546 PRÆTERITA-III

Carlyle’s mind, fixed anxiously on the future, and besides embarrassed by the practical pinching, as well as the unconfessed shame, of poverty, saw and felt from his earliest childhood nothing but the faultfulness and gloom of the Present.

It has been impossible, hitherto, to make the modern reader understand the vastness of Scott’s true historical knowledge, underneath its romantic colouring, nor the concentration of it in the production of his eternally great poems and romances. English ignorance of the Scottish dialect is at present nearly total; nor can it be without very earnest effort, that the melody of Scott’s verse,¹ or the meaning of his dialogue, can ever again be estimated. He must now be read with the care which we give to Chaucer; but with the greater reward, that what is only a dream in Chaucer, becomes to us, understood from Scott, a consummate historical morality and truth.

72. The first two of his great poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, are the re-animation of Border legends, closing with the truest and grandest battle-piece that, so far as I know, exists in the whole compass of literature;*-the absolutely fairest in justice to both contending nations, the absolutely most beautiful in its conception of both. And that the palm in that conception remains with the Scotch, through the sorrow of their defeat, is no more than accurate justice to the national character, which rose from the fraternal branches of the Douglas of Tantallon and the Douglas of Dunkeld. But,-between Tantallon and Dunkeld,-what moor or mountain is there over which the purple cloud of Scott’s imagination has not wrapt its light, in those two great poems?-followed by the entirely heroic enchantment of The Lady of the Lake,

* I include the literature of all foreign languages, so far as known to me: there is nothing to approach the finished delineation and flawless majesty of conduct in Scott’s Flodden.

¹ [Compare Love’s Meinie, § 125 (Vol. XXV. p. 118).]

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