I am not authorized to say--but I will not resist my impulse to say to Miss Edgeworth, that another novel, descriptive of more ancient manners still, may be expected erelong from the Author of Waverley. But I request her to observe, that I say this in strict confidence--not certainly meaning to exclude from the knowledge of what will give them pleasure, her respectable family. Mr. Scott's poem, The Lord of the Isles, promises fully to equal the most admired of his productions. It is, I think, equally powerful, and certainly more uniformly polished and sustained. I have seen three cantos. It will consist of six. I have the honor to be, Madam, with the utmost admiration and respect, Your most obedient and most humble servant, JAMES BALLANTYNE. Footnotes of the Chapter XXXIII. [96: The Scotts of Scotstarvet, and other families of the name in Fife and elsewhere, claim no kindred with the great clan of the Border--and their armorial bearings are different.] [97: Lord Byron writes to Mr. Moore, August 3, 1814: "Oh! I have had the most amusing letter from Hogg, the Ettrick Minstrel and Shepherd. I think very highly of him as a poet, but he and half of these Scotch and Lake troubadours are spoilt by living in little circles and petty coteries. London and the world is the only place to take the conceit out of a man--in the milling phrase. Scott, he says, is gone to the Orkneys in a gale of wind, during which wind, he affirms, the said Scott, he is sure, is not at his ease, to say the least of it. Lord! Lord! if these home-keeping minstrels had crossed your Atlantic or my Mediterranean, and tasted a little open boating in a white squall--or a gale in 'the Gut,'--or the Bay of Biscay, with no gale at all--how it would enliven and introduce them to a few of the sensations!--to say nothing of an illicit amour or two upon shore, in the way of Essay upon the Passions, beginning with simple adultery, and compounding it as they went along."--_Life and Works_, vol. iii. p. 102. Lord Byron, by the way, had written on July the 24th to Mr. Murray, "_Waverley_ is the best and most interesting novel I have redde since--I don't know when," etc.--_Ibid._ p. 98.] [98: Mr. Grieve was a man of cultivated mind and generous disposition, and a most kind and zealous friend of the Shepherd.] [99: Major Riddell, the Duke's Chamberlain at Branksome Castle.] [100: See letter to Mr. Morritt, _ante_, p. 120.]