"The Times" chronicles a—most curious and interesting literary discovery. This discovery relates ty Sir Walter Scott—and another. Brersbody knows the famous mes Sound, scund the clarion, fill. the To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name,'
These lines formed the motto to a chapter in 'Old Mortality." They are followed by the word 'Anonymous,' and since it was a common practice of Scott to invent' chapter and ascribe them to 'Old Play' or 'Old Ballad,' it was assumed by Lockhart and all who followed him that the lines quoted were written by Sir Walter, This tu out not to have been the case. 'Sound, sound the clarion' is part of @ poem written by a Major Mordaunt, and published in an Edinburgh literary weekly called the "Bee" in the year 1791- Scott can spare the quatrain, and Majo: Mordaunt joins the immortals, says the "Evening News."
Exvezzuewenr or Fane.
"Scott," says the "Manchester Guardian," "unconsciously bezzled a century of credit for what many people have believed to be the finest thing in his whole poetic output. The original four lines—slightly misquoted by Scott, who substituted "To all for 'Throughout'—have the curiously stirring quality of a great tenor voice, its power of possessing the mind' with kind of noble reason, as a line like 'Childe Roland to the dark tower'came' has the power of evoke ing instant images of enchanted landscape fested with sombre adventure.
"That Scott should have picked the jewel out of the drift mud of magazine verse' in which it lay, and quoted it, is no wonder. He' was a critic, like Homer, according to Mr. Kipling's Mulvaney, 'An' what 'e thought 'e might require "E went an' took.'
"But what possessed the cighteenth-century Major to write such a thing? Or, if he could write like this, to write the rest of what he wrote?
"For stanza after stanza ho maunders about Cupid, the Temple of Janus, Hymen, Albion, Delia, Clotho, Clio, and half the old furniture in Wardour Street, and then suddenly, without warning, he pipes up like Mars and Apollo (as he might say) rolled into one, and pours out -this little masterpiece. It makes one feel like alstaff_ when Mr. Justice Silence, after a long bout of ineffectiveness, had sung his charming lyric. did not think Master Silence had been a man of this mettle.'
The honour of this discovery belongs to Mr. James Rankin, of Galashiels, who found the lines a a number of the "Bee" (in Edinburgh weekly), dated October 12, 1791. They occur in a poem of 14 four-lined stanzas, said te be written by Major Mordaunt during the last. German War.' This was the Seven Years' War, the War of Minden, and the Mejor hag been identified as Thomas Oshert Mordaunt, who in February, 1759, was gazetted Captain, and served for long in the 10th Dragoons.
The Major was by 1782 Major-General and A.D.C. to the King; in 1793 he became _Lieutenant-General; and he died at his house, 27, St. James's Place, on February 18, 1809. He was apparently a man with general intellectual interests.
"He died five years before Walter Scott, whose name had no doubt reached him as that of a rising author, who had published—anonymously again—the first of the Waverley Novels.""
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.