Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/137

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Charles Pelham Villiers.
129

England and Scotland in the words of Wat Tinlinn—

"They cross'd the Liddel at curfew hour,
 And burnt my little lonely tower;
 The fiend receive their souls therefor!
 It had not been burnt this year and more.
 Barn-yard and dwelling, blazing bright.
 Served to guide me on my flight;
 But I was chased the live-long night.
 Black John of Akeshaw, and Fergus Grasme,
 Full fast upon my traces came,
 Until I turn'd at Priesthaugh Scrogg,
 And shot their horses in the bog.
 Slew Fergus with my lance outright—
 I had him long at high despite,
 He drove my cows last Fastern's night."

Scott himself, in his History of Scotland, has given a good explanation of the effect of his own genius in describing that of the genius of Shakspeare upon the Scottish tale of Macbeth.

"The genius of Shakspeare," says Scott,[1] "having found the tale of Macbeth in the Scottish chronicles of Holingshed, adorned it with a lustre similar to that with which a level beam of the sun often invests some fragment of glass, which, though shining at a distance with the lustre of a diamond, is, by a near investigation, discovered to be of no worth or


  1. History of Scotland contained in "Tales of a Grandfather," vol. i., p. 16, note (Robert Cadell, Edinburgh, 1846).