W. SCOTT.

I know not how much of the tale of The Black Dwarf had been seen by
Blackwood, in St. John Street, before he concluded this bargain for
himself and his friend Murray; but when the closing sheets of that
novel {p.113} reached him, he considered them as by no means
sustaining the delightful promise of the opening ones. He was a man of
strong talents, and, though without anything that could be called
learning, of very respectable information--greatly superior to what
has, in this age, been common in his profession; acute, earnest,
eminently zealous in whatever he put his hand to; upright, honest,
sincere, and courageous. But as Constable owed his first introduction
to the upper world of literature and of society in general to his
Edinburgh Review, so did Blackwood his to the Magazine, which has now
made his name familiar to the world--and at the period of which I
write, that miscellany was unborn; he was known only as a diligent
antiquarian bookseller of the old town of Edinburgh, and the Scotch
agent of the great London publisher, Murray. The abilities, in short,
which he lived to develop, were as yet unsuspected--unless, perhaps,
among a small circle; and the knowledge of the world, which so few men
gather from anything but painful collision with various conflicting
orders of their fellow-men, was not his. He was to the last plain and
blunt; at this time I can easily believe him to have been so to a
degree which Scott might look upon as "ungracious"--I take the epithet
from one of his letters to James Ballantyne. Mr. Blackwood, therefore,
upon reading what seemed to him the lame and impotent conclusion of a
well-begun story, did not search about for any glossy periphrase, but
at once requested James Ballantyne to inform the unknown author that
such was his opinion. This might possibly have been endured; but
Blackwood, feeling, I have no doubt, a genuine enthusiasm for the
author's fame, as well as a just tradesman's anxiety as to his own
adventure, proceeded to suggest the outline of what would, in his
judgment, be a better upwinding of the plot of The Black Dwarf, and
concluded with announcing his willingness, in case the proposed
alteration were agreed to, that the whole expense of cancelling
{p.114} and reprinting a certain number of sheets should be charged
to his own account. He appears to have further indicated that he had
taken counsel with some literary person, on whose taste he placed
great rel