way for his judgment and invention, and will probably be found to have consulted his own ease, rather than the delight of his readers. Now, the whole story of Marmion seems to us to turn upon a tissue of such incredible accidents. In the first place, it was totally beyond all calculation, that Marmion and De Wilton should meet, by pure chance, at Norham, on the only night which either of them could spend in that fortress. In the next place, it is almost totally incredible that the former should not recognize his antient rival and antagonist, merely because he had assumed a palmer's habit, and lost a little flesh and colour in his travels. He appears unhooded, and walks and speaks before him; and, as near as we can guess, it could not be more than a year since they had entered the lists against each other. Constance, at her death, says she had lived but three years with Marmion; and, it was not till he tired of her, that he aspired to Clara, or laid plots. against De Wilton. It is equally inconceivable that De Wiltonshould have taken upon himself the friendly office of a guide to his arch enemy, and discharged it quietly and faithfully, without seeking, or apparently thinking of any opportunity of disclosure or revenge. So far from meditating any thing of the sort, he makes two several efforts to leave him, when it appears that his services are no longer indispensable. If his accidental meeting, and continued association with Marmion, be altogether unnatural, it must appear still more extraordinary, that he should afterwards meet with the Lady Clare, his adored mistress, and the Abbess of Whitby, who had in her pocket the written proofs of his innocence, in consequence of an occurrence equally accidental. These two ladies, the only two persons in the universe whom it was of any consequence to him to meet, are captured in their royage from Holy Isle, and brought to Edinburgh, by the luckiest accident in the world, the very day that De Wilton and Marmion make their entry into it. Nay, the king, without knowing that they are at all of his acquaintance, happens to appoint them lodgings in the same stair-case, and to make them travel under his escort! We pass the night combat at Gifford, in which Marmion knows his opponent by moonlight, though he never could guess at him in sunshine; and all the inconsistencies of his dilatory wooing of Lady Clare. Those, and all the prodigies and miracles of the story, we can excuse, as within the privilege of poetry; but, the lucky chances we have already specified, are rather too much for our patience. A poet, we think, should never let his heroes contract such great debts to fortune; especially when a little exertion of his own might make them independent of her bounty. De Wilton might have been made to seek and watch his adversary, from some moody feeling of patient revenge; and

it certainly would not have been difficult to discover motives which might have induced both Clara and the Abbess to follow and relieve him, without dragging them into his presence by the clumsy hands of a cruizer from Dunbar.

In the fourth place, we think we have reason to complain of Mr Scott for having made his figuring characters so entirely worthless, as to excite but little of our sympathy, and at the same time keeping his virtuous personages so completely in the back ground, that we are scarcely at all acquainted with them when the work is brought to a conclusion. Marmion is not only a villain, but a mean and sordid villain; and represented as such, without any visible motive, and at the evident expense of characteristic truth and consistency. His elopement with Constance, and his, subsequent desertion of her, are knightly vices enough, we suppose; but then he would surely have been more interesting and natural, if he had deserted her for a brighter beauty, and not merely for a richer bride. This was. very well for Mr Thomas Inkle, the young merchant of London; but for the valiant, haughty and liberal Lord Marmion of Fontenaye and Lutterward, we do think it was quite unsuitable. Thus, too, it was very chivalrous and orderly per haps, for him to hate De Wilton, and to seek to supplant him in his lady's love; but, to slip a bundle of forged letters into his bureau, was cowardly as well as malignant. Now, Marmion is not represented as a coward, nor as at all afraid of De Wilton; on the contrary, and it is certainly the most absurd part of the story, he fights him fairly and valiantly after all, and overcomes him by mere force of arms, as he might have done at the beginning, without having recourse to devices so unsuitable to his ge neral character and habits of acting. By the way, we have great doubts whether a convicted traitor, like De Wilton, whose guilt was established by written evidence under his own hand, was ever allowed to enter the lists, as a knight, against his accuser. At all events, we are positive, that an accuser, who was as ready and willing to fight as Marmion, could never have condescended to forge in support of his accusation; and that the author has greatly diminished our interest in the story, as well as needlessly vio lated the truth of character, by loading his hero with the guilt of this most revolting and improbable proceeding. The crimes of Constance are multiplied in like manner to such a degree, as both to destroy our interest in her fate, and to violate all probability. Her elopement was enough to bring on her doom; and we should have felt more for it, if it had appeared a little more unmerited, She is utterly debased, when she becomes the instrument of Marmion's murderous perfidy, and the assassin of her unwilling rival,

De

De Wilton, again, is too much depressed throughout the poem." It is rather dangerous for a poet to chuse a hero who has been beaten in fair battle. The readers of romance do not like an unsuccessful warrior; but to be beaten in a judicial combat, and to have his arms reversed and tied on the gallows, is an adventure which can only by expiated by signal prowess and exemplary revenge, achieved against great odds, in full view of the reader. The unfortunate De Wilton, however, carries this stain upon him from one end of the poem to the other. He wanders up and down, a dishonoured fugitive, in the disguise of a palmer, through the five first books; and though he is knighted and mounted again in the last, yet we see nothing of his performances; nor is the author merciful enough to afford him one opportunity of redeeming his credit by an exploit of gallantry or skill. For the poor Lady Clare, she is a personage of still greater insipidity and insignificance. The author seems to have formed her upon the principle of Mr Pope's maxim, that women have no characters at all. We find her every where, where she has no business to be; neither saying nor doing any thing of the least consequence, but whimpering and sobbing over the Matrimony in her prayer book, like a great miss from a boarding school; and all this is the more inexcusable, as she is altogether a supernumerary person in the play, who should atone for her intrusion by some brilliancy or novelty of deportment. Matters would have gone on just as well, although she had been left behind at Whitby till after the battle of Flodden; and she is daggled about in the train, first of the Abbess and then of Lord Marmion, for no purpose, that we can see, but to afford the author an opportunity for two or three pages of indifferent description.

Finally, we must object, both on critical and on national grounds, to the discrepancy between the title and the substance of the poem, and the neglect of Scotish feelings and Scotish character that is manifested throughout. Marmion is no more a tale of Flodden Field, than of Bosworth Field, or any other field in history. The story is quite independent of the national feuds of the sister kingdoms; and the battle of Flodden has no other connexion with it, than from being the conflict in which the hero loses his life. Flodden, however, is mentioned; and the preparations for Flodden, and the consequences of it, are repeatedly alluded to in the course of the composition. Yet we nowhere fid any adequate expressions of those melancholy and patriotic sentiments which are still all over Scotland the accompaniment of those allusions and recollections. No picture is drawn of the national feelings before or after that fatal encounter; and the day that broke for ever the pride and the splendour of his coun

try,

try, is only commemorated by a Scotish poet as the period when an English warrior was beaten to the ground. There is scarcely one trait of true Scotish nationality or patriotism introduced into the whole poem; and Mr Scott's only expression of admiration or love for the beautiful country to which he belongs, is put, if we rightly remember, into the mouth of one of his Southern favourites. Independently of this, we think that too little pains is taken to distinguish the Scotish character and manners from the English, or to give expression to the general feeling of rivalry and mutual jealousy which at that time existed between the two

countries.

If there be any truth in what we have now said, it is evident that the merit of this poem cannot consist in the story. And yet it has very great merit, and various kinds of merit, both in the picturesque representation of visible objects, in the delineation of manners and characters, and in the description of great and striking events. After having detained the reader so long with our own dull remarks, it will be refreshing to him to peruse a few specimens of Mr Scott's more enlivening strains. The opening stanzas of the whole poem contain a good picture.

• Day set on Norham's caftled steep,

And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone :
The battled towers, the Donjon Keep,
The loop-hole grates where captives weep,
The flanking walls that round it fweep,
In yellow luftre fhone.

The warriors on the turrets high,
Moving athwart the evening fky,
Seemed forms of giant height:
Their armour, as it caught the rays,
Flashed back again the western blaze,
In lines of dazzling light.

St George's banner, broad and gay,
Now faded, as the fading ray

Lefs bright, and lefs, was flung;
The evening gale had fcarce the power
To wave it on the Donjon tower,
So heavily it hung.

The fcouts had parted on their fearch,

The caftle gates were barr'd;

Above the gloomy portal arch,
Timing his footsteps to a march,

The warder kept his guard,

Low humming, as he paced along,

Some ancient Border gathering fong.' p. 23, 24.

The

The first presentment of the mysterious Palmer is also laudable.
• The fummoned Palmer came in place;
His fable cowl o'erhung his face;
In his black mantle was he clad,
With Peter's keys, in cloth of red,
On his broad fhoulders wrought;
The fcallop fhell his cap did deck;
The crucifix around his neck

Was from Loretto brought;
His fandals were with travel tore,
Staff, budget, bottle, fcrip, he wore ;
The faded palm-branch in his hand,
Showed pilgrim from the Holy Land.
Whenas the Palmer came in hall,
Nor lord, nor knight, was there more tall,
Or had a ftatelier ftep withal,

Or looked more high and keen ;

For no faluting did he wait,

But ftrode across the hall of ftate,

And fronted Marmion where he fate,
As he his peer had been.

But his gaunt frame was worn with toil;
His cheek was funk, alas the while!

And when he struggled at a smile,

His eye looked haggard wild.

P. 49-51.

'The voyage of the Lady Abbess and her nuns presents a picture in a very different style of colouring, but of at least equal merit. 'Twas sweet to fee thefe holy maids, Like birds efcaped to green-wood fhades, Their first flight from the cage,

How timid, and how curious too,
For all to them was ftrange and new,
And all the common fights they view,
Their wonderment engage.

One eyed the shrouds and fwelling fail,
With many a benedicite ;

One at the rippling furge grew pale,
And would for terror pray;
Then shrieked, because the fea-dog, nigh,
His round black head, and sparkling eye,
Reared o'er the foaming spray;
And one would still adjuft her veil,
Disordered by the fummer gale,
Perchance left fome more worldly eye

Her dedicated charms might spy;
Perchance, because such action graced
Her fair-turned arm and flender waift.

Light was each fimple bofom there,' &c. p. 78, 79.

And