Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/31



, Although I do not pretend to the pleasure of your personal acquaintance, like many whom I believe to be equally strangers to you, I am nevertheless interested in your publications and desire their continuance; not that I pretend to much taste in fictitious composition, or that I am apt to be interested in your grave scenes or amused by those which are meant to be lively. I will not disguise from you that I have yawned over the last interview of Maclvor and his sister, and fell fairly asleep while the schoolmaster was reading the humours of Dandie Dinmont. You see, sir, that I scorn to solicit your favour in a way to which you are no stranger. If the papers I enclose you are worth nothing, I will not endeavour to recommend them by personal flattery, as a bad cook pours rancid butter upon stale fish. No, sir! what I respect in you is the light you have occasionally thrown on national antiquities, a study which I have commenced rather late in life, but to which I am attached with the devotion of a first love, because it is the only study I ever cared a farthing for.

You shall have my history, sir (it will not reach to three volumes), before that of my manuscript; and as you usually throw out a few lines of verse (by way of skirmishers. I suppose) at the head of each division of prose, I have had the luck to light upon a stanza in the schoolmaster's copy of Burns which describes me exactly. I love it the better, because it was originally designed for Captain Grose, an