Alight on Marmion’s vision spread
And fixed his glassy eye
With dying hand above his head
He shook the fragment of his blade
And shouted victory!
Charge, Chester charge, on Stanley on!
Were the last words of Marmion.”
He had the rare facutly of compressing a whole life’s romance in a few stanzas, as in “Lochinvar.”
Scott’s was not wholly an ideal world, nor his life a romance. There was something very real and prosaic in it—something also of the tragic. Not a few of the virtues of his ideal heroes became prominent in his own life. After his fame had been established, and nothing of earthly ambition and popular applause remained unsatisfied, there came upon him those sweeping financial disasters in which his own fortunes and those of Constable his publisher went down in wreck and ruin that seemed irretrievable. But with a heroism unparalled in the history of literature, he girds himself anew to cancel by his pen a debt that was colossal in its magnitude. He was fifty-five years of age. He could accept no compromise, but goes to work writing untiringly until by sheer force and industry he succeeded in paying off seventy thousand of the one hundred and seventeen thousand pounds sterling which was the sum total of his debt, but he achieved that tremendous feat at the expense of an exhauseted brain and a paralyzed body. He perished in the attempt to redeem his honor and good name. But the name remains immortal and while Scottish hearts and Scottish brains throb and beat, and tears and smiles be evoked as a tribute to genius, the memory of Scott shall remain enshrined on the deathless galaxy of fame.
Another of the great names imperishably with old Caledonia is that of Robert Burns, the darling of the Scottish muse, the pride and glory of his native land, and the idol of the Scottish people. Poor unfortunate child of genius. It is hard to read his brief history without being choked with our sobs. Beginning life in the midst of the deepest poverty, we are told that the miserable clay hovel in which he first saw the light was partly wrecked by a January tempest on the very night of his birth—sad forecast of the brief, bitter, and stormy career which awaited him. At sixteen years of age he tells us his life was “the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley slave.” After his father’s death the little paternal estae had to be sold to satisfy creditors, and after three years “tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation” Robert and his brother Gilbert succeeded in saving a trifle from the clutches of the lawyears by stepping in as creditors for arrears of wages. When they got to work again the poet received the sum of seven pounds sterling (35 dollars) per annum. Troubles multiplied upon him owing chiefly to his own indiscretions until he says frankly “even in the hour of social mirth, my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.”