It is its rapid onset, its hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind.
It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of _The Lay_, that _Marmion_, Scott's greatest poem, was published.

But I may as well say what seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of his poetry.

_Marmion_ has all the advantage over _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ that a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned with the same class of subjects as _The Lay_, must have over a confused and ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife.

Scott's poems have sometimes been depreciated as mere _novelettes_ in verse, and I think that some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism.

For instance, _The Lady of the Lake_, with the exception of two or three brilliant passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified _novelette_,--without the higher and broader characteristics of Scott's prose novels--than of a poem.