Memoir of John Murray
Walter Scott to John Murray, 18 December 1816
December 18th, 1816.
My dear Sir,
I give you hearty joy of the success of the Tales, although I do not claim that
paternal interest in them which my friends do me the credit to assign to me. I
assure you I have never read a volume of them till they were printed, and can
only join with the rest of the world in applauding the true and striking
portraits which they present of old Scottish manners.
I do not expect implicit reliance to be placed on my
disavowal, because I know very well that he who is disposed not to own a work
must necessarily deny it, and that otherwise his secret would be at the mercy
of all who chose to ask the question, since silence in such a ![]()
| SCOTT’S REVIEW OF HIS OWN NOVEL. | 471 |
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case must
always pass for consent, or rather assent. But I have a mode of convincing you
that I am perfectly serious in my denial—pretty similar to that by which
Solomon distinguished the fictitious from the real
mother—and that is by reviewing the work, which I take to be an operation
equal to that of quartering the child. . . Kind compliments to Heber, whom I expected at Abbotsford this
summer; also to Mr. Croker and all your
four o’clock visitors. I am just going to Abbotsford, to make a small
addition to my premises there. I have now about seven hundred acres, thanks to
the booksellers and the discerning public.
Yours truly,
John Wilson Croker (1780-1857)
Secretary of the Admiralty (1810) and writer for the
Quarterly
Review; he edited an elaborate edition of Boswell's
Life of
Johnson (1831).
Richard Heber (1774-1833)
English book collector, he was the elder half-brother of the poet Reginald Heber and the
friend of Walter Scott: member of the Roxburghe Club and MP for Oxford 1821-1826.
