plicitly, though not altogether to the advantage of Scott and his biographer, in a number of Chambers's Journal, about that period.
In my notes on Jerdan I have made allusion to Sir Walter's liability to literary imposition. There I was thinking of one particular instance, which, inasmuch as it has escaped the industry of, or been intentionally overlooked by, Lockhart, may be noticed here as showing that the black-letter sagacity of the "Shirra" himself might be caught napping, and that with the simple credulity of his own Monkbarns, he could mistake the "bit bourock of the mason-callants " for a Roman Prætorium.
I allude to a brochure of five pages, entitled The Raid of Featherstonehaugh: a Border Ballad. This was really written by Sir Walter's early friend, Mr. Robert Surtees, of Mainsforth, author of the History of Durham, some of whose other impositions upon the poet were printed in the Border Minstrelsy, or inserted in notes to his Metrical Romances. Of this poem, in particular. Sir Walter entertained so high an opinion that he has incorporated a verse from it in Marmion, and given it entire in a note, as a genuine relic of antiquity, gravely commenting upon it in a most elaborate manner, and pointing out its exemplifications of the then state of society. It will be found in Marmion, Canto i. verse 13:—
"The whiles a Northern harper rude," etc.
Yet another pleasant hoax on the poet may be recorded. In a letter to Southey, September, 1810, he states that " a witty rogue had proved him guilty of stealing a passage from one of Hieronymus Vida's Latin poems which he had never seen or heard of." The passage in question was the well-known distich in Marmion:—
"When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!"
The reference was to Vida's Ad Eranen, El. ii. v. 21;—
"Cum dolor atque supercilio gravis imminet angor,
Fungeris angelico sola ministerio."
If these lines were actually to be found among the poems of the learned Bishop of Alba, the coincidence would certainly have been a remarkable one ; but I need not say that they are of more modern fabrication, being the production of the Rev. Henry I. T. Drury, afterwards "subdidasculus" of Harrow, who took it into his head, in his college days, to perpetrate this clever trick upon Scott, after the manner of Lauder upon Milton. The other lines of the piece, "Marmio ad Claram," are given in the Arundines Cami p. 36.
Who wrote the Waverley Novels? This is the title of an ingenious pamphlet by W. J. F.,—to which, and to Notes and Queries, Series i. and ii., passim, the curious must be referred for a discussion of the apparently futile question.
Of parodies upon, and imitations of, Scott, there are plenty. One of the best known is Jokeby : a Burlesque on Rokeby, a Poem, in Six Cantos. By an Amateur of Fashion (London, 8vo, 8th ed. 18 13). I fail to see much talent in this, although it has gone through so many editions; and of its various attributions to John Roby, Thomas Tegg (its publisher), or the "Adelphi," James and Horace Smith, whose well-known imitation in the Rejected Addresses is of quite different merit, probably none is
