In October 1799, when Walter Scott was returning from a ballad-hunting raid through Ettrick Forest and Liddesdale, he stayed at Rosebank in Kelso for some days, and the school friends again met. Scott had recently published translations of the German ballads of Bürger—“Lenore” and “The Wild Huntsman,”—through the publishing house of Manners & Miller of Edinburgh. This little book had been well received in Scotland, but had gained no general acceptance in the south. It had led, however, to a correspondence with a few who were interested in ballad lore, especially with Matthew Gregory Lewis (known generally as “Monk” Lewis), who was then engaged upon a similar work called “Tales of Wonder,” but who had delayed its progress in such a way as to cause considerable annoyance to Scott and to others who had promised their aid.[2] In the meantime it happened that, while Scott was at Rosebank, James Ballantyne called one morning and asked him to supply a few paragraphs on some legal question of the day for his newspaper. Scott complied, and, carrying his manuscript to the printing-office, took with him also some ballads of his own composition designed to appear in “Monk” Lewis’s collection of “Tales of Wonder.” “With these, especially the ‘Morlachian fragment after Goethe,’ Ballantyne was charmed. Scott talked of Lewis with rapture; and, after reciting some of his stanzas, said: ‘I ought to apologise to you for having troubled you with anything of my own, when I had things like this for your ear.’ ‘I felt at once,’ says Ballantyne, ‘that his own verses were far above what Lewis could ever do, and though, when I said this, he dissented, yet he seemed pleased with the warmth of my approbation.’” On parting, Scott made a casual remark that he wondered his old friend did not try to get some work from the booksellers, “to keep his types in play” during the intervals of publication of the weekly _Mail_. Ballantyne replied that such an idea had not occurred to him, and that, moreover, he had little acquaintance with the Edinburgh publishers; but that his types were good, and he thought he could produce work equal to that of any of the town printers. “Scott, with his good-humoured smile, said, ‘You had better try what you can do. You have been praising my little ballads; suppose you print off a dozen copies or so of as many as will make a pamphlet, sufficient to let my Edinburgh acquaintances judge of your skill for themselves.’ Ballantyne assented; and exactly twelve copies of ‘William and Helen,’ ‘The Fire King,’ ‘The Chase,’ and a few other pieces, not all Scott’s own, were thrown off accordingly, with the title (alluding to the long delay in the publication of Lewis’s collection) of ‘An Apology for Tales of Terror, 1799.’”[3] A reproduction of the title is given on the opposite page.