It is in the poem which he began in November 1806, _Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field_, that Scott is most like Byron. As far as the plot is concerned, this work is quite in Scott's usual style; the scene is laid in sixteenth-century Scotland, and it is the life of the castle and the court that is described. But the hero's character makes him an unmistakable forerunner of the Byronic heroes, and the whole poem is written in the easy-flowing, but somewhat monotonous, four-footed iambics which Byron employed in most of his poetical narratives. Marmion is a proud and brave, but also wicked knight. A young, beautiful nun, Constance of Beverley, whom he has abducted, follows him everywhere, disguised as a page; but he grows tired of her, and is determined to compel a young girl of high birth to marry him, though he knows that she loves another. In her jealous despair, Constance makes an attempt on Marmion's life; and he, indifferent and cruel, gives her up to the convent to suffer punishment as a runaway nun. The abbess pronounces sentence; and, in a Romantic scene of horror of the kind which Byron painted frequently, and with much less consideration for his readers' nerves, we see Constance immured alive in an underground vault. There is not much psychology in Scott's poem. The gorgeousness of the knight's armour, the gloom of the convent crypt, the architecture of the old castle, are of more importance to him than complicated emotions. Nevertheless he has given us in _Marmion_ something very like a first sketch of _The Giaour_ and of _Lara_. The Giaour's mistress suffers a terrible death; Lara's follows him everywhere, in the disguise of a page; and the scene in _Marmion_, in which the hero is publicly put to shame, has a certain resemblance to the scene in which Lara's past is brought to mind. Is there not something almost Byronic in the lines?-- "Marmion, whose steady heart and eye Ne'er changed in worst extremity; Marmion, whose soul could scantly brook, Even from his king, a haughty look; Whose accent of command controlled, In camps, the boldest of the bold-- Thought, look, and utterance failed him now, Fallen was his glance, and flushed his brow; For either in the tone, Or something in the Palmer's look, So full upon his conscience strook That answer he found none." And the lines which describe his pangs of conscience:-- "High minds, of native pride and force, Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse! Fear for their scourge mean villains have, Thou art the torturer of the brave!" do they not seem to foreshadow the famous passage in _The Giaour?_-- "The mind that broods o'er guilty woes, Is like the scorpion girt by fire; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The sting she nourished for her foes, Whose venom never yet was vain, Gives but one pang and cures all pain, And darts into her desperate brain."