The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at once a very high literary name.

And the name was well deserved.

The _Border Minstrelsy_ was more commensurate _in range_ with the genius of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed, and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled delight.

For Scott's _Border Minstrelsy_ gives more than a glimpse of all his many great powers--his historical industry and knowledge, his masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the "old, simple, violent world" of rugged activity and excitement, as well as that power to kindle men's hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was the chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems.

It is much easier to discern the great novelist of subsequent years in the _Border Minstrelsy_ than even in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_ taken together.