Francis Jeffrey, in the _Edinburgh Review_, complained of anti-Scottish feeling, and otherwise criticised his friend’s work in a way that alienated Scott, not from Jeffrey, but from the Review, and opened to John Murray a prospect of securing Scott for a contributor to another Review, the Quarterly, which he would found as a representative of other political opinions with which Scott would be more in accord. “Marmion” thus has a place in the story of the origin of the _Quarterly Review_. Of the great popularity of “Marmion,” Scott himself said at the time that it gave him “such a heeze that he had almost lost his footing.” The Letters introducing the several Books are, in all Scott’s verse, perhaps the poems that most perfectly present to us his own personality. They form no part of “Marmion,” in fact there had been a plan for their publication as a distinct book. As they stand they interweave the poet with his poem, making “Marmion,” too, a “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” in the first days of its publication. George Ellis playfully observed to Scott that “the personal appearance of the Minstrel who, though the Last, is by far the most charming of all minstrels, is by no means compensated by the idea of an author shorn of his picturesque beard, deprived of his harp, and writing letters to his intimate friends.” The Minstrel of the Lay was but a creature of imagination; the Minstrel of “Marmion” is Scott himself. H. M. INTRODUCTION TO CANTO FIRST. TO WILLIAM STEWART ROSE, ESQ. _Ashestiel_, _Ettrick Forest_. November’s sky is chill and drear, November’s leaf is red and sear: Late, gazing down the steepy linn That hems our little garden in, Low in its dark and narrow glen You scarce the rivulet might ken, So thick the tangled greenwood grew, So feeble thrilled the streamlet through: Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen Through bush and briar, no longer green, An angry brook, it sweeps the glade, Brawls over rock and wild cascade, And foaming brown, with doubled speed, Hurries its waters to the Tweed.