into a sub rosa partnership with him, embarking in his concern almost the whole of his available capital. He had fixed to quit the bar, where his gains had been steadily though slowly increasing; he had no wish to attach himself exclusively to any one of the many publishers who sought to monopolize him; and he determined to found, under the name of Ballantyne, a gigantic publishing business of his own. In this, had he been the sole partner or the sole author, he might have been successful. But from his connection with men inferior to himself as publishers, and still more from his connection with men inferior to himself as authors, complications arose which nearly strangled even the leonine man who alone could, and who did afterwards, burst them asunder.

Meanwhile his mind was teeming with Brobdignagian projects. One of them was an edition of the British Poets. And certainly never was man so well qualified as he for this task, by learning, enthusiasm, cautious judgment, wide sympathies, and the powers of interesting narrative and genial criticism. His only danger had been in overloading the text with superfluous notes. But Scott's notes to his own poems are like no other body's notes: their superfluity is pardoned on account of their interest. It would

have been the same had he annotated the works of other bards. And his Lives of the Poets, if inferior to Johnson's in point, massive power, and sceptral majesty, would have far surpassed them in ease, variety, research, accurate knowledge, catholic taste, and fellow-feeling with genius. The plan, however, owing to rivalship among the booksellers, came to nothing. He began then an edition of Dryden, to which he prefixed a very valuable memoir, written with more care and condensation than usual. He wrote, besides, several articles for the Edinburgh Review; one on Todd's edition of Spenser, another on Godwin's Fleetwood (in which he does justice to Caleb Williams, but very much underrates St. Leon, a romance almost equal to his own Ivanhoe), a third on the Poems of Ossian, a fourth on Froissart, a fifth on Thornton's Sporting Tour, etc. Ossian he on the whole admired, and has even imitated in his Highland Widow and some other of his tales; and of Macpherson he had formed a very different opinion from that which Macaulay has paraded so often, and expressed with a bitterness and animus altogether unaccountable.

He began Waverley this year; although, having read some of the opening scenes to William Erskine, who disapproved of them, he threw it

aside. He was visited now by Southey, and they became friends, though never very warm or intimate ones. There were a certain strain and starch about Southey which Scott did not quite relish, highly as he admired his abilities and principles. He resumed his Volunteerism with redoubled energy. James Skene of Rubislaw spent a considerable portion of the autumn of 1805 at Ashestiel, and gives some very interesting sketches of Scott's occupations and amusements about this period of his life. He began now, for the first time, the habit he pursued ever afterwards, of rising very early, and, as he phrased it, 'breaking the neck of the day's work' before breakfast, a practice to which some have ascribed in part the limpid clearness, temperate calm, freshness, and healthiness of his style. He plunged occasionally, with Mr Skene, amidst the wild moorlands of Moffatdale, St Mary's Loch, Loch Skene, the Grey Mare's Tail, and the neighbouring wildernesses, drinking in large draughts of inspiration, which Marmion was to prove had not been imbibed in vain. He visited Wordsworth, then resident on the banks of Grasmere; and one day there rested on the brow of Helvellyn, shaming all its eagles, three of the mightiest spirits in Britain-Scott, Wordsworth, and Humphrey Davy.

From Grasmere he carried his wife to spend a few days at the old haunt of their loves, Gilsland; and they were enjoying themselves much there when the news arrived that a French force was about to land in Scotland, and that all the leal-hearted volunteers of the Lothians and the Border must assemble themselves in Dalkeith. The poet instantly obeyed the summons; and in twenty-four hours his noble horse, whom he had fortunately brought along with him, bore him in one fiery and unmitigated gallop for fully a hundred miles to the place of rendezvous. Here he found the scene in The Antiquary realized. It was a false alarm; the beacon fires had been lit prematurely. But he met a goodly array of friends, who had come on the same April errand with himself; and as there was no fray toward, they feasted in lieu thereof, and great were the mirth and martial jollity that ensued.

Nor had his time on the road been lost. He had during his ride composed The Bard's Incantation, one of his most vigorous minor pieces, and assuredly it 'rings to boot and saddle.'

CHAPTER VI.

A RUN OF PERSONAL AND LITERARY SUCCESS.

IGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIX

opened favourably for our poet. He was appointed one of the Principal Clerks of Session, with a salary of £800 a year and a few hours' labour, if labour it could be called, which amounted only to the duty of registering the decisions of the judges during the sitting of the Court. And there for a quarter of a century was Scott to sit, the observed of all observers, sometimes listening to the pleadings of the bar, and sometimes not; occasionally writing poetry (as when moved by Jeffrey's eloquence he began The Pibroch of Donnel Dhu, his pen galloping to the tune of the pleader's voice), and often lost in the far-stretching reveries of his own spirit, wandering over the Highland hills, or carrying on imaginary conversations which were afterwards to