Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/59

 can be no question of his adopting that measure, instead of some other form as Stanley, Spencer and Pye had done, because of Taylor's use of it. Again, Scott follows Taylor in changing the time of the action, and in much the same manner. Taylor had placed the event in the time of the first crusade under Richard Lionheart of England. Scott follows the crusade idea, but makes the leader Frederick, presumably Barbarossa of the third crusade. Still further, Scott agrees exactly with Taylor's first version in the number of stanzas of his translation. Bürger had employed thirty-two stanzas of eight lines each. These would naturally have become sixty-four stanzas of four lines in English. Taylor expanded them into sixty-six, and Scott has exactly the same number. Perhaps this is mere coincidence, but it suggests imitation.

Apart from these and the acknowledged plagiary, the similarities of expression are few. The first line of Scott's fourteenth and twentieth stanzas,

is the same as the corresponding line of Taylor's twentieth. So the first line of Scott's stanza twenty-three agrees but for one word with the same line of Taylor's twenty-third quatrain. Taylor has,

while Scott's line is

In stanza twenty-eight the first line has "so late by night" in Scott, using the exact equivalents of Bürger however, while Taylor makes a little better English by translating "so late at night." The last line of stanza thirty-seven, repeated in stanzas forty-seven and fifty-three, is in Scott

In Taylor's stanza thirty-eight, repeated in forty-seven and fifty-three, this line reads,

Yet even such verbal similarities may perhaps be accounted for by a close adherence to the German, and the influence upon both Taylor and Scott of the ballad literature.

The significant similarity, acknowledged by Scott as we have seen, is in the first couplet of his forty-ninth stanza, repeated in stanzas fifty-three and fifty-seven. Scott has,