his use of the Lasswade cottage and leased the substantial house of Ashestiel, from Selkirk, sited on the south bank of the River Tweed and incorporating an ancient tower house. At Scott's insistence the first edition of Minstrelsy was printed by his friend James Ballantyne at Kelso. In 1798 James had published Scott's version of Goethe's Erlkönig in his newspaper The Kelso Mail, and in 1799 included it and the two Bürger translations in a privately printed anthology, Apology for Tales of Terror. In 1800 Scott suggested that Ballantyne set up business in Edinburgh and provided a loan for him to make the transition in 1802. In 1805, they became partners in the printing business, and from then until the financial crash of 1826 Scott's works were routinely printed by the firm. Scott was known for his fondness of dogs, and owned several throughout his life. Upon his death, one newspaper noted "of all the great men who have loved dogs no one ever loved them better or understood them more thoroughly". The best known of Scott's dogs were Maida, a large stag hound, and Spice, a Dandle Dinmont terrier described as having asthma, to which Scott gave particular care. In a diary entry written at the height of his financial woes, Scott described dismay at the prospect of having to sell them: "The thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the reflections I have put down". The poet Between 1805 and 1817 Scott produced five long, six-canto narrative poems, four shorter independently published poems, and many small metrical pieces. Scott was by far the most popular poet of the time until Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 and followed them up with his exotic oriental verse narratives. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment". He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.) Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to