ighest pinnacles of
literature; and the author is so far fortunate in having incurred his
censure, that it gives his modesty a decent apology for quoting the
praise, which it would have ill-befited him to bring forward in an
unmingled state. The passage occurs in the EDINBURGH REVIEW, No. 55,
containing a criticism on IVANHOE:--

"There is too much, perhaps, of Dalgetty,--or, rather, he engrosses
too great a proportion of the work,--for, in himself, we think he is
uniformly entertaining;--and the author has nowhere shown more affinity
to that matchless spirit who could bring out his Falstaffs and his
Pistols, in act after act, and play after play, and exercise them every
time with scenes of unbounded loquacity, without either exhausting their
humour, or varying a note from its characteristic tone, than in his
large and reiterated specimens of the eloquence of the redoubted
Ritt-master. The general idea of the character is familiar to our comic
dramatists after the Restoration--and may be said in some measure to
be compounded of Captain Fluellen and Bobadil;--but the
ludicrous combination of the SOLDADO with the Divinity student of
Mareschal-College, is entirely original; and the mixture of talent,
selfishness, courage, coarseness, and conceit, was never so happily
exemplified. Numerous as his speeches are, there is not one that is not
characteristic--and, to our taste, divertingly ludicrous."

POSTSCRIPT.

While these pages were passing through the press, the author received
a letter from the present Robert Stewart of Ardvoirlich, favouring him
with the account of the unhappy slaughter of Lord Kilpont, differing
from, and more probable than, that given by Bishop Wishart, whose
narrative infers either insanity or the blackest treachery on the part
of James Stewart of Ardvoirlich, the ancestor of the present family of
that name. It is but fair to give the entire communication as received
from my respected correspondent, which is more minute than the histories
of the period.

"Although I have not the honour of being personally known to you, I hope
you will excuse the liberty I now take, in addressing you on the subject
of a transaction more than once alluded to by you, in which an ancestor
of mine was unhappily concerned. I allude to the slaughter of Lord
Kilpont, son of the Earl of Airth and Monteith, in 1644, by James
Stewart of Ardvoirlich. As the cause of this unhappy event, and the
quarrel which led to it, have