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. То 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 Scott's novels, is the very bad pun, but sincere wish of

Yours ever most affectionately, etc.

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 ") anything that it contains. But my "heart warms to the tartan," or to anything 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 Guillim) 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.

TO JOHN MURRAY

PISA, FY 8th 1822.

DEAR SIR, Attacks upon me were to be expected; but I perceive one upon you in the papers, which I confess that I did not expect. How, or in what manner,

you can be considered responsible for what I publish, I am at a loss to conceive.

If Cain be "blasphemous," Paradise Lost is "blasphemous," and the very words of the Oxford Gentleman, "Evil, be thou my Good" are from that very poem, from the mouth of Satan; and is there anything more in that of Lucifer in the Mystery? Cain is nothing more than a drama, not a piece of argument: if Lucifer and Cain speak as the first Murderer and the first Rebel may be supposed to speak, surely all the rest of the personages talk also according to their characters and the stronger

passions have ever been permitted to the drama.

I have even avoided introducing the Deity, as in Scripture (though Milton does, and not very wisely either); but have adopted his Angel as sent to Cain instead, on purpose to avoid shocking any feelings on the subject by falling short of what all uninspired men must fall short in, viz., giving an adequate notion of the effect of the presence of Jehovah. The Old Mysteries introduced him liberally enough, and all this is avoided in the New one.

The Attempt to bully you, because they think it won't succeed with me, seems to me as atrocious an attempt as ever disgraced the times. What? when Gibbon's, Hume's, Priestley's, and Drummond's publishers have been allowed to rest in peace for seventy years, are you to be

1 As the publisher of "Cain," Murray had been attacked in a pamphlet called "A Remonstrance" signed "Oxoniensis." The writer took the position: "You are responsible to that society whose institutions you contribute to destroy; and to those individuals whose dearest hopes you insult, and would annihilate."