‘My dear Rogers,—I am about to ask a great boon of you, which I shall
hold an especial courtesy if you can find in your heart to comply with. I have
hampered myself by a promise to a young
bookseller, whom I am for various reasons desirous to befriend,
that I would look over and make additions to a little miscellany of poetry
which he has entitled “English Minstrelsy,” and on which his brother, James Ballantyne, the Scottish Bodoni, intends to exert the utmost extent of
his typographical skill. The selection is chiefly from the smaller pieces of
dead authors, but it would be very imperfect without a few specimens from the
present Masters of the Lyre. I have never told you how high my opinion, so far
as it is worth anything, ranks you in that honoured class. But I am now called
on to say, in my own personal vindication, that no collection of the kind can
be completed without a specimen from the author of the Pleasures of
| WALTER SCOTT | 59 |
‘Why won’t you think of coming to see our lands of mist and snow? Not that I have the hardness of heart to wish you and George Ellis here at this moment, for it would be truly the meeting of the weird sisters in thunder, lightning, and in rain. The lightning splintered an oak here before my door last week with such a concussion that I thought all was gone to wrack. I have pretty good nerves for one of the irritable and sensitive race we belong to, but I question whether even the poet laureate would have confided composedly in the sic evitabile fulmen annexed to his wreath of bays.
