He persuaded himself, when he was writing _The Lady of the Lake_, that the eight-syllable line is "more congenial to the English language--more favourable to narrative poetry at least--than that which has been commonly termed heroic verse,"[363] and he proceeded to show that the first half-dozen lines of Pope's _Iliad_ were each "bolstered out" with a superfluous adjective.

"The case is different in descriptive poetry," he added, "because there epithets, if they are happily selected, are rather to be sought after than avoided....

But if in narrative you are frequently compelled to tag your substantives with adjectives, it must frequently happen that you are forced upon those that are merely commonplaces." He mentions other beauties of his favorite verse,--the opportunities for variation by double rhyme and by occasionally dropping a syllable, and the correspondence between the length of line and our natural intervals between punctuation,--but gives as his final excuse for using it his "better knack at this 'false gallop' of verse." The argument is ingenious enough, but his analysis of heroic verse has only a limited application, and his last reason probably was, as he was candid enough to admit, the most weighty.

George Ellis replied to his defence thus: "I don't think, after all the eloquence with which you plead for your favourite metre, that you really like it from any other motive than that _sainte paresse_--that delightful indolence--which induces one to delight in those things which we can do with the least fatigue."[364] This seems hardly a fair return for the poet's appeal to Ellis in one of the epistles of _Marmion_:[365] "Come listen! bold in thy applause, The bard shall scorn pedantic laws." Another introduction in the same poem is given up to a justification of the author's "unconfined" style, on the score of his love for the wild songs of his own country and the freedom of his early training.[366] Scott practically never rewrote his prose, and the result gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax.

An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his _Journal_: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time....