"Pisa, January 12. 1822.
"My dear Sir Walter,
"I need not say how grateful I am for your letter, but I must own
my ingratitude in not having written to you again long ago. Since I
left England (and it is not for all the usual term of
transportation) I have scribbled to five hundred blockheads on
business, &c. without difficulty, though with no great pleasure;
and yet, with the notion of addressing you a hundred times in my
head, and always in my heart, I have not done what I ought to have
done. I can only account for it on the same principle of tremulous
anxiety with which one sometimes makes love to a beautiful woman of
our own degree, with whom one is enamoured in good earnest;
whereas, we attack a fresh-coloured housemaid without (I speak, of
course, of earlier times) any sentimental remorse or mitigation of
our virtuous purpose.
"I owe to you far more than the usual obligation for the courtesies
of literature and common friendship; for you went out of your way
in 1817 to do me a service, when it required not merely kindness,
but courage to do so: to have been recorded by you in such a
manner, would have been a proud memorial at any time, but at such a
time when 'all the world and his wife,' as the proverb goes, were
trying to trample upon me, was something still higher to my
self-esteem,--I allude to the Quarterly Review of the Third Canto
of Childe Harold, which Murray told me was written by you,--and,
indeed, I should have known it without his information, as there
could not be two who _could_ and _would_ have done this at the
time. Had it been a common criticism, however eloquent or
panegyrical, I should have felt pleased, undoubtedly, and grateful,
but not to the extent which the extraordinary good-heartedness of
the whole proceeding must induce in any mind capable of such
sensations. The very _tardiness_ of this acknowledgment will, at
least, show that I have not forgotten the obligation; and I can
assure you that my sense of it has been out at compound interest
during the delay. I shall only add one word upon the subject, which
is, that I think that you, and Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt were the
only literary men, of numbers whom I know (and some of whom I had
served), who dared venture even an anonymous word in my favour just
then: and that, of those three, I had never seen _one_ at all--of
the second much less than I desired--and that the third was under
no kind of obligation to me, whatever; while the other _two_ had
been actually attacked by me on a former occasion; _one_, indeed,
with some provocation, but the other wantonly enough. So you see
you have been heaping 'coals of fire, &c.' in the true gospel
manner, and I can assure you that they have burnt down to my very
heart.
"I am glad that you accepted the Inscription. I meant to have
inscribed 'The Foscarini' to you instead; but first, I heard that
'Cain' was thought the least bad of the two as a composition; and,
2dly, I have abused S * * like a pickpocket, in a note to the
Foscarini, and I recollected that he is a friend of yours (though
not of mine), and that it would not be the handsome thing to
dedicate to one friend any thing containing such matters about
another. However, I'll work the Laureate before I have done with
him, as soon as I can muster Billingsgate therefor. I like a row,
and always did from a boy, in the course of which propensity, I
must needs say, that I have found it the most easy of all to be
gratified, personally and poetically. You disclaim 'jealousies;'
but I would ask, as Boswell did of Johnson, 'of _whom could_ you be
_jealous_?'--of none of the living certainly, and (taking all and
all into consideration) of which of the dead? I don't like to bore
you about the Scotch novels, (as they call them, though two of them
are wholly English, and the rest half so,) but nothing can or could
ever persuade me, since I was the first ten minutes in your
company, that you are _not_ the man. To me those novels have so
much of 'Auld lang syne' (I was bred a canny Scot till ten years
old) that I never move without them; and when I removed from
Ravenna to Pisa the other day, and sent on my library before, they
were the only books that I kept by me, although I already have them
by heart.
"January 27. 1822.
"I delayed till now concluding, in the hope that I should have got
'The Pirate,' who is under way for me, but has not yet hove in
sight. I hear that your daughter is married, and I suppose by this
time you are half a grandfather--a young one, by the way. I have
heard great things of Mrs. Lockhart's personal and mental charms,
and much good of her lord: that you may live to see as many novel
Scotts as there are Scots' novels, is the very bad pun, but sincere
wish of
"Yours ever most affectionately, &c.
"P.S. Why don't you take a turn in Italy? You would find yourself
as well known and as welcome as in the Highlands among the natives.
As for the English, you would be with them as in London; and I need
not add, that I should be delighted to see you again, which is far
more than I shall ever feel or say for England, or (with a few
exceptions 'of kith, kin, and allies') any thing that it contains.
But my 'heart warms to the tartan,' or to any thing of Scotland,
which reminds me of Aberdeen and other parts, not so far from the
Highlands as that town, about Invercauld and Braemar, where I was
sent to drink goat's _fey_ in 1795-6, in consequence of a
threatened decline after the scarlet fever. But I am gossiping, so,
good night--and the gods be with your dreams!
"Pray, present my respects to Lady Scott, who may, perhaps,
recollect having seen me in town in 1815.
"I see that one of your supporters (for like Sir Hildebrand, I am
fond of Guillin) is a _mermaid_; it is my _crest_ too, and with
precisely the same curl of tail. There's concatenation for you:--I
am building a little cutter at Genoa, to go a cruising in the
summer. I know _you_ like the sea too."
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