James Annesley, claimant in 1743 of the
honors and estates of the Earls of Anglesey, in Ireland.
That Sir Walter must have read the records of this
celebrated trial, as well as Smollett's edition of the
story in _Peregrine Pickle_, there can be no doubt. How
the circumstance had not recurred to his memory when
writing the explanatory Introduction to his Novel, I can
offer no conjecture. Very possibly the _Garland_ itself
may have been framed after the Annesley trial took
place.--(1841.) [The paper in _The Gentleman's
Magazine_, referred to above, will be found in the
Appendix to this volume.]]

The first edition was, like that of Waverley, in three little volumes,
with a humility of paper and printing which the meanest novelist would
now disdain to imitate; {p.027} the price a guinea. The 2000 copies
of which it consisted were sold the day after the publication; and
within three months came a second and a third impression, making
together 5000 copies more. The sale, before those novels began to be
collected, had reached nearly 10,000; and since then (to say nothing
of foreign reprints of the text, and myriads of translations into
every tongue of Europe) the domestic sale has amounted to 50,000.

On the rising of the Court of Session in March, Mr. and Mrs. Scott
went by sea to London with their eldest girl, whom, being yet too
young for general society, they again deposited with Joanna Baillie at
Hampstead, while they themselves resumed, for two months, their usual
quarters at kind Miss Dumergue's in Piccadilly. Six years had elapsed
since Scott last appeared in the metropolis; and brilliant as his
reception had then been, it was still more so on the present occasion.
Scotland had been visited in the interim, chiefly from the interest
excited by his writings, by crowds of the English nobility, most of
whom had found introduction to his personal acquaintance--not a few
had partaken of his hospitality at Ashestiel or Abbotsford. The
generation among whom, I presume, a genius of this order feels his
own influence with the proudest and sweetest confidence--on whose
fresh minds and ears he has himself made the first indelible
impressions--the generation with whose earliest romance of the heart
and fancy his idea had been blended, was now grown to the full
stature; the succ