It was through Percy’s collection that the poem first became generally known and popular. Even there, though in very rich company, it was singled out by competent critics for special admiration. But, indeed, good judges, who had known it in its earlier forms, had already made it a favourite. The poet Gray admired it much; and Thomas Warton spoke of it as “a noble poem,” and introduced an enthusiastic reference to it into one of his odes. Above all, it is celebrated now as having fired the boyish genius of Sir Walter Scott. “I was taught _Hardyknute_ by heart before I could read the ballad myself,” he tells us, informing us further that the book out of which he was taught the ballad was Allan Ramsay’s _Evergreen_ of 1724, and adding, “It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.” In another place he tells us more particularly that it was taught him out of the book by one of his aunts during that visit to his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire on which he had been sent when only in his third year for country air and exercise on account of his delicate health and lameness, and which he remembered always as the source of his earliest impressions and the time of his first consciousness of existence. He was accustomed to go about the farmhouse shouting out the verses of the ballad incessantly, so that the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the minister of the parish, in his calls for a sober chat with the elder inmates, would complain of the interruption and say, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.” _Hardyknute_, we may then say, was the first thing in literature that took hold of the soul and imagination of Scott; and who knows how far it may have helped to determine the cast and direction of his own genius through all the future? Afterwards, through his life in Edinburgh, Ashestiel, and Abbotsford, he was never tired of repeating snatches of the strong old thing he had learnt at Sandyknowe; and the very year before his death (1831) we find him, when abroad at Malta in the vain hope of recruiting his shattered frame, lamenting greatly, in a conversation about ballad-poetry, that he had not been able to persuade his friend Mr. John Hookham Frere to think so highly of the merits of _Hardyknute_ as he did himself. What _is_ the piece of verse so celebrated? It must be familiar to many; but we may look at it again. We shall take it in its later or more complete form, as consisting of 42 stanzas or 336 lines; in which form, though it is still only a fragment, the conception or story is somewhat more complex, more filled out, than in the first published form of 1719. The fragment opens thus:—