the only companion of his cell, that used to sing to him while he talked and whistled to it all day long.  With this performance Scott was always delighted.  Nothing could be richer than the contrast of the bird’s wild, sweet notes, some of which he imitated with wonderful skill, and the accompaniment of the cobbler’s hoarse, cracked voice, uttering all manner of endearing epithets, which Johnny multiplied and varied in a style worthy of the old women in Rabelais at the birth of Pantagruel."[31] That passage gives precisely the kind of estimation in which John Ballantyne was held both by Scott and Constable.  And yet it was to him that Scott entrusted the dangerous and difficult duty of setting up a new publishing house as a rival to the best publishers of the day.  No doubt Scott really relied on his own judgment for working the publishing house.  But except where his own books were concerned, no judgment could have been worse.  In the first place he was always wanting to do literary jobs for a friend, and so advised the publishing of all sorts of unsaleable books, because his friends desired to write them.  In the next place, he was a genuine historian, and one of the antiquarian kind himself; he was himself really interested in all sorts of historical and antiquarian issues,—­and very mistakenly gave the public credit for wishing to know what he himself wished to know.  I should add that Scott’s good nature and kindness of heart not only led him to help on many books which he knew in himself could never answer, and some which, as he well knew, would be altogether worthless, but that it greatly biassed his own intellectual judgment.  Nothing can be plainer than that he really held his intimate friend, Joanna Baillie, a very great dramatic poet, a much greater poet than himself, for instance; one fit to be even mentioned as following—­at a distance—­in the track of Shakespeare.  He supposes Erskine to exhort him thus:—­

    “Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
    Restore the ancient tragic line,
    And emulate the notes that rung
    From the wild harp which silent hung
    By silver Avon’s holy shore,
    Till twice a hundred years roll’d o’er,—­
    When she, the bold enchantress, came
    With fearless hand and heart on flame,
    From the pale willow snatch’d the treasure,
    And swept it with a kindred measure,
    Till Avon’s swans, while rung the grove
    With Montfort’s hate and Basil’s love,
    Awakening at the inspired strain,
    Deem’d their own Shakespeare lived again.”

Avon’s swans must have been Avon’s geese, I think, if they had deemed anything of the kind.  Joanna Baillie’s dramas are “nice,” and rather dull; now and then she can write a song with the ease and sweetness that suggest Shakespearian echoes.  But Scott’s judgment was obviously blinded by his just and warm regard for Joanna Baillie herself.