Incidentally there should here be mentioned another edition of Scott's William and Helen, especially because of indirect consequences in Scott's life. In 1799, on a visit to Rosebank, James Ballantyne called upon Scott, and the latter suggested Ballantyne's printing of books along with his newspaper. Scott said:
"You had better try what you can do. You have been praising my little ballads; suppose you print off a dozen copies or so of as many as will make a pamphlet, sufficient to let my Edinburgh acquaintances judge of your skill for themselves." Ballantyne assented; and I believe exactly twelve copies of William and Ellen, The Fire-King, The Chase, and a few more of those pieces were thrown off accordingly, with the title (alluding to the long delay of Lewis's collection) of "Apology for Tales of Terror—1799."[1]
This second printing of Scott's William and Helen is now one of the rarest of books. Yet it was to have an indirect effect upon Scott's whole after life, thus linking inextricably, though so disastrously, his earliest with his latest endeavors as a literary artist.
It is needless to say that Scott was the only one of these five translators of Bürger's Lenore to attain considerable fame as a poet, and even he withdrew from the poetic field as he began to succeed in prose fiction. Nor can it be said that this, his first poem to be printed, greatly encouraged him to give his life to writing verse. It was nine years before The Lay of the Last Minstrel delighted English readers. Yet the flattering reception of William and Helen by his friends, and the interviews with the popular author of The Monk, indirectly resulting from it, clearly had their influence on the shy Scotch advocate, the Sir Walter Scott who was to be.
VII. Summary and Influence.
We are now in a position to understand in detail the reason why the German tributary to English romanticism, as Professor Beers calls it, overflowed in five translations and seven versions of Bürger's Lenore during the single year 1796. The interest in Bürger, at least on the part of several, was clearly earlier than that year. William Taylor and Mr. J. T. Stanley had come to appreciate German literature from residence in Germany as early as
- ↑ Lockhart's Life, ch. IX (I, 275). The imprint was Kelso. The similarity of title to that first proposed by Lewis for his Tales of Wonder, and the fact that most of the pieces were reprinted in that work in 1801, have given rise, I believe, to the long-accepted idea that Lewis printed Tales of Wonder at Kelso in 1799. I shall deal with that subject in another place.
