Referring to some of the lines I have quoted, Campbell said,--"I have repeated them so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass.

To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head which strong, pithy poetry excites."[10] I suppose anecdotes of this kind have been oftener told of Scott than of any other English poet.

Indeed, Sir Walter, who understood himself well, gives the explanation in one of his diaries:--"I am sensible," he says, "that if there be anything good about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions."[11] He might have included old people too.

I have heard of two old men--complete strangers--passing each other on a dark London night, when one of them happened to be repeating to himself, just as Campbell did to the hackney coachmen of the North Bridge of Edinburgh, the last lines of the account of Flodden Field in _Marmion_, "Charge, Chester, charge," when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, "On, Stanley, on," whereupon they finished the death of Marmion between them, took off their hats to each other, and parted, laughing.

Scott's is almost the only poetry in the English language that not only runs thus in the head of average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its hurried frankness of style, to use Scott's own terms, or by that of its strong and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it.