gan a favourite interlude, mimicking a certain son of
Crispin, at whose stall Scott and he had often lingered when they were
schoolboys, and a blackbird, the only companion of his cell, that used
to sing to him while he talked and whistled to it all day long. With
this performance Scott was always delighted. Nothing could be richer
than the contrast of the bird's wild, sweet notes, some of which he
imitated with wonderful skill, and the accompaniment of the cobbler's
hoarse, cracked voice, uttering all manner of endearing epithets,
which Johnny multiplied and varied in a style worthy of the old women
in Rabelais at the birth of Pantagruel."[31] That passage gives
precisely the kind of estimation in which John Ballantyne was held
both by Scott and Constable. And yet it was to him that Scott
entrusted the dangerous and difficult duty of setting up a new
publishing house as a rival to the best publishers of the day. No
doubt Scott really relied on his own judgment for working the
publishing house. But except where his own books were concerned, no
judgment could have been worse. In the first place he was always
wanting to do literary jobs for a friend, and so advised the
publishing of all sorts of unsaleable books, because his friends
desired to write them. In the next place, he was a genuine historian,
and one of the antiquarian kind himself; he was himself really
interested in all sorts of historical and antiquarian issues,--and
very mistakenly gave the public credit for wishing to know what he
himself wished to know. I should add that Scott's good nature and
kindness of heart not only led him to help on many books which he knew
in himself could never answer, and some which, as he well knew, would
be altogether worthless, but that it greatly biassed his own
intellectual judgment. Nothing can be plainer than that he really held
his intimate friend, Joanna Baillie, a very great dramatic poet, a
much greater poet than himself, for instance; one fit to be even
mentioned as following--at a distance--in the track of Shakespeare. He
supposes Erskine to exhort him thus:--

"Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic line,
And emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp which silent hung
By silver Avon's holy shore,
Till twice a hundred years roll'd o'er,--
When she, the bold enchantress, came
With fearless hand and heart on flame,
From the pale willow snatch'd the tr