"nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may
have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating
when propounded in 1768.

Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was
postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had
spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found
an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and
had just attained his majority.

"Romance who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing,
To _him_ a painted paroquet
Had been--a most familiar bird--
Taught _him_ his alphabet to say,
To lisp his very earliest word."[19]

He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already
learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making
his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes,
border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in
search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages
from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English
poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and
witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal,
from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the
Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating
to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that
year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the
study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter