I do not say that Scott's poem had not much more in it of true poetic fire, though Scott himself, I believe, preferred these poems of Johnson's to anything that he himself ever wrote.

But the disproportion in the reward was certainly enormous, and yet what Scott gained by his _Lay_ was of course much less than he gained by any of his subsequent poems of equal, or anything like equal, length.

Thus for _Marmion_ he received 1000 guineas long before the poem was published, and for _one half_ of the copyright of _The Lord of the Isles_ Constable paid Scott 1500 guineas.

If we ask ourselves to what this vast popularity of Scott's poems, and especially of the earlier of them (for, as often happens, he was better remunerated for his later and much inferior poems than for his earlier and more brilliant productions) is due, I think the answer must be for the most part, the high romantic glow and extraordinary romantic simplicity of the poetical elements they contained.

Take the old harper of _The Lay_, a figure which arrested the attention of Pitt during even that last most anxious year of his anxious life, the year of Ulm and Austerlitz.