Excerpt from The Poems and Ballads of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 4 of 6
Sir Walter Scott commenced the composition of Rokeby at Abbotsford, on the 15th of September, 1812, and finished it on the last day of the following December.
The reader may be interested in the following extracts from his letters to his friend and printer, Mr. Ballantyne:
"Abbotsford, 28th Oct., 1812.
"Dear James, - I send you to-day better than the third sheet of Canto II., and I trust to send the other three sheets in the course of the week. I expect that you will have three cantos complete before I quit this place - on the 11th of November. Surely, if you do your part, the poem may be out by Christmas; but you must not dawdle over your typographical scruples. I have too much respect for the public to neglect anything in my poem to attract their attention; and you misunderstood me much, when you supposed that I designed any new experiments in point of composition. I only meant to say, that knowing well that the said public will never be pleased with exactly the same thing the second time, I saw the necessity of giving a certain degree of novelty, by throwing the interest more on character than in my former poems, without certainly meaning to exclude either incident or description.
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