m fully of the propriety of the
project. I alone can, by notes and the like, give these works a new
value, and in fact make a new edition. The price is to be made good from
the Second Series _Chronicles of Canongate_, sold to Cadell for L4000;
and it may very well happen that we shall have little to pay, as part of
the copyrights will probably be declared mine by the arbiter, and these
I shall have without money and without price. Cadell is most anxious on
the subject. He thinks that two years hence L10,000 may be made of a new
edition.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] Holyrood remained an asylum for civil debtors until 1880, when by
the Act 43 & 44 Victoria, cap. 34 imprisonment for debt was abolished.
For description of bounds see _Chronicles of the Canongate,_ p. 7. (vol.
xli.).

[66] The book was published during November, under the following title,
_Chronicles of the Canongate_ (First Series). By the author of
_Waverley_, etc.--SIC ITUR AD ASTRA, motto of Canongate arms. In two
vols. _The Two Drovers_, _The Highland Widow_, _The Surgeon's Daughter_.
Edinburgh, printed for Cadell and Co., and Simpkin Marshall. London
1827.

The introduction to this work contains sketches of Scott's own life,
with portraits of his friends, unsurpassed in any of his earlier
writings; for example, what could be better than the description of his
ancestors the Scotts of Raeburn, vol. xli. p. 61:--

"_They werena ill to them, sir, and that is aye something; they were
just decent bien bodies. Ony poor creature that had face to beg got an
awmous and welcome; they that were shamefaced gaed by, and twice as
welcome. But they keepit an honest walk before God and man, the
Croftangrys, and as I said before, if they did little good, they did as
little ill. They lifted their rents and spent them; called in their kain
and eat them; gaed to the kirk of a Sunday, bowed civilly if folk took
aff their bannets as they gaed by, and lookit as black as sin at them
that keepit them on_."

[67] Mrs. Wilson, landlady of the inn at Fushie, one stage from
Edinburgh,--an old dame of some humour, with whom Sir Walter always had
a friendly colloquy in passing. I believe the charm was, that she had
passed her childhood among the Gipsies of the Border. But her fiery
Radicalism latterly was another source of high merriment.--J.G.L.

[68] The "new hare" was this: "It transpired in the very nick of time,
that a suspicion of usury attached to these Israelites without guile,