dramatist is
professedly to delight the public at large, and therefore I
think you should make the experiment fairly.

{p.080} Little Sophia is much obliged by your kind and
continued recollection: she is an excellent good child,
sufficiently sensible, very affectionate, not without
perception of character; but the gods have not made her
poetical, and I hope she will never attempt to act a part
which nature has not called her to. I am myself a poet,
writing to a poetess, and therefore cannot be suspected of a
wish to degrade a talent, to which, in whatever degree I may
have possessed it, I am indebted for much happiness: but
this depends only on the rare coincidence of some talent
falling in with a novelty in style and diction and conduct
of story, which suited the popular taste; and were my
children to be better poets than me, they would not be such
in general estimation, simply because the second cannot be
the first, and the first (I mean in point of date) is
everything, while others are nothing, even with more
intrinsic merit. I am therefore particularly anxious to
store the heads of my young damsels with something better
than the tags of rhymes; and I hope Sophia is old enough
(young though she be) to view her little incidents of
celebrity, such as they are, in the right point of view.
Mrs. Scott and she are at present in Edinburgh; the rest of
the children are with me in this place; my eldest boy is
already a bold horseman and a fine shot, though only about
fourteen years old. I assure you I was prouder of the first
blackcock he killed, than I have been of anything whatever
since I first killed one myself, and that is twenty years
ago. This is all stupid gossip; but, as Master Corporal Nym
says, "things must be as they may:" you cannot expect grapes
from thorns, or much amusement from a brain bewildered with
thorn hedges at Kaeside, for such is the sonorous title of
my new possession, in virtue of which I subscribe myself,

ABBOTSFORD & KAESIDE.

There is now to be mentioned a little pageant of {p.081} December,
1815, which perhaps interested _Abbotsford and Kaeside_ not very much
less than the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," as James Ballantyne calls
it, of the preceding autumn. This was no other than a