most welcome of guests. His geniality, his humor, his frank, hearty manliness, his generosity, his readiness to amuse and to be amused, his endless store of entertaining anecdote, his tact and his union of sympathy with originality, made him the best of companions for an hour or for a lifetime. His friendships were generous and enduring. All these qualities of mind and heart are in one way or another dimly felt even to-day as a reader runs through Scott's stories. We are taken a bit into the confidence of a very noble nature — of a man of large mind, sane instincts, enduring courage, rich sympathy and far-ranging experience. We feel that Scott has lived widely and diversely, and found life good; we feel that he has suffered deeply and yet has found in human comradeship something that atones. We are insensibly led to an imitation of his frank, courageous acceptance of life of this life of ours that mixes so quaintly its good and its evil.

For all these reasons, then, Scott remains - despite our modernity, despite our increase in subtlety and accomplishment and sophistication-indeed, largely because of these very characteristics of the life of to-day-a permanent source of culture and delight.

SCOTT'S POETRY.

In the maturity of his powers he wrote "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," which was received with a rapture of enthusiasm. The selection is a portrait of the aged

harper :

"The way was long, the wind was cold,

The minstrel was infirm and old.

His withered cheek and tresses gray
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 sung of border chivalry.
For, well-a-day! their date 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 gay

The unpremeditated lay.

Old times were changed, old manners gone;

A stranger filled the Stuarts' 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.”

The following lines on Melrose Abbey, from the same poem, show Scott's descriptive powers at their best :

When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white;
When the cold light's uncertain shower
Streams on the ruined central tower;
When buttress and buttress, alternately,
Seemed framed of ebon and ivory;

When silver edges the imag'ry,

And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;

When distant Tweed is heard to rave,

And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave;

Then go - but go alone the while
Then view St. David's ruined pile,
And, home returning, soothly swear
Was never scene so sad and fair."

Scott made the mountains and lakes of Scotland famous throughout the world. The following lines, describing Loch Katrine, are selected from "The Lady of the Lake":

And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light,
And mountains that like giants stand,

To sentinel enchanted land.

High on the south huge Benvenue

Down on the lake in masses threw

Crags, knolls, and mounds, confusedly hurl'd,

The fragments of an earlier world;