LADY OF THE LAKE, The. Scott's 'Lady of the Lake,' published 1810, was the third of his metrical romances, following the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel> and 'Marmion.) It was in part the result of a trip which Scott had made, on legal business, into the Highland coun try, where he had been impressed by the romantic character of the scenery and its appro priateness to the poetic treatment of historic as sociations. °This poem," he said, "the action of which lay among scenes so beautiful and so deeply imprinted on my recollections, was a labor of love, and it was no less so to recall the manners and incidents introduced. The frequent custom of James IV, and particularly of James V, to walk through their kingdom in disguise, afforded me the hint of an incident which never fails to be interesting,"— that is, the participation, on the part of royalty in dis guise, in a romance among humbler folk. The poem may be said to reach the high-water mark of Scott's success in blending the interest of scenery, action and simple human feeling, so far as his metrical works are concerned, though it contains nothing so fine of its kind as the ac count of the battle of Flodden in 'Marmion.' The characters of the king and of Roderick Dhu are brilliantly sketched; that of the young lover, Scott, as usual, found difficulty in handling. "You must know," he wrote to a friend, "this Malcolm Grwme was a great plague to me from the beginning. . . . I gave him that dip in the lake by way of making him do something; but wet or dry I could make nothing of him." He also related, to illustrate
his care for accuracy of detail, that he himself rode into Perthshire "to see whether King James could actually have ridden from the banks of Loch Vennachar to Stirling Castle within the time supposed in the poem)" 'The Lady of the Lake,' like the earlier romances, met with instant success, and has proved last ingly popular. Incidentally, its epilogue is one of Scott's few distinguished achievements in purely lyric poetry. In the Edinburgh Review the work was discussed by Jeffrey, Scott's good friend but frank critic, and his summing up of its qualities remains one of the best accounts of Scott's poetic style: "A medley of bright images and flowing words, set and loosely together,— a diction tinged successively with the careless richness of Shakespeare, the harshness and antique simplicity of the old romances, the homeliness of vulgar ballads and anecdotes, and the sentimental glitter of the most modern poetry; passing from the borders of the ludicrous to those of the sublime, alter nately minute and energetic, sometimes artificial, and frequently negligent, but always full of spirit and vivacity, abounding in images that are striking, at first sight, to minds of every contexture, and never expressing a sentiment which it can cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend."