'A mountain stood,
Threat'ning from high, and overlook'd the wood;
Beneath the low'ring brow, and on a BENT,
The temple stood of Mars armipotent.'
line 745. The tent was fired so that the forces might descend amid
the rolling smoke.
line 747. As a poetical critic Jeffrey was right for once when he
wrote thus of this great battle piece:--
'Of all the poetical battles which have been fought, from the days
of Homer to those of Mr. Southey, there is none, in our opinion, at
all comparable, for interest and animation--for breadth of drawing
and magnificence of effect--with this of Mr. Scott's.'
line 757. To this day a commanding position to the west of the hill
is called the 'King's Chair.'
Stanza XXVI. line 795. 'Badenoch-man,' says Lockhart, 'is the
correction of the author's interleaved copy of the ed. of 1830.'
HIGHLANDMAN was the previous reading. Badenoch is in the S. E. of
co. of Inverness, between Monagh Lea mountains and Grampians.
Stanza XXVIII. line 867 Sped, undone, killed. Cp. Merchant of
Venice, ii. 9. 70: ' So be gone; you are sped.' See also note on
'Lycidas' 122, Clarendon Press Milton, vol. i.
Stanza XXX. The two prominent features of this stanza are the sweet
tenderness of the verses, and the illustration of the irony of
events in the striking culmination of the hero's career.
line 904. Cp. Pope, 'Moral Epistles,' II. 269:--
'And yet, believe me, good as well as ill,
Woman's at best a contradiction still.'
line 906. Cp. Byron's 'Sardanapalus,' I. ii. 511:--
'Your last sighs
Too often breathed out in a woman's hearing,
When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them.'
Stanza XXXII. line 972. See above, III. x.
line 976. Metaphor from the sand-glass. Cp. Pericles, v. 2. 26:--
'Now our sands are almost run.'
Stanza XXXIII. lines 999-1004. Charlemagne's rear-guard under Roland
was cut to pieces by heathen forces at Roncesvalles, a valley in
Navarre, in 778. Roland might have summoned his uncle Charlemagne by
blowing his magic horn, but this his valour prevented him from doing
till too late. He was fatally wounded, and the 'Song of Roland,'
telling of his worth and prowess, is one of the best of the
mediaeval romances. Olivier was also a distinguished paladin, and
the names of the two are immortalized in the proverb 'A Rowland for
an Oliver.' Fontarabia is on the coast of Spain, about thirty miles
from Roncesvalles. See Paradise Lost, I. 586, and note in Clarendon
Press ed.
line 1011 Our Caledonian pride, fitly and tenderly named 'the
flowers of the forest.'
Stanza XXXIV. line 1034. Cp. 'spearmen's twilight wood,' 'Lady of
the Lake,' VI. xvii.
line 1035. Cp. Aytoun's 'Edinburgh after Flodden,' vii, where
Randolph Murray tells of the 'riven banner':--
'It was guarded well and long
By your brothers and your children,
By the valiant and the strong.
One by one they fell around it,
As the archers laid them low,
Grimly dying, still unconquered,
With their faces to the foe.'
line 1059. Lockhart here gives an extract from Jeffrey:--'The
powerful poetry of these passages can receive no illustration from
any praise or observations of ours. It is superior, in our
apprehension, to all that this author has hitherto produced; and,
with a few faults of diction, equal to any thing that has ever been
written upon similar subjects. From the moment the author gets in
sight of FIodden Field, indeed, to the end of the poem, there is no
tame writing, and no intervention of ordinary passages. He does not
once flag or grow tedious; and neither stops to describe dresses and
ceremonies, nor to commemorate the harsh names of feudal barons from
the Border. There is a flight of five or six hundred lines, in
short, in which he never stoops his wing, nor wavers in his course;
but carries the reader forward with a more rapid, sustained, and
lofty movement, than any epic bard that we can at present remember.'
Stanza XXXV. 1. 1067. Lockhart quotes from Byron's 'Lara' as a
parallel,--
'Day glimmers on the dying and the dead,
The cloven cuirass, and the helmless head,' &c.
line 1084. 'There can be no doubt that King James fell in the battle
of Flodden. He was killed, says the curious French Gazette, within a
lance's length of the Earl of Surrey; and the same account adds,
that none of his division were made prisoners, though many were
killed; a circumstance that testifies the desperation of their
resistance. The Scottish historians record many of the idle reports
which passed among the vulgar of their day. Home was accused, by the
popular voice, not only of failing to support the King, but even of
having carried him out of the field, and murdered him. And this tale
was revived in my remembrance, by an unauthenticated story of a
skeleton, wrapped in a bull's hide, and surrounded with an iron
chain, said to have been found in the well of Home Castle, for
which, on enquiry, I could never find any better authority than the
sexton of the parish having said, that, IF THE WELL WERE CLEANED
OUT, HE WOULD NOT BE SURPRISED AT SUCH A DISCOVERY. Home was the
chamberlain of the King, and his prime favourite; he had much to
lose (in fact did lose all) in consequence of James's death, and
nothing earthly to gain by that event: but the retreat, or
inactivity, of the left wing, which he commanded, after defeating
Sir Edmund Howard, and even the circumstance of his returning
unhurt, and loaded with spoil, from so fatal a conflict, rendered
the propagation of any calumny against him easy and acceptable.
Other reports gave a still more romantic turn to the King's fate,
and averred, that James, weary of greatness after the carnage among
his nobles, had gone on a pilgrimage, to merit absolution for the
death of his father, and the breach of his oath of amity to Henry.
In particular, it was objected to the English, that they could never
show the token of the iron belt; which, however, he was likely
enough to have laid aside on the day of battle, as encumbering his
personal exertions. They produce a better evidence, the monarch's
sword and dagger, which are still preserved in the Herald's College
in London. Stowe has recorded a degrading story of the disgrace with
which the remains of the unfortunate monarch were treated in his
time. An unhewn column marks the spot where James fell, still called
the King's Stone.'--SCOTT. See also Mr. Jerningham's 'Norham
Castle,' chap. xi.
line 1084. See above, V. vii, &c.
Stanza XXXVI. line 1096. 'This storm of Lichfield Cathedral, which
had been garrisoned on the part of the King, took place in the Great
Civil War. Lord Brook, who, with Sir John Gill, commanded the
assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the vizor of his
helmet. The royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired
from St. Chad's Cathedral, and upon St. Chad's day, and received his
death-wound in the very eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see
the ruin of all the cathedrals in England. The magnificent church in
question suffered cruelly upon this, and other occasions; the
principal spire being ruined by the fire of the besiegers.'--SCOTT.
Ceadda, or Chad, after resigning the bishopric of York in 669 A. D.,
was appointed Bp. of Lichfield, where he 'lived for a little while
in great holiness.' See Hunt's 'English Church in the Middle Ages,'
p. 17.
line 1110. The allusion is to the old fragment on Flodden, which has
been so skilfully extended by Jean Elliot and also by Mrs. Cockburn
in their national lyrics, 'The Flowers o' the Forest.'
line 1117. Once more the poet uses the irony of events with
significant force.
Stanza XXXVII. line 1125. There is now a font of stone with a
drinking cup, and an inscription on the back of the font runs thus:-
-
'Drink, weary pilgrim, drink and stay,
Rest by the well of Sybil Grey.'
Stanza XXXVIII. In this stanza the poet indicates the spirit in
which romances are written, clearly indicating that those only that
have ears will be able to hear. 'Phonanta sunetoisin' might be the
watchword of all imaginative writers. Cp. Thackeray's 'Rebecca and
Rowena.'
line 1155. Hall and Holinshed were chroniclers of the sixteenth
century, to both of whom Shakespeare was indebted for pliant
material.
line 1168. Sir Thomas More, Lord Sands, and Anthony Denny. See Henry
VIII.
lines 1169-70. The references are to old homely customs at weddings.
See Brand's 'Popular Antiquities.'
L'ENVOY.
Scott's fondness for archaisms makes him add his L'Envoy in the
manner of early English and Scottish poets. See e.g. Spenser's
'Shepherd's Calendar' and the 'Phoenix' of James VI.
line 4. Rede, 'used generally for TALE or DISCOURSE.'--SCOTT.
line 6. Cp. William Morris's introduction to 'Earthly Paradise,'
where the poet calls himself
'The idle singer of an empty day.'
line 17. This hearty wish is uttered, no doubt, with certain
reminiscences of the author's own school days. His youthful spirit,
and his genial sympathy with the young, are prominent features in
the character of Sir Walter Scott.
Footnotes:
{1} Lockhart quotes:--'He resumed the bishopric of Lindisfarne,
which, owing to bad health, he again relinquished within less than
three months before his death.'--RAINE'S St. Cuthbert.
{2} See, on this curious subject, the Essay on Fairies, in the
"Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii, under the fourth head; also Jackson on
Unbelief, p. 175. Chaucer calls Pluto the "King of Faerie"; and
Dunbar names him, "Pluto, that elrich incubus." If he was not
actually the devil, he must be considered as the "prince of the
power of the air." The most curious instance of these surviving
classical superstitions is that of the Germans, concerning the Hill
of Venus, into which she attempts to entice all gallant knights, and
detains them there in a sort of Fools' Paradise.
{3} See Pennant's Tour in Wales.
{4} 'First Edition--Mr. Brydone has been many years dead. 1825.'
{5} '"Lesquels Escossois descendirent la montaigne in bonne ordre,
en la maniere que marchent Its Allemans, sans parler, ne faire aucun
bruit"--Gazette of the Battle, PINKERTON'S History, Appendix, vol.
ii. p. 456.'
