der if my course has been devious and desultory, and many of my
excursions altogether unprofitable to the advance of my journey.
The Dwarf Page is also an excrescence, and I plead guilty to all the
censures concerning him. The truth is, he has a history, and it is
this: The story of Gilpin Horner was told by an old gentleman to
Lady Dalkeith, and she, much diverted with his actually believing so
grotesque a tale, insisted that I should make it into a Border ballad.
I don't know if you ever saw my lovely chieftainess--if you have,
you must be aware that it is _impossible_ for any one to refuse her
request, as she has more of the angel in face and temper than any one
alive; so that if she had asked me to write a ballad on a broomstick I
must have attempted it. I began a few verses, to be called the Goblin
Page; and they lay long by me, till the applause of some friends
whose judgement I valued induced me to resume the poem; so on I wrote,
knowing no more than the man in the moon how I was to end. At length
the story appeared so uncouth, that I was fain to put it into
the mouth of my old minstrel--lest the nature of it should be
misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new school of
poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old. In the process
of romance the page, intended to be a principal person in the work,
contrived (from the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose)
to slink downstairs into the kitchen, and now he must e'en abide
there.

I mention these circumstances to you, and to any one whose applause I
value, because I am unwilling you should suspect me of trifling with
the public in _malice prepense_. As to the herd of critics, it is
impossible for me to pay much attention to them; for, as they do not
understand what I call poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each
other. Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of
tinkers, who, unable to _make_ pots and pans, set up for _menders_ of
them, and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one. The sixth
canto is altogether redundant; for the poem should certainly have
closed with the union of the lovers, when the interest, if any, was
at an end. But what could I do? I had my book and my page still on my
hands, and must get rid of them at all events. Manage them as I would,
their catastrophe must have been insufficient to occupy an entire
canto; so I was fain to eke it out with the songs of the minstrels. I
will