Revolution and Romanticism

WALTER SCOTT

The Lay of the Last Minstrel 1805

Inspired by hearing Coleridge’s unpublished Christabel, Scott wrote The Lay of the Last Minstrel as a medieval romance with a bizarre supernatural element. Wordsworth, to whom he read the first four cantos in September 1803, noted especially ‘the easy glowing energy’ of the verse. The poem was an immediate and lasting success: looking back in 1840 Scott reckoned that thirty thousand copies had been sold. His popularity as a poet was such that when he turned his hand to writing novels, with Waverley in 1814, Jane Austen wrote to her sister: ‘Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has Fame and Profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other peoples’ mouths.’

£65 $125

And now, fair dames, methinks I see
You listen to my minstrelsy;
Your waving locks ye backward throw,
And sidelong bend your necks of snow -
Ye ween to hear a tender tale
Of two true lovers in a dale;
And how the knight, with tender fire,
To paint his faithful passion, strove;
Swore, he might at her feet expire,
But never, never cease to love;
And how she blushed, and how she sighed,
And, half consenting, half denied...

(from Canto 2, st. xxix)

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Poetry of the 1890s