Almost by return of post came the duke's answer. "As to the offer of his royal highness to appoint you laureate, I shall frankly say, that I should be mortified to see you hold a situation which, by the general concurrence of the world, is stamped ridiculous. There is no good reason why it should be so; but it is so. _Walter Scott, Poet Laureate_, ceases to be Walter Scott, of the Lay, Marmion, etc. Any future poem of yours would not come forth with the same probability of a successful reception. The poet laureate would stick to you and your productions like a piece of _court plaster_. * * * Only think of being chanted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse and squeaking choristers, on a birthday, for the edification of the bishops, pages, maids of honor, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh, horrible! thrice horrible!" Scott replied, "I should certainly never have survived the recitative described by your grace; it is a part of the etiquet I was quite unprepared for, and should have sunk under it." Such was the horror of Scott, and his great patron Buccleugh, at the very idea of this most ridiculous of offers, of _this piece of court plaster_, of this horrible, thrice horrible of all quizzes--Scott at once declined the _honor_; and though he said he should make a bad courtier, assuredly no courtier could have done it in better style, professing that the office was too distinguished for his merits; that he was by no means adequate to it. Now Scott, all this time, had but an income of £2,000 a-year, out of all his resources; we have these calculated and cast up on the very same page, opposite to his letter to Buccleugh; nay, he is in embarrassments, and in the very same letter requests the duke to be guaranty for £2,000 for him: and he thought the laureateship worth £300 or £400 a-year. These facts all testify to his thorough idea of the ignominy of the office. How rich, then, is the sequel! This ignominy, this burning shame of an office, this piece of adhesive _court plaster_, he goes at once and recommends to Southey! "Hang it," he says to himself, "it would never do for such a man as me; but, by the by, it will do very well for Southey!" Well, he writes at once to Southey--tells him that he has had this offer, but that he has declined it, because he has had already two pieces of preferment, and, moreover, "my dear Southey, I had you in my eye." He adds--and now let any one who thinks himself flattered on any particular occasion, remember this delicious bam--"I did not refuse it _from any foolish prejudice against the situation_--otherwise how durst I offer it to you, (ay, how, indeed!) my elder brother in the muse?--but from a sort of internal hope that they would give it to you, on whom it would be so much more worthily conferred. For I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry, though I have had, probably but for a time, the tide of popularity in my favor. I have not time to add the