Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

452 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
fied with each other, as nothing can give me so much pleasure
as being able to act liberally towards you. I thought I had
mentioned before that I would make you an additional allowance
for 'Legatees.' If I have not, it has escaped merely from
having always been in my mind as a matter of course.
25 June 1821.
I am not surprised at Bonaparte's agent taking the ' Annals '
for a credible history, for even here some people have viewed
them in the same light. Among the others, my worthy old
mother read the book with great delight, and thought Micah
an honest and upright minister of the Gospel. But, unfortunately,
one of my little boys told her it was a novel, and
thus it lost all its charms, and she was very angry with us
for having deceived her.
Mr Gait, however, does not seem to have stood
very much in need of encouragement : his opinion
of himself was modest but not insufficient.
John Gait to W. Blackwood.
!
30 Jan. '22.
It is one of my literary misfortunes that I cannot get friends
to read my MSS. Even Mrs G. pronounces them illegible.
I am therefore obliged to read scraps here and there, which
do not serve to convey any proper outline of the general story.
Were I to get sufficient encouragement, I think I could write
a novel on the progress of a Scotchman in London, embracing
all varieties of metropolitan life, that would assuredly take.
For although the ' Legatees ' is apparently my first Scottish
work, the fact is that the Pastor was begun many years ago,
and before 'Waverley' appeared I wrote to Constable pro-
posing to execute a Scottish story. It is also a curious coin-
cidence that long before the appearance of the 'Lay of the
Last Minstrel,' I, then very young, in sending some trifle to
the 'Scots Magazine,' mentioned my design of executing a
series of historical ballads and dramas from Scottish history.
"What a cursed fellow that Walter Scot [sic] has been, to drive
me out of my old original line
Let us hope that Gait spoke in jest, and did not