It is not unremarkable in connection with this, the special characteristic of the ‘Scotch novels,’ that their author began his literary life by collecting the old ballads of his native country. Ballad poetry is, in comparison at least with many other kinds of poetry, a sensible thing. It describes not only romantic events, but historical ones, incidents in which there is a form and body and consistence—events which have a result. Such a poem as ‘Chevy Chace,’ we need not explain, has its prosaic side. The latest historian of Greece has nowhere been more successful than in his attempt to derive from Homer, the greatest of ballad poets, a thorough and consistent account of the political working of the Homeric state of society. The early natural imagination of men seizes firmly on all which interests the minds and hearts of natural men. We find in its delineations the council as well as the marriage; the harsh conflict as well as the deep love-affair. Scott’s own poetry is essentially a modernised edition of the traditional poems which his early youth was occupied in collecting. The _Lady of the Lake_ is a sort of _boudoir_ ballad, yet it contains its element of common sense and broad delineation. The exact position of Lowlander and Highlander would not be more aptly described in a set treatise than in the well-known lines: ‘Saxon, from yonder mountain high I marked thee send delighted eye Far to the south and east, where lay, Extended in succession gay, Deep waving fields and pastures green, With gentle slopes and groves between: These fertile plains, that softened vale, Were once the birthright of the Gael. The stranger came with iron hand, And from our fathers reft the land. Where dwell we now! See, rudely swell Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell. Ask we this savage hill we tread, For fattened steer or household bread; Ask we for flocks these shingles dry,— And well the mountain might reply: To you, as to your sires of yore, Belong the target and claymore; I give you shelter in my breast, Your own good blades must win the rest. Pent in this fortress of the North, Think’st thou we will not sally forth To spoil the spoiler as we may, And from the robber rend the prey? Ay, by my soul! While on yon plain The Saxon rears one shock of grain; While of ten thousand herds there strays But one along yon river’s maze; The Gael, of plain and river heir, Shall with strong hand redeem his share.’ We need not search the same poem for specimens of the romantic element, for the whole poem is full of them. The incident in which Ellen discovers who Fitz-James really is, is perhaps excessively romantic. At any rate the lines,—