7. But the time had come when his pen was to be used wholly in the service of his own brain, and not merely in translating or collecting the works of others. Lady Dalkeith, the daughter-inlaw of Scott's "chieftain" the Duke of Buccleuch, asked Scott to write her a ballad on a legend called Gilpin Horner. He sat down intending to write only a few verses; but the poem grew from a ballad into a long romance in verse. It was published under the title of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and at once made Scott famous. It is the freshest of all his poems, and takes one's thoughts away from the dulness of a quiet life, back into the Middle Ages, with its knights and ladies and heroic adventurers. It was a great success, and Scott was able to give up the bar altogether and devote himself to writing. His next poem, The Lady of the Lake, took his readers into the lovely scenery of the Trossachs and the unknown poetry of Highland clan life, which Scott had become acquainted with through his having to go into that district on a business journey. His third poem, Marmion, was chiefly composed on horseback; and the verse seems to gallop along as Scott's strong horse galloped in the fresh air over the green turf. "Oh, man!" Scott would say, "I had many a grand gallop among these braes when I was thinking of Marmion." The Lord of the Isles and Rokeby were written some time after his first novel.

8. But by this time the fickle taste of readers had begun to tire of Scott's poetry, and turned to Byron's as something quite new and different. But Scott was not to be outdone. If he had lost the Genius of the Ring, as some one says of him, he now found the Genius of the Lamp in the shape of Waverley and the novels that followed it. He was then living in Edinburgh, in Castle Street, and night after night, and often all night long, the busy pen could be seen moving rapidly along, filling sheet after sheet with almost miraculous speed. If you go to the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, you will see the manuscript of Waverley just as he wrote it, and you will be surprised at the very few corrections in it. The stories seemed to flow from his pen. All Edinburgh was soon talking of Waverley, wondering who could be the author. For seventeen years the

"Wizard of the North" went on enchanting readers with his 'wondrous tales.

9. Scott had found a fortune in his pen : what would he do with his money? He would carry out his life-long wish and build a grand castle, such as those he had described, by the banks of his beautiful Tweed. So bit by bit land was added, and Abbotsford grew into a Gothic mansion with "a tall tower at either end, zigzagged gables, fantastic waterspouts, stained-glass windows; while the rooms in it were filled with sideboards and carved chests, adorned with cuirasses, helmets, swords of every order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner's sword." And there Scott-now Sir Walter1lived in good old style with his wife and daughters, his dogs and gamekeepers and shepherds, keeping open house to his relatives, friends, and neighbours, doing the "honours of Scotland" to many a stranger from foreign lands, singing ballads, and sounding pibrochs, hunting and dancing-himself the life and soul of every merry-making, with his hearty laugh and merry stories.

10. But all this ended when the bookselling firm of Constable and Co., and the printing firm of Ballantyne and Co., in which Scott was a partner, failed, and he found himself at the age of fifty-five a ruined man with a debt of £117,000. It was then that the brave old Scottish spirit showed itself at its best. Refusing all favour, Scott merely asked for time, and setting to work at once he wrote untiringly for four years, and in that time reduced the debt to £54,000. But the effort cost him his life. He became paralyzed; and after a tour in Italy and Germany in search of health, he returned to his beloved Abbotsford to die. 11. I am not going to say much of Scott's works, for I hope, if you do not already know them, you will lose no time in becoming acquainted with them. True, there is much in them that can only be fully enjoyed in later life; but nearly all boys and girls enjoy the fresh, stirring life of the poems, and the thrilling adventures in the novels. If we do not get quite an exact picture of history from Scott's pages, we at least get a love of it that

1 Sir Walter. He was made a baronet in 1820, when he was forty-nine.

will make us want to learn more. If we find the long historical discursions and introductions wearisome at first, we forget all that when once we have got into the story itself. Scott has peopled Scotland with figures from his novels, characters of every age and rank in life, from the baron to the beggar, from the fine lady to the fishwife-innkeepers, old wives, rogues, pirates, freebooters, Rob Roy, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilees, Madge Wildfire, Jeanie Deans, and the Laird o' Dumbiedykes.

12. For young folks who love the stories of Scottish history, few books are more delightful than that which Sir Walter wrote for his little grandson, Master Hugh Lockhart, calling it Tales of a Grandfather. It was to little Hugh's father that Scott on his deathbed said these, almost his last words :— "Be a good man-be virtuous, be religious-be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here."

13. In the hands of Scott the novel became the favourite form of prose literature. We have had many good novelwriters since the days of the "Waverley Novels," and perhaps in the present day there are more novels than are good for people. But if one does not read too many, one may get great enjoyment and help from novels. There are times when one is too tired to read anything harder, and a really good story takes one's thoughts away from work just as a talk with a friend or a pleasant walk does. A really great novel does more than this-it teaches us to know ourselves and other people better; it takes us to other lands which we may be unable to see for ourselves; it even teaches us the great lessons of life. THACKERAY, for instance, in his novels makes his readers share his scorn for shams and pretences. DICKENS tells us of the sufferings of the poor in such a way that our hearts are touched to help them. An English lady, who wrote under the name of GEORGE ELIOT, shows us better perhaps than any other how character may be made noble by trying to carry out the highest purpose in one's daily life, no matter how commonplace and dull that life may seem to oneself or to others.

14. Besides George Eliot, many other ladies have written good

novels. JANE AUSTEN, the daughter of a clergyman in a little village in the south of England, wrote true pictures of the simple daily life of the people around her, which Scott praised highly and was fond of reading. Another clergyman's daughter, CHARLOTTE BRONTË, wrote some very wonderful novels. She was one of a number of lonely little motherless children, living with a rather stern father among the wild Yorkshire moors. There, on long winter evenings, the girls would gather around the fire or pace the dark room making stories for each other, and by-and-by they began to publish them. When we think how few people they met, and how uneventful their lives were, we wonder at the stories those clever sisters wrote. They had rather sad lives, for one by one they faded away, leaving, however, their stories and verses to win them undying fame.

15. There are many famous novelists and story-writers in the present day. Some of the best of them write books specially meant for you young people-such books as your grandfathers would have delighted in; for there was no ROBERT M. BALLANTYNE, WILLIAM H. KINGSTON, or ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON to write for them such stories as The Coral Island, The Three Midshipmen, or Kidnapped.

16. Now, too, there are magazines for old and young of every kind and quality, and the only difficulty is to know what to read, and the only danger is, not that of having nothing to read, but that of reading too much and thinking too little. We have had many clever essay-writers in this nineteenth century HAZLITT, the critic; CHARLES LAMB, the gentle "Elia;" DE QUINCEY, the "opium-eater;" MACAULAY, the historian; CARLYLE, the old Scottish philosopher, who died a few years ago; and such great thinkers as JOHN STUART MILL, as well as many others who are still alive. JOHN RUSKIN has written much about art and various other subjects, and still from time to time sends forth messages from his beautiful home in Lakeland to the English people. There is also a great deal of history and biography written in the present day, as the nation keeps on writing its life, and as people write their stories in their lives and actions.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

OUR LATER POETS.

1. Our last word must be for the poetry of the nineteenth century after Wordsworth's time. As the star of Scott's poetry waned, a new star arose--a young poet who "awoke one morning to find himself famous." This was GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON. His was a wild, sad, foolish life; and much of his poetry is, like his life, wild and foolish. But in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage we have some fine pictures of scenery in Europe, and in other poems pictures of Eastern life, which attract many readers. One of his shorter poems, The Prisoner of Chillon, is full of depth and beauty, and many of his songs will not soon be forgotten. Lord Byron's unfortunate life ended in Greece, where he had gone to help the Greeks to free themselves from the rule of the Turks.

2. Another sad young life suddenly closed was that of PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. Like Spenser, he has been called the "poets' poet." The life of the dreamy, passionate boy-poet was a very strange one. Misunderstood at home, expelled from his college, separated from his girl-wife and his children, Shelley tossed about the world, first in England, then in Italy, singing his musical songs, which a few people praise almost more than they deserve, but which only a few understood or ever will perhaps understand. He was only thirty when a wave overturned his little boat in the Bay of Spezzia, and ended the life of the young dreamer. Besides long poems and a number of essays, Shelley has written many smaller poems, which are lovely. His language is very musical, and the words seem to make themselves into music as we read them. One of his finest pieces is The Skylark.

3. Another young poet, a friend of Shelley, was JOHN KEATS. He was a surgeon's apprentice, and used to borrow books of a friend among others, Spenser's Faerie Queene, a book of which he was very fond. He began to write poems, and his friends got them published; but some critics wrote very cruelly