Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/96

 Croker. The first number of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ to which he contributed three articles, appeared during his stay, and he had frequent conferences with John Murray concerning the new alliance with Ballantyne. This was soon cooled in consequence of John Ballantyne's modes of doing business (, John Murray, i. 175). Scott added to his other distractions a keen interest in theatrical matters. He became intimate with J. P. Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. In the summer he took a share in the theatre at Edinburgh, and induced Henry Siddons [q. v.], the nephew of Mrs. Siddons, to undertake the management and to produce as his first play the ‘Family Legend’ of his friend Joanna Baillie. This led to a friendship with Daniel Terry [q. v.], an actor in the Edinburgh company, who shared Scott's taste for curiosities, dramatised his novels, and admired him so much as to catch a trick of personal likeness.

In 1810 an act was passed to put in force some of the recommendations of the judicature commission. Compensation was made to the holders of some offices abolished. Scott had recently appointed a deserving old clerk to a vacant place and given the ‘extractorship’ thus vacated to his brother Thomas. Thomas was now pensioned off with 130l. a year. The transaction was attacked as a job in the House of Lords by Lord Holland. Thomas had been forced by his difficulties to retreat to the Isle of Man, and did his duty at Edinburgh by deputy. The appointment was apparently not out of the usual course of things at that period. Scott bitterly resented the attack, and ‘cut’ Lord Holland soon afterwards at Edinburgh. The quarrel, however, was made up in later years. Meanwhile Scott was finishing his third poem, ‘The Lady of the Lake.’ He received nominally 2,000l. for the copyright, but ‘Ballantyne & Co.’ retained three-fourths of the property. He had taken special care to be accurate in details, and repeated the king's ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, in order to assure himself that it could be done in the time. The poem was published in May 1810, and equalled the success of its predecessors. There was a rush of visitors to Loch Katrine, and the post-horse duty in Scotland rose regularly from that date (, ch. xx. p. 192). From Lockhart's statement, it appears that twenty thousand copies were sold in the year, the quarto edition of 2,050 copies being sold for two guineas. This success was even more rapid than that of the ‘Lay’ or ‘Marmion,’ though the sale of each of the poems down to 1825 was about the same, being in each case something over thirty thousand. ‘The Lady of the Lake’ was praised by Jeffrey in the ‘Edinburgh,’ while Ellis (who reviewed it in the ‘Quarterly’) and Canning entreated him to try next time to adopt Dryden's metre. The extraordinary success of these ‘novels in verse’ was in proportion less to their purely poetical merits than to the romantic spirit afterwards more appropriately embodied in the novels. A poem of which it can be said that the essence could be better given in prose is clearly not of the highest class, though the lays include many touches of most genuine poetry. Scott himself never formed an exalted estimate of his own verses. Johnson's poems, he said, gave him more pleasure than any others. His daughter, on being asked what she thought of the ‘Lay,’ said that she had not read it; ‘papa says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.’ His son had never heard of it, and conjectured as the reason of his father's celebrity that ‘it's commonly him that sees the hare sitting’ (, ch. xx. p. 196). The compliment to the ‘Lady’ which probably pleased its author most was from his friend, Adam Ferguson, who was serving in Portugal, and had read the poem to his comrades, while lying under fire at the lines of Torres Vedras (ib. ch. xxii. p. 206). Ferguson afterwards read to similar audiences the ‘Vision of Don Roderick,’ in Spenserian stanzas, published for the benefit of the distressed Portuguese in 1811. This, with an imitation of Crabbe and one or two trifles of the same period, seems to have resulted from his desire to try his friend's advice of attempting a different style in poetry. After finishing the ‘Lay,’ Scott had again taken up ‘Waverley,’ and again laid it aside upon a discouraging opinion from Ballantyne, who, it seems, wanted more ‘Lays.’ Scott's regular employment was the edition of Swift. Meanwhile the publishing business was going badly, partly owing to Scott's characteristic patronage of other authors. Anna Seward [q. v.] had begun a correspondence with him on the publication of the ‘Minstrelsy.’ She was not sparing of comically pedantic compliments, which Scott repaid with praises which, if insincere, brought a fit punishment. She died in 1809, and left him her poems with an injunction to publish them. He obeyed, and the firm suffered by the three volumes, which appeared in the autumn of 1810. Another unlucky venture was the edition of Beaumont and Fletcher by Henry William Weber [q. v.] Scott had taken him for an amanuensis in 1804 when he was a half-starved bookseller's hack. Though Weber was a Jacobin in principles,