of the Melrose district, so dear to the poet's mind, and had indeed once belonged to the Abbey, as the word Abbotsford itself indicated. At all events, the purchase was made, and Scott proceeded to improve, to plant, to annex, to build, and, in fine, to flit, in the end of May 1812, leaving Ashestiel with much regret, in which we think all his admirers must share. Yet Abbotsford, if it was to be the grave of Scott's towering worldly hopes, was to be the cradle of the Waverley Novels.

In 1812 he was occupied with minor matters: he read Byron's Childe Harold, and frankly admitted its transcendent power; began the poem Rokeby, and visited the place Rokeby; passed by Hexham, near which he met the famous blacksmith John Lundie, turned doctor, whose specifics were laudamy and calamy, and who consoled himself with the thought that if he did accidentally kill a few Southrons by his drugs, it would be long ere he made up for Flodden! corresponded with and cheered the heart of worthy George Crabbe, the poet; and, in fine, published Rokeby; and when that poem had appeared, returned to his 'Patmos of Abbotsford, as blithe as bird on tree.'

Rokeby was pronounced the first decided failure among his poems. The Vision of Don Roderick, indeed, which appeared a year or two before, was

not a great success; but then it was not a great effort. It claimed to be only an improvise, published for a benevolent purpose. Rokeby was a serious trial of strength. But although its sale was rapid and large, its reception was not nearly so favourable as even Roderick. It had less power than any of his previous poems, and consisted of more commonplace and Minerva press-like materials. It sprung, too, less from impulse than from a desire to gratify Mr. Morritt, by 'doing' his beautiful seat for him in song.

CHAPTER VIII.

VICISSITUDES IN LIFE, LITERATURE, AND
BUSINESS 'WAVERLEY' LAUNCHED.

T was sympathy with the Portuguese, at that time trampled under the iron hoof of the French armies, which had led Scott in 1811 to write his Vision of Don Roderick, the profits of which he gave to the distressed patriots. There were in it two or three noble passages. Who has forgot the description of the landing of the three nations, English, Scotch, and Irish, on the shores of Portugal? and who that ever heard can forget Professor Wilson's recitation of that description in his class-room, in the deepest of his deep and lingering tones, with the fieriest of his soul-quelling glances, and with the most impassioned of his natural and commanding gestures? The book, however, was less admired than its review in the Edinburgh, where Jeffrey in his best

style rebuked the author for his silence in reference to the good, gallant, and unfortunate Sir John Moore, an omission as inexcusable in a Scotchman, as if one writing an epic on Bruce were to take no notice at all of the name of Wallace.

With a certain falling off in the power of his poetry there coincided the uprise of Byron, who, after some elegant trifling in his first production, and some adroit grinning in his second, began fairly to exert his force in the third. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage had come like a comet across the literary sky, and the poems of Scott seemed tame as lunar rainbows in the comparison. The victory of the English bard needed but one or two fiery fragments like the Giaour on his part, and one more splendid failure on Scott's (the Lord of the Isles), to make it complete, and, so far as verse was concerned, final. Lockhart, indeed, says that the success of Byron's first pieces arose chiefly from their resemblance to, and unconscious imitation of, Scott's poetry. But this is the criticism of a sonin-law. Had these poems been mere imitations of Scott, they would have fallen powerless, as all echoes do, on the public ear. And whatever resemblance they bore to Scott's, it was not the similitude, it was the difference, between the English and the Scottish poet, and their respective

styles, which secured Byron's success. The public saw intensity substituted for slipshod ease, the passionate for the picturesque, the thoughtful for the lively, the scenery, the manners, and the suns of Spain and Greece, for those of Scotland; and the change was grateful and stimulating at the time. In short, as Scott confessed long after, Byron bett (beat) him, although, by happily shifting his ground, and, like his own Ivanhoe, disguising himself, he more than recovered his laurels. Immediately after Rokeby, appeared anonymously his Bridal of Triermain, which he meant as a trap for the critics, Jeffrey particularly, but which was instantly discovered to be a second or third rate effusion of his own master mind. It was the same afterwards with Harold the Dauntless, another anonymous production of his pen.

While writing the Vision, Scott lost two of his friends very suddenly-President Blair and Lord Melville. He tells a curious story about a dentist called Dubisson, who met the President the day before his death, and he used a particular expression to him. He met Lord Melville the day before his death, who, to the man's surprise, used the same expression. Dubisson, after the second death, jocularly remarked that he himself would be the third to die. He was taken ill, and expired in an hour's