on bards

Thomas Gray's "The Bard" was a famous treatment of the "last minstrel" phenomena. Twelve years after Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel was published, John Martin produced a painting, The Bard, based on Gray's poem.

All of this works looks back to the efforts of antiquarians like Thomas Wharton to collect manuscripts of English poetry. Below is the title page of Wharton's important collection of medieval poetry (heavily edited for Romantic era audiences), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1766). Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border does the same collecting and compiling work for Scottish poetry.