advise with. I have not ventured to mention the
business to my brother on account of the cursed
mysteries and injunctions of secrecy connected with it.
I know he would blame me for engaging in it, for he has
a very small opinion of the Ballantynes." Apart from the
vexations attending their office as intermediaries, for
which the Ballantynes were only partially responsible,
this shrewd, if irritated, observer appears to have
formed opinions of the brothers as business men, in some
respects not differing greatly from those held by
Lockhart in later days.

The delight of the two publishers in at last receiving
the MS. of _The Black Dwarf_ and the manner in which it
passed into the hands of Constable, even before the
stipulated 6000 copies were disposed of,--it must be
owned he treated his rivals somewhat unhandsomely,
finally severing them from Scott's literary career,--are
fully set forth by the historian of the House of
Blackwood. With her "one cannot but feel that this was
one of those tragically insignificant circumstances
which so often shape life apart from any consciousness
of ours. Probably ruin would never have overtaken Sir
Walter had he been in the steady and careful hands of
Murray and Blackwood, for it is unlikely that even the
glamour of the great Magician would have turned heads so
reasonable and sober.")]

{p.115} While these volumes were in progress, Scott found time to make
an excursion into Perthshire and Dumbartonshire, {p.116} for the sake
of showing the scenery, made famous in The Lady of the Lake and
Waverley, to his {p.117} wife's old friends, Miss Dumergue and Mrs.
Sarah Nicolson,[40] who had never before been in Scotland. The account
which he gives of these ladies' visit at Abbotsford, and this little
tour, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, shows the "Black Hussar of
Literature" in his gentler and more habitual mood.

[Footnote 40: The sister of Miss Jane Nicolson.--See
_ante_, vol. i. p. 248. Vol. ii. p. 82.]

TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., M. P., ROKEBY PARK.

ABBOTSFORD, 21st August,