TO MISS SEWARD

The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Edinburgh, 21 March, 1805.

MY DEAR MISS SEWARD,

I am truly happy that you found any amusement in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.  It has great faults, of which no one can be more sensible than I am myself.  Above all, it is deficient in that sort of continuity which a story ought to have, and which, were it to write again, I would endeavour to give it.  But I began and wandered forward, like one in a pleasant country, getting to the top of one hill to see a prospect, and to the bottom of another to enjoy a shade, and what wonder if my course has been devious and desultory, and many of my excursions altogether unprofitable to the advance of my journey.  The Dwarf Page is also an excrescence, and I plead guilty to all the censures concerning him.  The truth is, he has a history, and it is this:  The story of Gilpin Horner was told by an old gentleman to Lady Dalkeith, and she, much diverted with his actually believing so grotesque a tale, insisted that I should make it into a Border ballad.  I don’t know if you ever saw my lovely chieftainess—­if you have, you must be aware that it is impossible for any one to refuse her request, as she has more of the angel in face and temper than any one alive; so that if she had asked me to write a ballad on a broomstick I must have attempted it.  I began a few verses, to be called the Goblin Page; and they lay long by me, till the applause of some friends whose judgement I valued induced me to resume the poem; so on I wrote, knowing no more than the man in the moon how I was to end.  At length the story appeared so uncouth, that I was fain to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel—­lest the nature of it should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old.  In the process of romance the page, intended to be a principal person in the work, contrived (from the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose) to slink downstairs into the kitchen, and now he must e’en abide there.

I mention these circumstances to you, and to any one whose applause I value, because I am unwilling you should suspect me of trifling with the public in malice prepense.  As to the herd of critics, it is impossible for me to pay much attention to them; for, as they do not understand what I call poetry, we talk in a foreign language to each other.  Indeed, many of these gentlemen appear to me to be a sort of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them, and, God knows, often make two holes in patching one.  The sixth canto is altogether redundant; for the poem should certainly have closed with the union of the lovers, when the interest, if any, was at an end.  But what could I do?  I had my book and my page still on my hands, and must get rid of them at all events.