In the same letter of 1st April, 1810, the poet and novelist, who ten days later donned cap and gown at University College, is seen at work on another novel, in the hope that it will bring him 60_l._, and place him before the world as the author of the _New Romance_ in three volumes. If 'Jock' (otherwise styled Mr. John Robinson, of Paternoster Row) won't pay him 'a devil of a price' for his new poem, and at least 60_l._ for his new romance, 'the dog shall not have them.' It was thus the youngster swaggered over a sheet of paper on April Fools' Day, about his dog of a publisher, and the devil of a price the dog must pay him for the finest fruit of his genius. The young man boasting of the 60_l._ he meant to have for his _New Romance_ in three volumes, was the same boy who seems to have set it about that he had been paid 40_l._ for _Zastrozzi_. What the poem was, does not appear. It may have been the 'Original Poetry' that wasn't original, or the _Wandering Jew_ that was subsequently offered for a devil of a price, or a gentlemanly price to the Messrs. Ballantyne and Co. of Edinburgh, and Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of 41 Pall Mall, or even the first meagre sketch of _Queen Mab_; but I am inclined to think it was _The Jew_. _Zastrozzi_ having fallen dead from the press (of course, for no other reason than the dog's neglect to pouch the villains), Jock was not in the humour to drop money either on the poem for which 'a devil of a price' would be nothing more than fair payment, or on the novel that, on being finished and 'fitted' for the press by a publisher, instead of filling three volumes was (in bulk) a slighter and meaner book than _Zastrozzi_. Placed in Mr. Stockdale's hands in September, 1810, and 'fitted' for public perusal by Mr. Stockdale himself, this performance in prose fiction was published by the Pall Mall bookseller (not on the payment of 60_l._ to the author, but altogether at the author's cost and risk) in December, 1810, under the style and titles of _St. Irvyne_, or, _The Rosicrucian_, the first of the two titles being an adaptation of the names of the ducal seat (St. Irving's Hills)[2], in whose glades and gardens he had walked by moonlight with the more cold than faithless Harriett, not six months since. For insufficient reasons _St. Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian_--an even wilder piece of lunacy than _Zastrozzi_--has been assigned to a German source. German tale-wrights may have been in some slight degree accountable for its morbid extravagances, even as they were indirectly accountable for some of the several hundreds of similar English romances, that were produced in the poet's boyhood by the imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. But to speak of it as a tale _from_ the German, or even _after_ the German, is to be guilty of a misdescription.