unknown author. Another incognito
proposes immediately to resume the second volume of
Triermain, which is at present in the state of the Bear and
Fiddle.[36] Adieu, dear Morritt.

Ever yours,

Walter SCOTT.

[Footnote 36: See _Hudibras_.]

Speaking of his third novel in a letter of the same date to Terry,
Scott says: "It wants the romance of Waverley and the adventure of Guy
Mannering; and yet there is some salvation about it, for if a man will
paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily
looking at it."

After a little pause of hesitation, The Antiquary attained popularity
not inferior to Guy Mannering; and though the author appears for a
moment to have shared the doubts which he read in the countenance of
James Ballantyne, it certainly was, in the sequel, his chief favorite
among all his novels. Nor is it difficult to account for this
preference, without laying any stress on the fact, that, during a few
short weeks, it was pretty commonly talked of as a falling off from
its immediate predecessors--and that some minor critics reechoed this
stupid whisper in print. In that view, there were many of its
successors that had much stronger claims on the parental instinct of
protection. But the truth is, that although Scott's Introduction of
1830 represents him as pleased with fancying that, in the principal
personage, he had embalmed a worthy friend of his boyish days, his own
antiquarian propensities, originating perhaps in the kind attentions
of George Constable of Wallace-Craigie, and fostered not a little, at
about as ductile a period, by those of old Clerk of Eldin, and John
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, had by degrees so developed themselves, that he
{p.105} could hardly, even when The Antiquary was published, have
scrupled about recognizing a quaint caricature of the founder of
Abbotsford Museum, in the inimitable portraiture of the Laird of
Monkbarns. The Descriptive Catalogue of that collection, which he
began towards the close of his life, but, alas, never finished, is
entitled "Reliquiae Trottcosianae--or the Gabions of the late Jonathan
Oldbuck, Esq."

But laying this, which might have been little more than a good-humored
pleasantry, out of the question, there is assuredly no one of all his
works on which more of his own early associations have left their
image. Of those early associations, as his full-grown tastes were