Introduction - Page 2

out of each other's hands, and talking of nothing else." She preferred it to all but "Waverley," and congratulates him on having made "the perfectly good character the most interesting. . . . Had this very story been conducted by a common hand, Effie would have attracted all our concern and sympathy, Jeanie only cold approbation. Whereas Jeanie, without youth, beauty, genius, warns passions, or any other novel-perfection, is here our object from beginning to end." Lady Louisa, with her usual frankness, finds the Edinburgh lawyers tedious, in the introduction, and thinks that Mr. Saddletree "will not entertain English readers." The conclusion "flags"; "but the chief fault I have to find relates to the reappearance and shocking fate of the boy. I hear on all sides 'Oh, I do not like that!' I cannot say what I would have had instead, but I do not like it either; it is a lame, huddled conclusion. I know you so well in it, by-the-by! You grow tired yourself, want to get rid of the story, and hardly care how." Lady Lousia adds that Sir George Staunton would never have hazarded himself in the streets of Edinburgh. "The end of poor Madge Wildfire is most pathetic. The meeting at Muschat's Cairn tremendous. Dumbiedikes and Rory Beau are delightful. . . . I dare swear many of your readers never heard of the Duke of Argyle before." She ends: "If I had known nothing, and the whole world had told me the contrary, I should have found you out in that one parenthesis, 'for the man was mortal, and had been a schoolmaster.'"

Lady Louisa omits a character who was probably as essential to Scott's scheme as any--Douce Davie Deans, the old Cameronian. He had almost been annoyed by the criticism of his Covenanters in "Old Mortality," "the heavy artillery out of the Christian Instructor or some such obscure field work," and was determined to "tickle off" another. There are signs of a war between literary Cavaliers and literary Covenanters at this time, after the discharge of Dr. McCrie's "heavy artillery." Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe was presented by Surtees of Mainsforth with a manuscript of Kirkton's unprinted "History of the Church of Scotland." This he set forth to edite, with the determination not to "let the Whig dogs have the best of it." Every Covenanting scandal and absurdity, such as the old story of Mess David Williamson--"Dainty Davie"--and his remarkable prowess, and presence of mind at Cherrytrees, was raked up, and inserted in notes to Kirkton. Scott was Sharpe's ally in this enterprise. "I had in the persons of my forbears a full share, you see, of religious persecution . . . for all my greatgrandfathers were under the ban, and I think there were hardly two of them out of jail at once." "I think it would be most scandalous to let the godly carry it oft thus." "It" seems