Marmion:
A TALE OF FLODDEN FIELD.

BY
SIR WALTER SCOTT.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE.
1888.

INTRODUCTION.

The “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Scott’s first romantic tale, was published in January, 1805, and won for its author his first great success.  The writing of “Marmion” was begun in November, 1806.  Constable offered as publisher to pay at once a thousand guineas for the copyright, when he heard that the new poem was begun, though he had not yet seen a line of it.  Miller and Murray joined, each taking a fourth part of the venture, and John Murray said, “We both view it as honourable, profitable, and glorious to be concerned in the publication of a new poem by Walter Scott.”  Scott, thirty-five years old, had the impulse upon his mind of a preceding great success, took more than usual pains, and thoroughly enjoyed the writing.  On pleasant knolls, under trees, and by the banks of Yarrow, many lines were written; and trotting quietly over the hills in later life he said to Lockhart, his son-in-law, “Oh, man, I had many a grand gallop among these bracs when I was thinking of ‘Marmion.’”  The description of the battle of Flodden was shaped in the autumn of 1807, when Scott was out practising with the Light Horse Volunteers, which had been formed in prospect of an invasion from France, and of which Scott was quartermaster and secretary.  Scott at those gatherings was full of companionable mirth, and in intervals between drill he would sometimes ride his charger at full speed up and down on the sands of Portobello within spray of the wave, while his mind was at work on such lines as—

“They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway and with lance’s thrust;
   And such a yell was there,
Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought in upper earth,
   And fiends in upper air.”

“Marmion” was published early in the year 1808; its first edition of two thousand, in the form, then usual, of a quarto volume, priced at a guinea and a half, was sold in a month.  Then came the editions in octavo, of which there were twelve, between 1808 and 1825.

Francis Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, complained of anti-Scottish feeling, and otherwise criticised his friend’s work in a way that alienated Scott, not from Jeffrey, but from the Review, and opened to John Murray a prospect of securing Scott for a contributor to another Review, the Quarterly, which he would found as a representative of other political opinions with which Scott would be more in accord.  “Marmion” thus has a place in the story of the origin of the Quarterly Review.  Of the great popularity of “Marmion,” Scott himself said at the time that it gave him “such a heeze that he had almost lost his footing.”  The Letters introducing the several Books are, in all Scott’s verse, perhaps the poems that most perfectly present to us his own personality.  They form no part of “Marmion,” in fact there had been a plan for their publication as a distinct book.  As they stand they interweave the poet with his poem, making “Marmion,” too, a “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” in the first days of its publication.  George Ellis playfully observed to Scott that “the personal appearance of the Minstrel who, though the Last, is by far the most charming of all minstrels, is by no means compensated by the idea of an author shorn of his picturesque beard, deprived of his harp, and writing letters to his intimate friends.”  The Minstrel of the Lay was but a creature of imagination; the Minstrel of “Marmion” is Scott himself.

H. M.

INTRODUCTION TO CANTO FIRST.

To William Stewart Rose, Esq.

Ashestiel, Ettrick Forest.

November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear:
Late, gazing down the steepy linn
That hems our little garden in,
Low in its dark and narrow glen
You scarce the rivulet might ken,
So thick the tangled greenwood grew,
So feeble thrilled the streamlet through:
Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen
Through bush and briar, no longer green,
An angry brook, it sweeps the glade,
Brawls over rock and wild cascade,
And foaming brown, with doubled speed,
Hurries its waters to the Tweed.

   No longer Autumn’s glowing red
Upon our forest hills is shed;
No more, beneath the evening beam,
Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam:
Away hath passed the heather-bell
That bloomed so rich on Needpath Fell;
Sallow his brow, and russet bare
Are now the sister-heights of Yair.
The sheep, before the pinching heaven,
To sheltered dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines,
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The withered sward and wintry sky,
And far beneath their summer hill,
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon’s rill:
The shepherd shifts his mantle’s fold,
And wraps him closer from the cold;
His dogs no merry circles wheel,
But, shivering, follow at his heel;
A cowering glance they often cast,
As deeper moans the gathering blast.

   My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild,
As best befits the mountain child,
Feel the sad influence of the hour,
And wail the daisy’s vanished flower;
Their summer gambols tell, and mourn,
And anxious ask: “Will spring return,
And birds and lambs again be gay,
And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?”

   Yes, prattlers, yes.  The daisy’s flower
Again shall paint your summer bower;
Again the hawthorn shall supply
The garlands you delight to tie;
The lambs upon the lea shall bound,
The wild birds carol to the round,
And while you frolic light as they,
Too short shall seem the summer day.

   To mute and to material things
New life revolving summer brings;
The genial call dead Nature hears,
And in her glory reappears.
But oh! my country’s wintry state
What second spring shall renovate?
What powerful call shall bid arise
The buried warlike and the wise;
The mind that thought for Britain’s weal,
The hand that grasped the victor steel?
The vernal sun new life bestows
Even on the meanest flower that blows;
But vainly, vainly may he shine,
Where glory weeps o’er Nelson’s shrine;
And vainly pierce the solemn gloom,
That shrouds, O Pitt, thy hallowed tomb!

   Deep graved in every British heart,
Oh never let those names depart!
Say to your sons—Lo, here his grave,
Who victor died on Gadite wave;
To him, as to the burning levin,
Short, bright, resistless course was given.
Where’er his country’s foes were found,
Was heard the fated thunder’s sound,
Till burst the bolt on yonder shore,
Rolled, blazed, destroyed—and was no more.

   Nor mourn ye less his