24 July.

...  I had just proceeded thus far when your kind favour of the 21st reached Abbotsford.  I am heartily glad you continued to like Waverley to the end.  The hero is a sneaking piece of imbecility; and if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski’s wife used to do with him.  I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, buccaneers, Highland robbers, and all others of a Robin-Hood description.  I do not know why it should be, as I am myself, like Hamlet, indifferent honest; but I suppose the blood of the old cattle-drivers of Teviotdale continues to stir in my veins.

TO THE SAME

Acceptance of a baronetcy

Edinburgh, 7 Dec., 1818.

MY DEAR MORRITT,

...  There is another thing I have to whisper in your faithful ear.  Our fat friend being desirous to honour Literature in my unworthy person, has intimated to me, by his organ the Doctor, that, with consent ample and unanimous of all the potential voices of all his ministers, each more happy than another of course on so joyful an occasion, he proposes to dub me Baronet.  It would be easy saying a parcel of fine things about my contempt of rank, and so forth; but although I would not have gone a step out of my way to have asked, or bought, or begged, or borrowed a distinction, which to me personally will rather be inconvenient than otherwise, yet, coming as it does directly from the source of feudal honours, and as an honour, I am really gratified with it;—­especially as it is intimated, that it is his Royal Highness’s pleasure to heat the oven for me expressly, without waiting till he has some new batch of Baronets ready in dough.  In plain English, I am to be gazetted per se.  My poor friend Carpenter’s bequest to my family has taken away a certain degree of impecuniosity, a necessity of saving cheese-parings and candle-ends, which always looks inconsistent with any little pretension to rank.  But as things now stand, Advance banners in the name of God and St. Andrew.  Remember, I anticipate the jest, ’I like not such grinning honours, as Sir Walter hath.’  After all, if one must speak for themselves, I have my quarters and emblazonments, free of all stain but Border theft and High Treason, which I hope are gentleman-like crimes; and I hope Sir Walter Scott will not sound worse than Sir Humphry Davy, though my merits are as much under his, in point of utility, as can well be imagined.  But a name is something, and mine is the better of the two.  Set down this flourish to the account of national and provincial pride, for you must know we have more Messieurs de Sotenville in our Border counties than anywhere else in the Lowlands—­I cannot say for the Highlands.

TO LORD MONTAGU