It was in 1802 that the first and second volumes of the "Minstrelsy" appeared, in an edition of eight hundred copies, Scott's share of the profits amounting to £78 10 s., which did not pay him for the actual expenditure in the collection of his materials. The historical notes with which he elucidated the value of the ancient ballads, and the freshness and vigor of those which he himself wrote for the collection, secured warm commendations from Ellis, Ritson, and other friends, and the whole edition was sold; yet the work did not bring him wide fame. The third and last volume was issued in 1803.
The work is full of Scott's best characteristics,--wide historical knowledge, wonderful industry, humor, pathos, and a sympathetic understanding of life--that of the peasant as well as the knight--such as seizes the imagination. Lockhart quotes a passage of Scott's own self-criticism: "I am sensible that if there be anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions." His ability to "toil terribly" in accumulating choice material, and then, fusing it in his own spirit, to throw it forth among men with this "hurried frankness" that stirs the blood, was the secret of his power.
Scott did not become famous, however, until his first original poem appeared,--"The Lay of the Last Minstrel," printed by Ballantyne in 1805, and published by Longman of London, and Constable of Edinburgh. It was a great success; nearly fifty thousand copies were sold in Great Britain alone by 1830. For the first edition of seven hundred and fifty copies quarto, Scott received £169 6 s., and then sold the copyright for £500.
In the meantime, a rich uncle died without children, and Scott's share of the property enabled him, in 1804, to rent from his cousin, Major-General Sir James Russell, the pretty property called Ashestiel,--a cottage and farm on the banks of the Tweed, altogether a beautiful place, where he lived when discharging his duties of sheriff of Selkirkshire. He has celebrated the charms of Ashestiel in the canto introduction to "Marmion." His income at this time amounted to about £1000 a year, which gave him a position among the squires of the neighborhood, complete independence, and leisure to cultivate his taste. His fortune was now made: with poetic fame besides, and powerful friends, he was a man every way to be envied.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" placed Scott among the three great poets of Scotland, for originality and beauty of rhyme. It is not marked by pathos or by philosophical reflections. It is a purely descriptive poem of great vivacity and vividness, easy to read, and true to nature. It is a tale of chivalry, and is to poetry what Froissart's "Chronicles" are to history. Nothing exactly like it had before appeared in English literature. It appealed to all people of romantic tastes, and was reproachless from a moral point of view. It was a book for a lady's bower, full of chivalric sentiments and stirring incidents, and of unflagging interest from beginning to end,--partly warlike and partly monastic, describing the adventures of knights and monks. It deals with wizards, harpers, dwarfs, priests, warriors, and noble dames. It sings of love and wassailings, of gentle ladies' tears, of castles and festal halls, of pennons and lances,--
"Of ancient deeds, so long forgot,
Of feuds whose memory was not,
Of forests now laid waste and bare,
Of towers which harbor now the hare."
In "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" there is at least one immortal stanza which would redeem the poem even if otherwise mediocre. How few poets can claim as much as this! Very few poems live except for some splendid passages which cannot be forgotten, and which give fame. I know of nothing, even in Burns, finer than the following lines:--