present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year. The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza: Three years after The Lay Scott published Marmion (1808) telling a story of corrupt passions leading up as a disastrous climax to the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The main innovation involves prefacing each of the six cantos with an epistle from the author to a friend: William Stewart Rose, The Rev. John Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber: the epistles develop themes of moral positives and special delights imparted by art. In an unprecedented move, the publisher Archibald Constable purchased the copyright of the poem for a thousand guineas at the beginning of 1807, when only the first had been completed. Constable's faith was justified by the sales: the three editions published in 1808 sold 8,000 copies. The verse of Marmion is less striking than that of The Lay, with the epistles in iambic tetrameters and the narrative in tetrameters with frequent trimeters. The reception by the reviewers was less favourable than that accorded The Lay: style and plot were both found faulty, the epistles did not link up with the narrative, there was too much antiquarian pedantry, and Marmion's character was immoral. The most familiar lines in the poem sum up one of its main themes: "O what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practice to deceive" Scott's meteoric poetic career peaked with his third long narrative, The Lady of the Lake (1810), which sold 20,000 copies in the first year. The reviewers were fairly favourable, finding the defects noted in Marmion largely absent. In some ways it is more conventional than its predecessors: the narrative is entirely in iambic tetrameters and the story of the transparently disguised James V (King of Scots 1513‒42) predictable: Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth: 'The movement of the Poem... is between a sleeping Canter and a Marketwoman's trot – but it is