the unremitting hostility of Lord Byron. His rather fantastic epics,
composed with great facility and much real spirit, are almost forgotten; he
is remembered chiefly by three or four short poems--'The Battle of
Blenheim,' 'My days among the dead are past,' 'The Old Man's Comforts' (You
are old, Father William,' wittily parodied by 'Lewis Carroll' in 'Alice in
Wonderland')--and by his excellent short prose 'Life of Nelson.'

WALTER SCOTT. In the eighteenth century Scotland had contributed Thomson
and Burns to the Romantic movement; now, early in the nineteenth, she
supplied a writer of unexcelled and marvelous creative energy, who
confirmed the triumph of the movement with work of the first importance in
both verse and prose, namely Walter Scott. Scott, further, is personally
one of the most delightful figures in English literature, and he is
probably the most famous of all the Scotsmen who have ever lived.

He was descended from an ancient Border fighting clan, some of whose
pillaging heroes he was to celebrate in his poetry, but he himself was
born, in 1771, in Edinburgh, the son of an attorney of a privileged, though
not the highest, class. In spite of some serious sicknesses, one of which
left him permanently lame, he was always a very active boy, more
distinguished at school for play and fighting than for devotion to study.
But his unconscious training for literature began very early; in his
childhood his love of poetry was stimulated by his mother, and he always
spent much time in roaming about the country and picking up old ballads and
traditional lore. Loyalty to his father led him to devote six years of hard
work to the uncongenial study of the law, and at twenty he was admitted to
the Edinburgh bar as an advocate. Though his geniality and high-spirited
brilliancy made him a social favorite he never secured much professional
practice; but after a few years he was appointed permanent Sheriff of
Selkirk, a county a little to the south of Edinburgh, near the English