mart, and expanded them on the stalls of their hapless publishers! We cannot but hope that, primarily, the publication of these Memoirs will be widely beneficial to novelists and poets, and secondarily, to the reading public; that they will improve the taste of those authors who are content to indulge in superficialities merely; to amuse the imagination, and convey infection to love-sick damsels, without satisfying the judgment, or touching the heart. So mote it be! We commence our extracts with a brief history of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem 'which has now kept its place for nearly a third of a century:' "It is curious to trace the small beginnings and gradual development of his design. The lovely Countess of Dalkeith bears a wild rude legend of Border _diablerie_, and sportively asks him to make it the subject of a ballad. He had been already laboring in the elucidation of the 'quaint Inglis' ascribed to an ancient seer and bard of the same district, and perhaps completed his own sequel, intending the whole to be included in the third volume of the Minstrelsy. He assents to Lady Dalkeith's request, and casts about for some new variety of diction and rhyme, which might be adopted without impropriety in a closing strain for the same collection. Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year or two before, of Coleridge's unpublished Christabel, had fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory; and it occurs to him, that by throwing the story of Gilpin Horner into somewhat of a similar cadence, he might produce such an echo of the later metrical romance, as would serve to connect his _Conclusion_ of the primitive Sir Tristrem with his imitations of the common popular ballad in the Grey Brother and Eve of St. John. A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volunteer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of the bugle; and suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old Border life of war and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his researches on the 'Minstrelsy' had by degrees fed his imagination, until every the minutest feature had been taken home and realized with unconscious intenseness of sympathy; so that he had won for himself in the past another world, hardly less complete or familiar than the present. Erskine or Cranstoun suggests that he would do well to divide the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of them a motto explanatory of the action, after the fashion of Spenser in the Faëry Queen. He pauses for a moment--and the happiest conception of the frame-work of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poet--one