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.
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