"[31] That passage gives
precisely the kind of estimation in which John Ballantyne was held
both by Scott and Constable. And yet it was to him that Scott
entrusted the dangerous and difficult duty of setting up a new
publishing house as a rival to the best publishers of the day. No
doubt Scott really relied on his own judgment for working the
publishing house. But except where his own books were concerned, no
judgment could have been worse. In the first place he was always
wanting to do literary jobs for a friend, and so advised the
publishing of all sorts of unsaleable books, because his friends
desired to write them. In the next place, he was a genuine historian,
and one of the antiquarian kind himself; he was himself really
interested in all sorts of historical and antiquarian issues,--and
very mistakenly gave the public credit for wishing to know what he
himself wished to know. I should add that Scott's good nature and
kindness of heart not only led him to help on many books which he knew
in himself could never answer, and some which, as he well knew, would
be altogether worthless, but that it greatly biassed his own
intellectual judgment.
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