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