the
forthcoming chronicle of the House of 'Ebony'; but it is told with fair
detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives.

Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the
historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the _Edinburgh Annual
Register_, yet the two _Tales_ were ready in November, and appeared on
the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must
be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and
received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as
an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of
falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure
you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were
printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and
means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary
magician, could read a _volume_ (which in the usual parlance means a
printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott
offered to review himself in the _Quarterly_, which he did. I certainly
do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as
sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults
and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate
state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what
the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one
out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke
than anything else.

Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first
foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned,
if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture
of the Covenanters given in _Old Mortality_. No one who knows the
documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of
view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's
humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find
quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron,
and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical
novel, it is a far greater one than _Waverley_. Drumclog, the siege of
Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved
from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But
greater than any of these single th