(a) p. 17. Norna’s soothsaying. The passage quoted by Scott from the Saga of Eric the Red may be read in its context in “Vinland the Good,” edited by Mr. Reeves, and published by the Clarendon Press. Eric was the discoverer of Greenland, and father of Leif the Lucky, who found Vinland (New England, or Nova Scotia?) about the year 1002. Leif has a statue in Boston, Massachusetts.(b) p. 35. Islands “supposed to be haunted.” In De Quincey’s autobiographical essay his sailor brother, Pink, describes the terrors of those isles. One of them, the noise of a Midnight Axe, is also found in Ceylon, in Mexico, and elsewhere. The Editor may be permitted to refer to the legends collected in his “Custom and Myth.”(c) p. 47. Cleveland’s song. Lockhart says that Scott, in his later years, heard this song sung, and said, “‘Capital words! Whose are they? Byron’s, I suppose, but I don’t remember them.’ He was astonished when I told him that they were his own in ‘The Pirate.’ He seemed pleased at the moment, but said next minute, ‘You have distressed me—if memory goes all is up with me, for that was always my strong point.’” This was in 1828. Mrs. Arkwright was the daughter of Stephen Kemble. She set “Hohenlinden.”(d) p. 86. “Auld Robin Gray.” In the Abbotsford MSS. is a long correspondence between Lady Ann Lindsay and Scott. She had known him as a child. There was a project of editing all her poems, but perhaps her own modesty, perhaps the quality of the work, caused this to be dropped, and Scott only edited the ballad, with a letter of the lady’s. This small quarto sells for some £5 when it comes into the market. It has a frontispiece by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and is apparently the only book of Scott’s which is valued as a rarity by bibliomaniacs.(e) p. 255. “John was a Jacobite.” In the library of a country house in the south of England is a copy of Dryden’s Miscellany Poems, with a laudatory autograph envoy to Judge Jeffreys, a sufficiently thoroughgoing King’s man.

Andrew Lang.

August 1893.