Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/224

 Fatiims and Zelicas, the noble infants in coral necklets, and the still nobler ladies with pearl pendants on their brows, into the safe harbour of boudoir and drawing-room. He made this clear to Heath, who, nothing daunted, set off at once for Abbotsford, and laid his proposals at the feet of Sir Walter Scott, adding to his bribe another hundred pounds.

Scott, the last man in Christendom to have undertaken such an office, or to have succeeded in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured promise to contribute to the "Keepsake" when it was launched. He was not nervous about his literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear of lowering it by journeyman's work. "I have neither the right nor the wish," he wrote once to Murray, "to be considered above a common labourer in the trenches." Moore, however, was far from sharing this modest unconcern. When Reynolds, on whom the editorship of the "Keepsake" finally devolved, asked him for some verses, he peremptorily declined. Then began a system of pursuit and escape, of assault and repulse, which casts the temptations of St. Anthony into the shade. "By day and