The way was long, the wind was cold, The minstrel was infirm and old;His withered cheek and tresses grey, Seemed to have known a better day; The harp, his sole remaining joy, Was carried by an orphan boy;The last of all the bards was he, Who sang of Border chivalry;For, well-a-day! their day was fled, His tuneful brethren all were dead; And he, neglected and oppressed, Wished to be with them, and at rest. No more, on prancing palfrey borne, He carolled, light as lark at morn; No longer courted and caressed, High placed in hall a welcome guest, He poured to lord and lady gayThe unpremeditated lay.
Old times were changed, old manners gone; A stranger filled the Stuart"s throne;The bigots of the iron time
Had called his harmless art a crime;
A wandering harper, scorned and poor, He begged his bread from door to door, And tuned to please a peasant"s ear The harp a king had loved to hear.
Sir Walter Scott
A uthor.-Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the greatest of Scottish novelists and one of the greatest of Scottish poets, was born at Edinburgh. Nearly all of his works deal with history, his chief poems being-The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, Lord of the Isles; his chief prose works Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe, and Quentin Durward. He wrote also a History of Scotland and Tales of a Grandfather. " Scott exalted and purified the novel, and made Scotland known throughout the world. " He has been called " the Wizard of the North. "General.-A cold winter day, a poor old beggar-man, followed by a boywith a harp, the castle in the background, and the cottages clustering near it for protection-can you see the picture? Go back a few years and you will have another picture, the minstrel in his palmy days. Can you visualize that after reading the poem? What is an unpremeditated lay? Who was the stranger that filled the Stuart"s throne? Read the whole of Scott"s "Lay of the Last Minstrel. " It will be a delight.
