A History of English Literature

never provided the happy ending he intended. The innocent Christabel is possessed

by a beautiful demon, in spite of the poem’s ‘medieval’ Christianity. It is a flesh-

creeping verse romance, ‘extravagant’ and ‘sickly’ in its subject-matter – to take terms

from Wordsworth’s Preface – but disciplined and subtle in execution.

The Romantic Revival often drew on Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English

Poetry (3 volumes, 1765; 4th edn, 1794). Bishop Percy (1729–1811), who translated

from Chinese, Old Icelandic, Spanish and Hebrew, collected old songs, ballads and

romances in English and in Scots, often ‘improving’ their texts. His Reliques

‘redeemed English poetry’, according to Wordsworth, and had a huge influence.

Through Percy, 18th-century antiquarianism, the romancing of the past, became the

source of 19th-century Romanticism.

Sir Walter Scott

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) was the first of the verse romances by which Sir

Walter Scott (1771–1832) made his name. He had begun by translating German

imitation-romances, and collecting the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, continuing

the work of Percy and ofThe Scots Musical Museum.The battlefields of the Borders

ofScotland and England produced ballads such as the 15th-century Chevy Chase,a

romance admired by Sidney, praised by Addison and printed by Percy. Scott spent

much of his boyhood in the Borders with his grandparents, hearing many stories.

The Lay, sung at a noble Scott household in the 1690s, is a medieval tale of feud and

magic,taking clues from Christabel, which Scott had seen in manuscript, and from

Spenser. It has a shape-changing dwarf, and a wizard, Michael Scott, from whose

tomb a magic book is taken to provide a curse. Amid this conventional Gothic

mummery there is something new and more genuine, something of the chivalry of

the Middle Ages as we have come to think of it. Canto First of the Minstrel’s Lay

gives us,in its fourth stanza, the Knights feasting in Branksome Hall:

Ten of them were sheathed in steel,

With belted sword, and spur on heel;

They quitted not their harness bright,

Neither by day, nor yet by night;

They lay down to rest

With corselet laced,

Pillow’d on buckler cold and hard;

They carved at the meal

With gloves of steel,

And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.

Readers were very taken with the vigour of such a stanza, and were expected to

enjoy the touch of hyperbole in the last line. These were real knights! But the reason

that we think knights might have been like this is that this is how Scott re-imagined

them. He also gave his readers a fight in the woods and a tournament (taken from

Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale), lots of armour and a daring ride through picturesque

country. Border ballads usually end grimly, but a tragic outcome to this tale of lovers

from feuding families is averted – by love, chivalry and magic, not by divine grace.

The Layis recited in a lively and flexible minstrel verse-form, and it runs easily

through its more than 3000 lines.In his History of English Literatureof 1898,George

Saintsbury called the Lay‘in some ways the most important original work in poetry,

taking bulk,form and merit together, that had appeared for generations, though

236 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837