story, based on `a midnight experience' of his own; unluckily he
does not tell us what that experience was. Had he encountered one
of the local ghosts?

`My blood-curdling romance I offered to the editor of Longman's
Magazine, but that misguided person was so ill-advised as to return
it, accompanied with one of these abominable lithographed forms
conveying his hypocritical regrets.' Murray sent a directed
envelope with a twopenny-halfpenny stamp. The paper came back for
three-halfpence by book-post. `I have serious thoughts of sueing
him for the odd penny!' `Why should people be fools enough to read
my rot when they have twenty volumes of Scott at their command?' He
confesses to `a Scott-mania almost as intense as if he were the last
new sensation.' `I was always fond of him, but I am fonder than
ever now.' This plunge into the immortal romances seems really to
have discouraged Murray; at all events he says very little more
about attempts in fiction of his own. `I am a barren rascal,' he
writes, quoting Johnson on Fielding. Like other men, Murray felt
extreme difficulty in writing articles or tales which have an
infinitesimal chance of being accepted. It needs a stout heart to
face this almost fixed certainty of rejection: a man is weakened by
his apprehensions of a lithographed form, and of his old manuscript
coming home to roost, like the Graces of Theocritus, to pine in the
dusty chest where is their chill abode. If the Alexandrian poets
knew this ill-fortune, so do all beginners in letters. There is
nothing for it but `putting a stout heart to a stey brae,' as the
Scotch proverb says. Editors want good work, and on finding a new
man who is good, they greatly rejoice. But it is so difficult to do
vigorous and spontaneous work, as it were, in the dark. Murray had
not, it is probable, the qualities of the novelist, the narrator.