ing would disgust you as a materialization of the plan, and appear to you like insensibility to the power of the history in the mind. Not that I should have shrunk back from the mere fear of giving transient pain, and a temporary offence, from the want of sympathy of feeling and coincidence of opinions. I rather envy than blame that deep interest in a production, which is inevitable perhaps, and certainly not dishonourable to such as feel poetry their calling and their duty, and which no man would find much fault with if the object, instead of a poem, were a large estate or a title. It appears to me to become a foible only when the poet denies, or is unconscious of its existence, but I did not deem myself in such a state of mind as to entitle me to rely on my own opinion when opposed to yours, from the heat and bustle of these disgusting lectures.

From most of these causes I was suffering, so as not to allow me any rational confidence in my opinions when contrary to yours, which had been formed in calmness and on long reflection. Then I received your sister's letter, stating the wish that I would give up the thought of proposing the means of correction, and merely point out the things to be corrected, which-as they could be of no great consequence -you might do in a day or two, and the publication of the poem-for the immediacy of which she expressed great anxiety-be no longer retarded. The merely verbal alteranda did appear to me very few and trifling. From your letter on L, I concluded that you would not have the incidents and action interfered with, and therefore I sent it off; but soon retracted it, in order to note down the single words and phrases that I disliked in the books, after the two first, as there would be time to receive your opinion of them during the printing of the two first, in which I saw nothing amiss, except the one passage we altered together, and the

two lines which I scratched out, because you yourself were doubtful. Mrs Shepherd told me that she had felt them exactly as I did--namely, as interrupting the spirit of the continuous tranquil motion of the White Doe.

However, though somewhat grieved by your sister's exceeding anxiety about pecuniary matters, - grieved, Heaven knows, for your sake and for hers, because I thought it not only a decaying of genial hope and former light-heartedness, but as a recurrence of fears, which had harassed you at Racedown, I could not bear to think that her judgment should be in danger of warping from money motives, in affairs which concern, if not your fame, yet your thereto introductory reputation; and which too, by expediting or retarding the steady establishment of your classical rank, would affect, of course, even your average pecuniary gains. Indeed, before my fall . . . I had indulged the hope that, by a division of labour, you would have no occasion to think about as, with very warm and zealous patronage, I was fast ripening a plan which secures from £12 to £20 a week (the prospectus, indeed, going to the press as soon as Mr Sotheby and Sir G. Beaumont had read it). However, on the mere possibility of a genial mood coming upon me, in which I should either see the whole conduct of the poem in the light in which you and she see it, or such a flash of conviction concerning the excellence of my own imagined amendment as would settle me, I wrote out the last 200 lines or so of the third book, and then again sent it off, in order that it might be advertised as in the press, about the time when I give my lecture on your system and compositions, which will be, God willing! on Friday after next, as my first lecture on Modern Poetry is to be on next Tuesday. I cannot therefore think my 'misinterpretation a very strange one; but unless when I am reading it to and for myself—I cannot get rid of the fear that it will be

talked of as an imitation of Walter Scott. I have such daily experiences of what people are, and how different their abiding thoughts, if they have any, from those which even the worthiest express, and I daresay feel, when under the influence of some immediate sympathy. I therefore did not send the little preface in which my name was, because I know that the public are quick-witted in detecting the most hidden thing that can be made a topic of chit-chat scandal.

If every one who had seen the Christabel believed, without the least suspicion of the difference, that the metre was the same as that of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, they will and must, of course, think your metre to be the same with that of The Lay of the Last Minstrel; and then your referring the metre of a poem, composed since the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, to a MS. poem, will appear strange and almost envious, if the great priority of the MS. to the publication be not mentioned at the same time; and if it be, it would then, I fear, be deemed invidious, and a covert attack on Scott's originality, which for the world I would not that you should be suspected of. 1 say, but for this apprehension, which I am sure is not an absurd one, I should most deeply regret the withdrawal of a poem so peculiarly yours, and beyond any other in rhyme illustrative of your characteristic excellences, though I may now add that, it being not only sense, but sense that demands thought in the reader, and, will not leave him to a lax free-will, that the metre being as you observed of your poems in general-rather dramatic than lyric, i.e., not such an arrangement of syllables, not such a metre as acts à priori, and with complete self-subsistence (as the simple anapestic in its smoothest form, or as the praise of Bacchus in Dryden's Ode), but depending, for its beauty always, and often even for its metrical existence, on the sense and passion. I have something like the same suspicion that you

entertained concerning Christabel, how far this would or would not be an obstacle to its popularity. Lamb and Miss Lamb, who evidently read it—he twice through, he said, with no genial effort, no exertion from sympathy—are, for the very reason that disqualifies them as judges concerning its true merit, no unfair specimens of perhaps the majority of readers of poetry, especially in the perusal of a new poem, which does not employ the common excitements of lively interest—namely, curiosity, and the terror or pity from unusual external events, and scenes, convents, dungeons, &c., &c., &c.

I beg to be understood solely as referring to the Public, not the People, according to your own distinction, and this only for a while-and chiefly influenced by the wish, that two publications should not succeed each other, both failing in their first general impression, and perhaps in some measure by comparing its chances of immediate sale with the almost certainty of the great popularity of either Peter Bell, or Margaret, or even Salisbury Plain. God forbid that your sister should ever cease to use her own eyes and heart, and only her own, in order to know how a poem ought to affect mankind; but we must learn to see with the eyes of others in order to guess luckily how it will affect them. I do wish her to learn this; but then I would have her learn to entertain neither warm hopes, nor confident expectations, concerning events dependent on minds and hearts below the distinct ken of her sympathies. Let her only reflect that even excluding the effect of routs, and continued personal gossip, &c., &c; yet, the great majority of the modern buyers of new poems read at least twenty whole novels of two, three, four, five volumes each for one poem. You have slightly mentioned this in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, but it deserves to be dwelt on at length. . . ."

Two letters from Wordsworth to Walter Scott, now in the Abbotsford collection of MSS., refer both to The White Doe, to Marmion, and to Scott's edition of Dryden.

Wordsworth had asked Scott to give him any particulars about "the rising in the north," and the fate of the Norton family, with which he was acquainted. Scott sent him these, whereupon Wordsworth wrote:

"GRASMERE, May 14, 1808.

MY DEAR SCOTT,-. . . Thank you for the interesting particulars about the Nortons. I shall like much to see them for their own sakes; but so far from being serviceable to my poem, they would stand in the way of it, as I have followed (as I was in duty bound to do) the traditionary and common historic account. Therefore I shall say, in

this case, a plague upon your industrious antiquarians, that have put my fine story to confusion.”

Scott had sent Wordsworth a copy of Marmion in the summer of 1808, and Wordsworth wrote to him thus acknowledging it :

"GRASMERE, August 4, 1808.*

Thank you for Marmion, which I have read with lively pleasure. I think your end has been attained. That it is not in every respect the end which I should wish you to purpose to yourself, you will be well aware, from what you know of my notions of composition, both as to matter and In the circle of my acquaintance, it seems as well liked as the Lay, though I have heard that in the world it is not so. Had the poem been much better than the Lay it could scarcely have satisfied the public, which, at best, has too much of the monster, the moral monster, in its composi

manner.

This letter is quoted, very imperfectly, in Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. ii. p. 142.