It has been my object to present the subject of this Lecture historically rather than critically,--to show the extraordinary popularity of Scott as a poet among his contemporaries, rather than to estimate his merit at the present time. I confess that most of "Marmion," as also of the "Lady of the Lake," is tame to me, and deficient in high poetic genius. Doubtless we are all influenced by the standards of our own time, and the advances making in literature as well as in science and art. Yet this change in the opinions of critics does not apply to Byron's "Childe Harold," which is as much, if not as widely, admired now as when it was first published. We think as highly too of "The Deserted Village," the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and the "Cotter's Saturday Night," as our fathers did. And men now think much more highly of the merits of Shakspeare than they have at any period since he lived; so that after all there is an element in true poetry which does not lose by time. In another hundred years, the verdicts of critics as to the greater part of the poems of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Browning, and Longfellow, may be very different from what they now are, while some of their lyrics may be, as they are now, pronounced immortal. Poetry is both an inspiration and an art. The greater part of that which is now produced is made, not born. Those daintily musical and elaborate measures which are now the fashion, because they claim novelty, or reproduce the quaintness of an art so old as to be practically new, perhaps will soon again be forgotten or derided. What is simple, natural, appealing to the heart rather than to the head, may last when more pretentious poetry shall have passed away. Neither criticism nor contemporary popularity can decide such questions. Scott himself seemed to take a true view. In a letter to Miss Seward, he said:-- "The immortality of poetry is not so firm a point in my creed as the immortality of the soul." 'I've lived too long, And seen the death of much immortal song.'