On calling at Ballantyne's, I find, as I had anticipated, that your copy, being of royal size, requires some particular nicety in hot-pressing. It will be sent by the Carlisle mail _quam primum_.--Ever yours,
P. S.--Love to Mrs. Morritt. John Ballantyne says he has just about eighty copies left, out of 3250, this being the second day of publication, and the book a two-guinea one.
It will surprise no one to hear that Mr. Morritt assured his friend he considered Rokeby as the best of all his poems. The admirable, perhaps the unique fidelity of the local descriptions, might alone have swayed, for I will not say it perverted, the judgment of the lord of that beautiful and thenceforth classical domain; and, indeed, I must admit that I never understood or appreciated half the charm of this poem until I had become familiar with its scenery. But Scott himself had not designed to rest his strength on these descriptions. He said to James Ballantyne while the work was in progress (September 2), "I hope the thing will do, chiefly because the world will not expect from _me_ a poem of which the interest turns upon _character_;" and in another letter (October 28, 1812), "I think you will see the same sort of difference taken in all my former poems,--of which I would say, if it is fair for me to say anything, that the force in the Lay is thrown on style--in Marmion, on description--and in The Lady of the Lake, on incident."[15] I suspect some of these distinctions may have been matters of afterthought; but as to Rokeby, there can be no mistake. His own original conceptions of some of its principal characters have been explained in letters already cited; and I believe no one who compares the poem with his novels will doubt that, had he undertaken their portraiture in prose, they would have come forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups he ever created. As it is, I question whether even in his prose there is anything more exquisitely wrought out, as well as fancied, than the whole contrast of the two rivals for the love of the heroine in Rokeby; and that heroine herself, too, has a very particular interest attached to her. Writing to Miss Edgeworth five years after this time (10th May, 1818), he says, "I have not read one of my poems since they were printed, excepting last year The Lady of the Lake, which I liked better than I expected, but not well enough to induce me to go through the rest--so I may truly say with Macbeth--