For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

These lines occur in Walter Scott’s narrative poem “Lochinvar,” a ballad-like episode embedded in his verse romance *Marmion* (1808). The poem recounts the bold ride of the young border laird Lochinvar to a wedding where his beloved Ellen is being married off for advantage to a man described as cowardly in both love and war. Scott wrote *Marmion* during the height of his popularity as a poet of chivalric and Border themes, drawing on Scottish oral tradition and romanticized history to dramatize ideals of courage, honor, and spirited defiance of social arrangements.

The couplet sharpens the poem’s moral contrast: Ellen’s intended husband is branded doubly unworthy—slow and timid in courtship (“laggard in love”) and dishonorable in conflict (“dastard in war”). Scott uses the rhyme and parallel phrasing to make the judgment feel proverbial, as if the match itself violates a code of merit. The lines also underscore a recurring Romantic-era tension between marriages arranged for status or security and the claims of passionate attachment. By presenting Ellen’s marriage as a kind of injustice, the poem prepares the reader to sympathize with Lochinvar’s audacious intervention.