iled to suggest an
appropriate epigraph, he had recourse to the inexhaustible mines of
"_old play_" or "_old ballad_," to which we owe some of the most
exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen.

Unlike, I believe, most men, whenever Scott neared the end of one
composition, his spirits seem to have caught a new spring of buoyancy,
and before the last sheet was sent from his desk, he had crowded his
brain with the imagination of another fiction. The Antiquary was
published, as we have seen, in May, but by the beginning of April he
had already opened to the Ballantynes the plan of the first Tales of
my Landlord; and--to say nothing of Harold the Dauntless, which he
began shortly after The Bridal of Triermain was finished, and which he
seems to have kept before him for two years {p.107} as a congenial
plaything, to be taken up whenever the coach brought no proof sheets
to jog him as to serious matters--he had also, before this time,
undertaken to write the historical department of the Register for
1814. Mr. Southey had, for reasons upon which I do not enter,
discontinued his services to that work: and it was now doubly
necessary, after trying for one year a less eminent hand, that if the
work were not to be dropped altogether, some strenuous exertion should
be made to sustain its character. Scott had not yet collected the
materials requisite for his historical sketch of a year distinguished
for the importance and complexity of its events; but these, he doubted
not, would soon reach him, and he felt no hesitation about pledging
himself to complete, not only that sketch, but four new volumes of
prose romances--and his Harold the Dauntless also, if Ballantyne could
make any suitable arrangement on that score--between the April and the
Christmas of 1816.

The Antiquary had been published by Constable, but I presume that, in
addition to the usual stipulations, he had been again, on that
occasion, solicited to relieve John Ballantyne and Co.'s stock to an
extent which he did not find quite convenient; and at all events he
had of late shown a considerable reluctance to employ James Ballantyne
and Co. as printers. One or other of these impediments is alluded to
in a note of Scott's, which, though undated, has been pasted into John
Ballantyne's private letter-book among the documents of the period in
question. It is in these words:--

DEAR JOHN,--I have seen the great swab, who is supple as a
glove, and will do A