"Where shall he find, in foreign land,
So lone a lake, so sweet a strand?"

Some one, perhaps, waving his arm at the same time with a half-uttered huzza, as the shot from the enemy's battery scatter the broken branches of the olive-tree over the group; others, more impetuous, starting from their recumbent posture as the array of Scottish standards is called up by these lines :—

"Is it the thunder's solemn sound
That mutters deep and dread?
Or echoes from the groaning ground
The warrior's measured tread?
Is it the lightning's quivering glance
That on the thicket streams?
Or do they flash on spear and lance
The sun's retiring beams?

I see the dagger-crest of Mar,
I see the Moray's silver star

Wave o'er the cloud of Saxon war

That up the lake comes winding far.

To hero bound for battle-strife,

Or bard of martial lay,

"Twere worth ten years of peaceful life,

A glance at that array!"

After the "Lady of the Lake," Scott found his popularity waning, and perhaps his poetic resources exhausted; for he was not a man to recognise a poet's solemn responsibility of cultivating his imagination by laborious meditation. The power he had employed with such brilliant success never left him. He was the minstrel still, even in his later years, when calamities weighed heavily upon him. sion, amid his commercial difficulties, he

On one occachanced to be

reading the historical account of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee's, leaving Edinburgh, in 1688, and making a last and dying effort to rally the Highlanders in support of the house of Stuart. It inspired the animated stanzas of "Bonny Dundee." "I know not," he wrote in his diary, "what could have induced me to take a frisk so uncommon of late as to write verses.

I sup

pose the same impulse that makes the birds sing after the storm is blown over."

"To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claver'se who spoke :-
'Ere the king's crown shall fall, there are crowns to be broke;
So let each cavalier who loves honour and me,
Come follow the bonnet of bonny Dundee!'

Come, fill up my cup; come, fill up my can;
Come, saddle your horses and call up your men ;
Come, open the west port and let me gang free,
And it's room for the bonnets of bonny Dundee !

"Dundee he is mounted and rides up the street,
The bells are rung backwards, the drums they are beat
But the provost, douce man, said 'Just e'en let him be;
The gude town is well quit of that deil of Dundee !'

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"As he rode down the sanctified bends of the Bow,
Ilk carline was flying and shaking her pow;

But the young plants of grace they looked couthie and slee,
Thinking 'Luck to thy bonnet, thou bonny Dundee !'

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"With sour-featured Whigs the Grass-market was crammed,
As if half the West had set tryst to be hanged;

There was spite in each look, there was fear in each ee,
As they watched for the bonnets of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"The cowls of Kilmarnock had spits and had spears, And lang-hafted gullies to kill cavaliers;

But they shrunk to close heads, and the causeway was free At the toss of the bonnet of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"He spurred to the foot of the proud castle-rock, And with the gay Gordon he gallantly spoke :'Let Mons Meg and her marrows speak twa words or three, For the love of the bonnet of bonny Dundee !'

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"The Gordon demands of him which way he goes: 'Where'er shall direct me the shade of Montrose! Your Grace in short space shall hear tidings of me, Or that low lies the bonnet of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"There are hills beyond Pentland, and lands beyond Forth; If there's lords in the Lowlands, there's chiefs in the North: There are wild Dunnies wassals three thousand times three Will cry 'hoigh' for the bonnets of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"There's brass on the target of barkened bull-hide;
There's steel in the scabbard that dangles beside;
The brass shall be burnished, the steel shall flash free,
At a toss of the bonnet of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"Away to the hills, to the caves, to the rocks,
Ere I own a usurper I'll couch with the fox:
And tremble, false Whigs, in the midst of your glee:
You have not seen the last of my bonnet and me!'

Come, fill up my cup, &c.

"He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were blown, The kettle-drums clashed, and the horsemen rode on,

Till on Ravelston's cliffs and on Clermiston's lee
Died away the wild war-notes of bonny Dundee !

Come, fill up my cup; come, fill up my can
Come, saddle the horses; come, call up the men ;
Come, open your gates, and let me go free,

For it's up with the bonnet of bonny Dundee !"

It is curious to observe how, when beneath their enormous load Scott's mind began to fail, his memory clung to the ancient minstrelsy, although it lost its hold of some of his own compositions. On hearing the verses from "The Pirate," set to music,

"Farewell! farewell! The voice you hear
Has left its last soft tone with you;
Its next must join the seaward cheer
And shout among the shouting crew !"-

he said, "Capital words! Whose are they? Byron's, I suppose." But, on visiting the ruined castle of Douglas, he repeated his favourite of the old ballads,"The Battle of Otterburne;" and the closing stanza left him in tears :—

666

"My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me beneath the bracken-bush
That grows on yonder lily lee.'

This deed was done at the Otterburne

About the dawning of the day:

Earl Douglas was buried by the bracken-bush,
And the Percy led captive away."

A more striking proof of the tenacity to the strains which had been familiarized to his ear in childhood occurred on his hopeless pilgrimage to Italy. There were

pointed out to him the Lake of Avernus, the Temple of Apollo, the Lucrine Lake, Baiæ, Misenum, and the surrounding monuments: and what was the reply? The fragment of a Jacobite ditty. "I found," says his companion, “that something in the place had inspired recollections of his own beloved country and the Stuarts; for he immediately repeated, with a grave tone and with great emphasis,

'Up the craggy mountain and down the mossy glen,

We canna gang a milking for Charlie and his men.'

I could not help smiling at this strange commentary on my dissertation on the Lake of Avernus.”

There are many traits of Scott's character as a man, -especially in his calamitous years,-many as a writer, the notice of which does not belong to this course of lectures. It is, however, not inappropriate that the existence of the last and the greatest of the Border Minstrels closed in the centre of that region which his genius has peopled with spiritual creations, and not far away from that spot where his young imagination was early fed with the traditions of Scottish song.