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.