Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

334 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
of my plan, but he did not approve of it. He asked if you
had dealt honourably by me? I said always like a brother;
but I feared that you were so much engaged with your miscellany
that you were careless as a publisher. This he would
not' admit of. A man's own interest, he said, would improve
that: and finally said, if my work was an object to you, as
my friend you should have it ; if not, he would assist me in
making any bargain. I do not suspect you, my dear friend,
in that sense. I know that ' The Brownie ' should have gone
through more editions than either two or three. I have been
assured of it again and again by gentlemen that had no inter-
ested motive in saying so, and who know better than either
you or me. One gentleman told me that from the interest
with which it was first read in London he considered it would
have sold as well as any novel ever published; but that the
work appeared to all men to have been suppressed, and was
never yet to be had in a shop in England. I beg you will
not mention this work to any one living, as I mean to send
it to press in a different handwriting, and positively to deny
it. But as I never met with anything but candour and truth
from you, I am resolved not to do anything underhand.
I wish you would publish the Jacobite Songs, and really let
folk hear a little of the works you are going to publish and
have published, if it were only on the cover of a Magazine. It
will not do merely to get them printed and make Lesley bring
them up in large bales to the shop. Mine are carefully kept
out of all your lists. But enough of reflection : a dull author,
I am aware, always blames his publisher. I have looked over
the Magazine, which is a very commonplace one.
A second letter on the same subject shows still more
fully the confidence of Hogg in the good-nature of the
publisher whom he wishes to deprive of the advantage
of producing his book, but who magnanimously takes
in hand to procure another bookseller for him :
As the carrier has missed a week, I have time to add a few
words more to those enclosed. There is really scarce a practic-
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