“type,” and Scott got him therefore to print his Minstrelsy of the Border, the excellent workmanship of which attracted much attention in London.  In 1802, on Scott’s suggestion, Ballantyne moved to Edinburgh; and to help him to move, Scott, who was already meditating some investment of his little capital in business other than literary, lent him 500l.  Between this and 1805, when Scott first became a partner of Ballantyne’s in the printing business, he used every exertion to get legal and literary printing offered to James Ballantyne, and, according to Mr. Lockhart, the concern “grew and prospered.”  At Whitsuntide, 1805, when The Lay had been published, but before Scott had the least idea of the prospects of gain which mere literature would open to him, he formally, though secretly, joined Ballantyne as a partner in the printing business.  He explains his motives for this step, so far at least as he then recalled them, in a letter written after his misfortunes, in 1826.  “It is easy,” he said, “no doubt for any friend to blame me for entering into connexion with commercial matters at all.  But I wish to know what I could have done better—­excluded from the bar, and then from all profits for six years, by my colleague’s prolonged life.  Literature was not in those days what poor Constable has made it; and with my little capital I was too glad to make commercially the means of supporting my family.  I got but 600_l._ for The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and—­it was a price that made men’s hair stand on end—­1000_l._ for Marmion.  I have been far from suffering by James Ballantyne.  I owe it to him to say, that his difficulties, as well as his advantages, are owing to me.”

This, though a true, was probably a very imperfect account of Scott’s motives.  He ceased practising at the bar, I do not doubt, in great degree from a kind of hurt pride at his ill-success, at a time when he felt during every month more and more confidence in his own powers.  He believed, with some justice, that he understood some of the secrets of popularity in literature, but he had always, till towards the end of his life, the greatest horror of resting on literature alone as his main resource; and he was not a man, nor was Lady Scott a woman, to pinch and live narrowly.  Were it only for his lavish generosity, that kind of life would have been intolerable to him.  Hence, he reflected, that if he could but use his literary instinct to feed some commercial undertaking, managed by a man he could trust, he might gain a considerable percentage on his little capital, without so embarking in commerce as to oblige him either to give up his status as a sheriff, or his official duties as a clerk of session, or his literary undertakings.  In his old schoolfellow, James Ballantyne, he believed he had found just such an agent as he wanted, the requisite link between literary genius like his own, and the world which reads and buys books; and he thought that,