Page:The Earliest English Translations of Bürger's Lenore - A Study in English and German Romanticism - Emerson (1915).djvu/53



This statement may be supplemented by a part of Scott's letter to William Taylor, Nov. 25, 1796, in sending a copy of William and Helen. After apologizing for his "plagiary," he continues:

The "lady in manuscript" of Scott's oddly arranged sentence he himself named in a later letter to Taylor. When the latter published his Historic Survey of German Poetry, in commenting on Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, he referred to the English version as one "admirably translated in 1799 at Edinburgh by William Scott, advocate; no doubt the same person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, has since become the most extensively popular of the British writers." Scott was naturally not pleased with this reference, and dictated a letter to Taylor, dated Abbotsford, Apr. 23, 1831. After explaining that he had never used an assumed name, he writes:

I must not forget, Sir, that I am addressing a person to whom I owe a literary favour of some consequence. I think it is from you, and by your obliging permission, that I borrowed, with my acknowledgment, the lines in your translation of Lenore,