amount, I shall immediately ship the
quantity for you."

_Mr. James Ballantyne to John Murray_.

"Your agency hitherto has been productive of little or no advantage to
us, and the fault has not lain with us. We have persisted in offering
you shares of everything begun by us, till we found the hopelessness of
waiting any return; and in dividing Mr. Scott's poem, we found it our
duty to give what share we had to part with to those by whom we were
chiefly benefited both as booksellers and printers."

This letter was accompanied with a heavy bill for printing the works of
De Foe for Mr. Murray. A breach thus took place with the Ballantynes;
the publisher of the _Quarterly_ was compelled to look out for a new
agent for Scotland, and met with a thoroughly competent one in Mr.
William Blackwood, the founder of the well-known publishing house in
Edinburgh.

To return to the progress of the _Quarterly_. The fifth number, which
was due in February 1810, but did not appear until the end of March,
contained many excellent articles, though, as Mr. Ellis said, some of
them were contributed by "good and steady but marvellously heavy
friends." Yet he found it better than the _Edinburgh_, which on that
occasion was "reasonably dull."

It contained one article which became the foundation of an English
classic, that of Southey on the "Life of Nelson." Of this article Murray
wrote to its author:

"I wish it to be made such a book as shall become the heroic text of
every midshipman in the Navy, and the association of Nelson and Southey
will not, I think, be ungrateful to you. If it be worth your attention
in this way I am disposed to think that it will enable me to treble the
sum I first offered as a slight remuneration."

Mr. Murray, writing to Mr. Scott (August 28, 1810) as to the appearance
of the new number, which did not appear till a month and a half after it
was due, remarked on the fourth article. "This," he said, "is a review
of the 'Daughters of Isenberg, a Bavarian Romance,' by Mr. Gifford, to
whom the authoress (Alicia T. Palmer) had the temerity to send three L1
notes!" Gifford, instead of sending back the money with indignation, as
he at first proposed, reviewed the romance, and assumed that the
authoress had sent him the money for charitable purposes.

_Mr. Gifford to Miss A.T. Palmer_.

"Our avocations leave us but little leisure for extra-official
employment; and in the present case she has inadvertently added t