the most common incidents of the stately self-congruous romances of D'Urfe, Scuderi, etc. N.B. I have not read the _Monastery_, but I suspect that the thought or element of the faery work is from the German. I perceive from that passage in the _Old Mortality_, where Morton is discovered by old Alice in consequence of calling his dog Elphin, that Walter Scott has been reading Tieck's _Phantasies_ (a collection of faery or witch tales), from which both the incident and name is borrowed. I forget whether I ever mentioned to you, that some eighteen months ago I had planned and half collected, half manufactured and invented a work, to be entitled _The Weather_-BOUND _Traveller_; or, Histories, Lays, Legends, Incidents, Anecdotes, and Remarks, contributed during a detention in one of the Hebrides, recorded by their Secretary, Lory McHaroldson, Senachy in the Isle of ----. The principle of the work I had thus expressed in the first chapter:--"Though not _fact_, must it needs be false? These things have a truth of their own, if we but knew how to look for it. There is a _humanity_ (meaning by this word whatever contradistinguishes man), there is a humanity common to all periods of life, which each _period_ from childhood has its own way of representing. Hence, in whatever laid firm hold of us in early life, there lurks an interest and a charm for our maturest years,[109] but which _he_ will never draw forth, who, content with mimicking the unessential, though natural defects of thought and expression, has not the skill to remove the _childish_, yet leave the _childlike_ untouched. Let each of us then relate that which has left the deepest impression on his mind, at whatever period of his life he may have seen, heard, or read it; but let him tell it in accordance with the _present state_ of his intellect and feelings, even as he has, perhaps (Alnaschar-like), acted it over again by the parlour fire-side of a rustic inn, with the fire and the candles for his only companions." On the hope of my Lectures answering, I had intended to have done this work out of hand, dedicating the most genial hours to the completion of _Christabel_, in the belief that in the former I should be rekindling the feeling, and recalling the state of mind, suitable to the latter.--But the Hope was vain.