r to be the author, and wrote to him
to that effect. Byron had not yet seen the book, and
says in his reply: "I am not P. P. [Peter Pattieson], I
assure you on my honor, and do not understand to what
book you allude, so that all your compliments are quite
thrown away."--Byron's _Letters and Journals_ (1900),
vol. iv. p. 56.]]

[Footnote 53: [Lady Louisa Stuart, whose approbation
Scott writes he values "beyond a whole wilderness of
critics," says in a letter of December 5, 1816:

"[Old Mortality] is super-excellent in all its points;
it breaks up fresh ground, and has all the raciness of
originality. I cannot help thinking it will bear down
the world before it triumphantly. As usual it makes its
personages our intimate acquaintance, and its scenes so
present to the eye, that, last night, after sitting up
unreasonably late over it, I got no sleep, from a kind
of fever of mind it had occasioned. It seemed as if I
had been an eye and ear witness of all the passages, and
I could not lull the agitation into calmness. Mause and
Cuddie hurried my spirits in another way; they forced me
to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does alone. On a
second slower reading I expect to be still better
pleased, and then also I suppose I shall find out the
faults. At present it has, in the Scotch phrase, 'taken
me off my feet,' and I do not criticise, though I think
you will believe me when I say I do not and will not
flatter. One thing I regret, that like the author of
_The Antiquary_, Jedediah did not add a glossary;
because even I, a mongrel, occasionally paying long
visits to Scotland, and hearing Girsy at Bothwell gate
and Peggy Macgowan hold forth in the village,--even I,
thus qualified, have found a great many words absolute
Hebrew to me, and I fear the altogether English will
find many more beyond their comprehension or conjecture.
But this may be remedied in another edition. I have as
yet only one great attack to make, and that upon a