Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!”
It is no wonder that Scott struck the chords of the national heart in this production, for it embodies so much of that unwritten history which had an oracle at every fireside.
As “Marmion” furnished us with a picture of James the Fourth, so the “Lady of the Lake” gives us a portrait of his son James the Fifth. He is said to have been handsome in person, and devoted to military exercises. He inherited his father’s love for justice, “was well educated, and like his ancestor, James the First, was a poet and musician.” His first care on taking the government was to restore the border country, of which we have just spoken, to something like order. He seized the principal chieftains and imprisoned them. He executed Adam Scott, known as king of the border, and John Armstrong, a free-booting chief, to whom the whole border country paid tribute. He thoroughly subdued these warlike chiefs, and it passed into a proverb, that “he made the rush bush keep the cow;” or, in other words, that cattle might remain safely in the fields without a guard.
He proceeded in the same manner against the Highland chiefs, and reduced the mountain country to a degree of quiet unknown for generations. Some of his acts are pronounced cruel by historians, but, in those bitter times, he was compelled to consider the welfare of the whole nation, and was compelled to be cruel in order to be kind.
James the Fifth also resembled his father in wandering, now and then, about Scotland in the dress of a private person. Many pleasing incidents are related of these royal visits in disguise, and the king in this way readily discovered the actual sentiments and feeling of the common people. Scott presents him in the “Lady of the Lake” in this character, after a long chase through the Highlands, which leaves him alone in the deep wilds of the Trosachs. His adventure in the disguise of Snowdoun’s knight, or James-Fitz-James, is doubly interesting as it presents a trait of the monarch’s character. The world likes true stories. It never outgrows the question of the child: Did it really happen? This is one of the marked features of these poems and romances. When we rise from the reading of Scott’s works we have in our minds something more than a mere story. We have not only the human qualities of love and friendship, but also the characteristics and features of the times, or the presentation of some well-known personage. The sketch of James-Fitz-James, from the time when he meets Helen Douglas near the margin of the Lake to the eventful day, when Snowdoun’s knight is revealed to her at Stirling Castle as Scotland’s King, is the faithful delineation of a real personage. He is not lifted into a realm of mere fancy, but everything is real and substantial about him. He is conducted to the island home which shelters the outlawed Douglas; around the walls hang trophies of the war and chase; spears, broadswords and battle-axes garnish with rude tapestry the sylvan hall; he sleeps upon the mountain heather, in the room
“Where oft a hundred guests had lain,
And dreamed their mountain sports again.”
There is another character in the poem drawn true to life; that of the bold mountain chieftain Roderick Dhu, an outlawed, desperate man, representative of the Gaelic leaders driven back into their mountain fastnesses. In the harsh treatment which they received alike from kings and nobles, they found ready excuse for depredation. Scott puts this idea with great force in the lines of the Gaelic warrior:
“Saxon, from yonder mountain high,