Page:Marmion - Walter Scott (ed. Bayne, 1889).pdf/267

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NOTES: INTRODUCTION TO CANTO III.
237

coloni of Æn. I. 12 , makes them 'hynis of Tyre. Shakespeare (Merry Wives, iii. 5. 94) uses the word as servant,' A couple of Ford's knaves, his hinds, were called forth.' The modern usage implies a farm-bailiff or simply a farm-servant.

l. 149. Lochaber is a large district in the south of Invernesshire, having Ben Nevis and other Grampian heights within its compass. It is a classic name in Scottish literature owing to Allan Ramsay's plaintive lyric, 'Lochaber no more.'

l. 153. For early influences, see Lockhart's Life, vol. i.

l. 178. 'Smailholm Tower, in Berwickshire, the scene of the author's infancy, is situated about two miles from Dryburgh Abbey.'—Lockhart.

l. 180. The aged hind was 'Auld Sandy Ormiston,' the cow-herd on Sandyknows, Scott's grandfather's farm. 'If the child saw him in the morning,' says Lockhart, 'he could not be satisfied unless the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to keep him company as he lay watching his charge.'

l. 183. strength, stronghold. Cp. Par. Lost, vii. 141:—

l. 194. slights, as pointed out by Mr. Rolfe, was 'sleights' in the original, and, as lovers' stratagems are manifestly referred to, this is the preferable reading. But both spellings occur in this sense.

1. 201. The Highlanders displayed such valour at Killiecrankie (1689), and Prestonpans (1745).

l. 207. 'See notes on the Eve of St. John, in the Border Minstrelsy, vol. iv; and the author's Introduction to the Minstrelsy, vol. i. p. 101.'—Lockhart.

l. 211. 'Robert Scott of Sandyknows, the grandfather of the Poet.'—Lockhart.

l. 216. doom, judgment or decision. 'Discording,' in the sense of disagreeing, is still in common use in Scotland both as an adj. and a participle. 'They discorded’ indicates that two disputants approached without quite reaching a serious quarrel. In a note to the second edition of the poem Scott states that the couplet beginning 'whose doom' is 'unconsciously borrowed from a passage in Dryden's beautiful epistle to John Driden of Chesterton.' Dryden's lines are:—

'Just, good, and wise, contending neighbours come,
From your award to wait their final doom.

l. 221. 'Mr. John Martin, minister of Mertoun, in which parish Smailholm Tower is situated.'—Lockhart. With the tribute to the