Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

SIGNOR ALDIBORONTOPHOSCOPHORNIO. 63
at which we granted our acceptances for six hundred pounds,
feel rather impatient at hearing nothing whatever of the Work
of Fiction of which you assured me the first volume would be
printed and put into my hands upwards of two months ago.
We beg you would now inform us what is doing, or is to be
done, as it is most unpleasant to have the business hanging in
this way.
The plausible James replied instantly to Mr
Blackwood :
—
I should be myself entirely unreasonable if I thought there
was anything unreasonable in the solicitude which you express
in Mr Murray's name and your own respecting this work, for
which you have granted your bills—I think it, on the contrary,
natural and unavoidable.
This matter has taught me a lesson which I will not forget
which is, never to give my own conviction for that of others.
In place, therefore, of saying what / think upon the subject, I
shall tell you what the author says to me. He says, then, that
I shall have the first vol. in my hands by the end of August,
and that the whole work will, as he all along said, be ready for
publication by Christmas. This I say for him : I will pledge
myself no longer.
This clever assumption of a grievance in his own
innocent person, and candid incapacity to answer for
another unaccountable individual, is a very good ex-
ample of Scott's Aldiborontophoscophornio, the genial
vassal ready to serve his principal's eccentricities even
by blaming him when needful, with uplifted hands and
eyes of regret and wonder.
—
" This matter has taught
me a lesson which I will not forget " ! Plausible as
it all was, however, it did not satisfy Mr Blackwood,
and there would seem to have been in the beginning
of August a conversation of the most important kind
between the impatient publisher and the slippery