But in the interval between these two publications our attention is demanded by one of those literary currents flowing from one country to another and back again, which it is our chief aim to trace, and which in this case is remarkably plain. Not long after Percy's _Reliques_ appeared, a luckless young German lawyer in Government employ, Bürger by name, was appointed to a small post in Göttingen, where he lived in straitened circumstances and in unhappy and demoralising marital relations with two sisters. Into this man's house Percy's book finds its way. It makes a powerful impression on him, and fires him with the desire to write something which had long been proscribed by the rules of poetical art, but which he himself calls (to Baggesen, see _The Labyrinth_) poetry proper, namely, a ballad. He begins the famous _Lenore_ and works at it slowly, week after week, with such a conviction of the importance of the step he is taking that his letters to his friends are full of nothing else. The ballad appears, and is soon read in every country in Europe. In the year 1795 an Edinburgh young lady introduces it to the notice of another lawyer in Crown employ; and this young man, Walter Scott by name, who was also to be an author, and a very much greater one, makes his literary _début_ with a translation of _Lenore_ and another ballad of Bürger's, _The Wild Huntsman_. His translations meeting with a favourable reception, Scott began to regard himself as a poet. And it was upon the basis of these translations and that of _Götz von Berlichingen_, which he published in 1799, that the national Scottish Romanticism of his poetry was founded.