Dear Sir,—I regret exceedingly that I shall be wholly without the means of satisfying you with the sort of intelligence respecting the Memoir which you appear to expect, as every criticism and opinion that has reached my anxious and interested ear has been most completely favourable.
Gifford and Lord Byron—two persons of opposite tastes and neither of them particularly known to you—have expressed to me their entire satisfaction at its judiciousness and interest of the narrative and its attending remarks, and Sir James Mackintosh is no less pleased with these qualities in it, and is delighted with the ease and elegance of the style in which it is written. Others of less note I have heard speak of it with indiscriminate satisfaction; and as to the comments of Park’s friends, you have too much experience of mankind not to have anticipated the many chances against the possibility of harmonising with the warm but ill-regulated feelings of mere relations.
If your visit be about four o’clock or later, you will probably be rewarded by meeting with Scott or Byron and most likely with both.
