Childe Harold

‘Edinburgh, July 2nd, 1812.

My dear Sir,

I have been very silent, partly through pressure of business and partly from idleness and procrastination, but it would be very ungracious to delay returning my thanks for your kindness in transmitting the very flattering particulars of the Prince Regent’s conversation with Lord Byron. I trouble you with a few lines to his Lordship expressive of my thanks for his very handsome and gratifying communication, and I hope he will not consider it as intrusive in a veteran author to pay my debt of gratitude for the high pleasure I have received from the perusal of ‘Childe Harold,’ which is certainly the most original poem which we have had this many a day I owe you best thanks not only for that but for the Calamities of Authors which has all the entertaining and lively features of the curiosities of literature. I am just packing them up with a few other books for my hermitage at Abbotsford where my present parlour is only twelve foot square & my book press in liliputian proportion. . . . . .

Your obliged, humble Servant,

Walter Scott’

Scott thought very highly of Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold”, as he expressed in a letter to publisher John Murray on July 2, 1812.