"Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay."


People still cavil idly, complaining that Scott did not finish, or
did not polish his pieces; that he was not Keats, or was not
Wordsworth. He was himself; he was the Last Minstrel, the latest,
the greatest, the noblest of natural poets concerned with natural
things. He sang of free, fierce, and warlike life, of streams yet
rich in salmon, and moors not yet occupied by brewers; of lonely
places haunted in the long grey twilights of the North; of crumbling
towers where once dwelt the Lady of Branksome or the Flower of
Yarrow. Nature summed up in him many a past age a world of ancient
faiths; and before the great time of Britain wholly died, to
Britain, as to Greece, she gave her Homer. When he was old, and
tired, and near his death--so worn with trouble and labour that he
actually signed his own name wrong--he wrote his latest verse, for a
lady. It ends -


"My country, be thou glorious still!"


and so he died, within the sound of the whisper of Tweed, foreseeing
the years when his country would no more be glorious, thinking of
his country only, forgetting quite the private sorrow of his own
later days.