[242] Quarterly Review, No. 66:  Lockhart’s review of Sheridan’s Life.

[243] It is interesting to read what James Ballantyne has recorded on this subject.—­“Sir Walter at all times laboured under the strangest delusion, as to the merits of his own works.  On this score he was not only inaccessible to compliments, but even insensible to the truth; in fact, at all times, he hated to talk of any of his productions; as, for instance, he greatly preferred Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein to any of his own romances.  I remember one day, when Mr. Erskine and I were dining with him, either immediately before or immediately after the publication of one of the best of the latter, and were giving it the high praise we thought it deserved, he asked us abruptly whether we had read Frankenstein.  We answered that we had not.  ‘Ah,’ he said, ’have patience, read Frankenstein, and you will be better able to judge of——.’  You will easily judge of the disappointment thus prepared for us.  When I ventured, as I sometimes did, to press him on the score of the reputation he had gained, he merely asked, as if he determined to be done with the discussion, ’Why, what is the value of a reputation which probably will not last above one or two generations?’ One morning, I recollect, I went into his library, shortly after the publication of the Lady of the Lake, and finding Miss Scott there, who was then a very young girl, I asked her, ’Well, Miss Sophia, how do you like the Lady of the Lake, with which everybody is so much enchanted?’ Her answer was, with affecting simplicity, ’Oh, I have not read it.  Papa says there’s nothing so bad for young girls as reading bad poetry.’  Yet he could not be said to be hostile to compliments in the abstract—­nothing was so easy as to flatter him about a farm or a field, and his manner on such an occasion plainly showed that he was really open to such a compliment, and liked it.  In fact, I can recall only one instance in which he was fairly cheated into pleasure by a tribute paid to his literary merit, and it was a striking one.  Somewhere betwixt two and three years ago I was dining at the Rev. Dr. Brunton’s, with a large and accomplished party, of whom Dr. Chalmers was one.  The conversation turned upon Sir Walter Scott’s romances generally, and the course of it led me very shortly afterwards to call on Sir Walter, and address him as follows—­I knew the task was a bold one, but I thought I saw that I should get well through it—­’Well, Sir Walter,’ I said, ’I was dining yesterday, where your works became the subject of very copious conversation.’  His countenance immediately became overcast—­and his answer was, ’Well, I think, I must say your party might have been better employed.’  ’I knew it would be your answer,’—­the conversation continued,—­’nor would I have mentioned it, but that Dr. Chalmers was present, and was by far the most decided in his expressions of pleasure and admiration of any of the party.’