The magnificent quarto edition of 750 copies was
soon exhausted, and an octavo edition of 1500 copies was sold out
within the year. In the following year two editions, containing
together 4250 copies, were disposed of, and before twenty-five years
had elapsed, that is, before 1830, 44,000 copies of the poem had been
bought by the public in this country, taking account of the legitimate
trade alone. Scott gained in all by _The Lay_ 769_l._, an
unprecedented sum in those times for an author to obtain from any
poem. Little more than half a century before, Johnson received but
fifteen guineas for his stately poem on _The Vanity of Human Wishes_,
and but ten guineas for his _London_. I do not say that Scott's poem
had not much more in it of true poetic fire, though Scott himself, I
believe, preferred these poems of Johnson's to anything that he
himself ever wrote. But the disproportion in the reward was certainly
enormous, and yet what Scott gained by his _Lay_ was of course much
less than he gained by any of his subsequent poems of equal, or
anything like equal, length.
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