“I have just gone through the Scottish Border Ballads. Walter Scott himself is a man of great talent and genius; but wherever he patches an old poem, it is always with new bricks. Of the modern ballads, his own fragment is the only good one, and that is very good. I am sorry to see Leyden’s good for so little. Sir Agrethorn is flat, foolish, Matthewish, Gregoryish, Lewisish. I have been obliged to coin vituperative adjectives on purpose, the language not having terms enough of adequate abuse. I suppose the word Flodden-Field entitles it to a place here, but the scene might as well have been laid in El-dorado, or Tothill Fields, or the country of Prester John, for anything like costume which it possesses. It is odd enough that almost every passage which Scott has quoted from Froissart should be among the extracts which I had made.
“In all these modern ballads there is a modernism
| 212 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 28. |
“Scott, it seems, adopts the same system of metre with me, and varies his tune in the same stanza from iambic to anapæstic ad libitum. In spite of all the trouble that has been taken to torture Chaucer into heroic metre, I have no doubt whatever that he wrote upon this system, common to all the ballad writers. Coleridge agrees with me upon this. The proof is, that, read him thus, and he becomes everywhere harmonious; but expletive syllables, en’s and y’s and e’s, only make him halt upon ten lame toes. I am now daily drinking at that pure well of English undefiled, to get historical manners, and to learn English and poetry.
“His volume of the Border Songs is more amusing for its
prefaces and notes than its poetry: the ballads themselves were written in a
very unfavourable age and country; the costume less picturesque than chi-
| Ætat. 28. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 213 |
“. . . . . Rickman tells me there will be no army sent to Portugal; that it is understood the French may overrun it at pleasure, and that then we lay open Brazil and Spanish America. If, indeed, the Prince of Brazil could be persuaded to go over there, and fix the seat of his government in a colony fifty times as large, and five hundred fold more valuable, than the mother country, England would have a trade opened to it far more than equivalent to the loss of the Portuguese and Spanish ports. But if he remains under the protection of France, and is compelled to take a part against England, any expedition to Brazil must be for mere plunder. Conquest is quite impossible.
“Most likely I shall go up to town in about a week or ten days. God bless you!
