CHAPTER V.
SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.
Scott's genius flowered late.

_Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one years of age.

It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of his first great romance in verse, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four.

The first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which Scott was cornet.

The poem was originally intended to be included in the _Border Minstrelsy_, as one of the studies in the antique style, but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the freedom of its manner.