The paragraphs quoted from Jeffrey compare Marmion adversely with the Lay and criticize the epistles, but they also attack the fundamental enterprise of the poem, renewing the regrets the Edinburgh had expressed about the Lay--'that an author endowed with such talents should consume them in imitations of obsolete extravagance, and in the representation of manners and sentiments in which none of his readers can be supposed to take much interest, except the few who can judge of their exactness'--and predicting that Scott's popularity would prove merely temporary, the taste for his antiquarian jargon as fleeting as that for Erasmus Darwin's 'gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and
polyandria' (M ii.