“I have been long in acknowledging your letter, my
dear friend, and yet you have not only been frequent in my thoughts, as must
always be the case, but your name has been of late familiar in my mouth as a
household word. You must know that the pinasters you had the goodness to send
me some time since, which are now fit to be set out of the nursery, have
occupied my mind as to the mode of disposing of them. Now, mark the event;
there is in the middle of what will soon be a bank of fine young wood, a
certain old gravel-pit, which is the present scene of my operations. I have
caused it to be covered with better earth, and gently altered with the spade,
so as, if possible, to give it the air of one of those accidental hollows which
the surface of a hill frequently presents. Having arranged my ground, I intend
to plant it all round with the pinasters, and other varieties of the pine
species, and in the interior I will have a rustic seat, surrounded by all kinds
of evergreen shrubs (laurels in particular), and all varieties of the holly and
cedar, and so forth, and this is to be called and entitled Joanna’s Bower. We are determined in the choice of our ornaments
by necessity, for our ground fronts (in poetic phrase) the rising sun, or, in
common language, looks to the east; and being also on the north side of the
hill—(don’t you shiver at the thought?)—why, to say truth, George Wynnos and I are both of opinion that
nothing but evergreens will flourish there; but I trust I shall convert a
present deformity into a very pretty little hobby-horsical sort of thing. It
will
| LETTER TO MISS BAILLTE—NOV. 1815. | 389 |
“I do most devoutly hope Lord Byron will succeed in his proposal of bringing out one of
your dramas; that he is your sincere admirer is only synonymous with his being
a man of genius; and he has, I am convinced, both the power and inclination to
serve the public, by availing himself of the treasures you have laid before
them. Yet I long for ‘some yet untasted spring,’ and
| 390 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
“Little
Sophia is much obliged by your kind and continued recollection:
she is an excellent good child, sufficiently sensible, very affectionate, not
without perception of character; but the gods have not made her poetical, and I
hope she will never attempt to act a part which nature has not called her to. I
am myself a poet, writing to a poetess, and therefore cannot be suspected of a
wish to degrade a talent, to which, in whatever degree I may have possessed it,
I am indebted for much happiness: but this depends only on the rare coincidence
of some talent falling in with a novelty in style and diction and conduct of
story, which suited the popular taste; and were my children to be better poets
than me, they would not be such in general estimation, simply because the
second cannot be the first, and the first (I mean in point of date) is every
thing, while others are nothing, even with more intrinsic merit. I am therefore
particularly anxious to store the heads of my young damsels with something
better than the tags
| LETTER TO MISS BAILLIE—NOV. 1815. | 391 |
