And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance, remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning, every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his own "Bride of Abydos," for instance, which he had written from beginning to end in four days, or even the traveling reflections of Harold and Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon's reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his best,--the drama of "Cain." Of which dedication the virtual significance to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White Maidens, also of Gray Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may tremblingly ask "Gude guide us, what's yon?" hast thou yet known, seeing that thou hast yet told, _nothing_. Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 73: September, 1880.] [Footnote 74: "It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse for verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and a bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so tell those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy. "I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same." (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1820.) "A dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except your neighbor's."] [Footnote 75: See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all other modern poets, "Juan," canto iii. stanza 80, and compare canto xiv. stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for line.] [Footnote 76: "Island," ii. 16, where see context.] [Footnote 77: "Juan," viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworth says "instrument,"--not "daughter." Your Lordship had better have said "Infant" and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only Infant would not have rymed.]