“More than a month has glided away in this busy solitude, and yet I have never sat down to answer your kind letter. I have only to plead a horror of pen and ink with which this country, in fine weather (and ours has been most beautiful) regularly affects me. In recompense, I ride, walk, fish, course, eat and drink, with might and main from morning to night. I could have wished sincerely you had come to Reged this year to partake her rural amusements;—the only comfort I have is, that your visit would have been over, and now I look forward to it as a pleasure to come. I shall be infinitely obliged to you for your advice and assistance in the course of Dryden. I fear little can be procured for a Life beyond what Malone has compiled, but certainly his facts may be rather better told and arranged. I am at present busy with the dramatic department. This undertaking will make my being in London in spring a matter of absolute necessity.
“And now let me tell you of a discovery which I have made, or rather which Robert Jameson has made, in copying the MS. of ‘True Thomas and the Queen of Elfland,’ in the Lincoln cathedral. The queen at parting, bestows the gifts of harping and carping upon the prophet, and mark his reply—
‘To harp and carp, Tomas, where so ever ye gen— Tomas, take thou these with thee.’— ‘Harping,’ he said, ‘ken I nane, For Tong is chefe of mynstrelsie.’ |
| 74 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Another curiosity was brought here a few days ago by
Mr Southey the poet, who favoured me
with a visit on his way to Edinburgh. It was a MS. containing sundry metrical
romances, and other poetical compositions, in the northern dialect, apparently
written about the middle of the 15th century. I had not time to make an
analysis of its contents, but some of them seem highly valuable. There is a
tale of Sir Gowther, said to be a Breton Lay,
which partly resembles the history of Robert the
Devil, the hero being begot in the same way; and partly that of
Robert of Sicily, the penance imposed on
Sir Gowther being the same, as he kept
table with the hounds, and was discovered by a dumb lady to be the stranger
knight who had assisted her father the emperor in his wars. There is also a MS.
of Sir Isanbras; item a poem called Sir Amadas not Amadis of
Gaul, but a courteous knight who, being reduced to poverty, travels to
conceal his distress, and gives the wreck of his fortune to purchase the rites
of burial for a deceased knight, who had been refused them by the obduracy of
his creditors. The rest of the story is the same with that of Jean de Calais, in the Bibliothèque Bleue, and with a vulgar
ballad called the Factor’s Garland. Moreover
there is a merry tale of hunting a hare, as performed by a set of country
clowns, with their mastiffs, and curs with ‘short legs and never a
tail.’ The disgraces and blunders of these ignorant sportsmen
must have afforded infinite mirth at the table of a feudal baron,
| ASHESTIEL—1805. | 75 |
