his soul to the Devil. Yet if any body can discover the mystic words used by the person who deposited the treasure, and pronounced them, the fiend must instantly decamp. I had many stories of a similar nature from a peasant, who had himself seen the Devil, in the shape of a great cat."'—Scott.
l. 190. Begun has always been a possible past tense in poetry, and living poets continue its use. There is an example in Mr. Browning's 'Waring':—
Let Waring end what I begun;
and Lord Tennyson writes:—
'The light of days when life begun '
in the memorial verses prefixed to his brother's 'Collected Sonnets' (1879).
l. 205. Robert Lindsay of Pittscottie (a Fife estate, eastward of Cupar) lived in the first half of the sixteenth century, and wrote Chronicles of Scotland ' from James II to Mary. Nothing further of him is known with certainty. Like the Lion King he was a cadet of the noble family of Lindsay, including Crawford and Lindsay and Lindsay of the Byres.
l. 207. See above, IV. xiv.
l. 212. John of Fordun (a village in Kincardineshire) about the end of the fourteenth century wrote the first five of the sixteen books of the 'Scotochronicon,' the work being completed by Walter Bower, appointed Abbot of St. Colm's, 1418.
l. 220. Gripple, tenacious, narrow. See 'Waverley,' chap. lxvii. —'Naebody wad be sae gripple as to take his gear'; and cp. 'Faerie Queene,' VI. iv. 6:—
'On his shield he gripple hold did lay.'
l. 225. They hide away their treasures without using them, as the magpie or the jackdaw does with the articles it steals.
CANTO SIXTH.
Stanza I. l. 6. Cp. Job xxxix. 25.
l. 8. Terouenne, about thirty miles S. E. of Calais.
l.9. Leaguer, the besiegers' camp. Cp. Longfellow's 'Evan geline,' I. 5,—
'Like to a gipsy camp, or a leaguer after a battle.'
