EDINBURGH, January 31, 1817.

MY DEAR LADY LOUISA,--This accompanies Harold the Dauntless.
I thought once I should have made it something clever, but
it turned vapid upon my imagination; and I finished it at
last with hurry and impatience. Nobody knows, that has not
tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon
mood and whim. I {p.139} don't wonder, that, in dismissing
all the other deities of Paganism, the Muse should have been
retained by common consent; for, in sober reality, writing
good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the
volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers set up
for themselves, independent of my head; for twenty times I
have begun a thing on a certain plan, and never in my life
adhered to it (in a work of imagination, that is) for half
an hour together. I would hardly write this sort of
egotistical trash to any one but yourself, yet it is very
true for all that. What my kind correspondent had
anticipated on account of Jedediah's effusions has actually
taken place; and the author of a very good Life of Knox has,
I understand, made a most energetic attack, upon the score
that the old Covenanters are not treated with decorum. I
have not read it, and certainly never shall. I really think
there is nothing in the book that is not very fair and
legitimate subject of raillery; and I own I have my
suspicions of that very susceptible devotion which so
readily takes offence: such men should not read books of
amusement; but do they suppose, because they are virtuous,
and choose to be thought outrageously so, "there shall be no
cakes and ale"?--"Ay, by our lady, and ginger shall be hot
in the mouth too."[56] As for the consequences to the
author, they can only affect his fortune or his temper--the
former, such as it is, has been long fixed beyond shot of
these sort of fowlers; and for my temper, I considered
always, that by subjecting myself to the irritability which
much greater authors have felt on occasions of literary
dispute, I should be laying in a plentiful stock of
unhappiness for the rest of my life. I therefore make it a
rule never to read the attacks made upon me. I remember
being capable of something like this sort of self-denial at
a ver