offered to review the Tales in the “Quarterly.” His true reason for this step was the wish to reply to Dr. Thomas McCrie, author of the “Life of John Knox,” who had been criticising Scott’s historical view of the Covenant, in the       “Edinburgh Christian Instructor.” Scott had, perhaps, no better mode of answering his censor. He was indifferent to reviews, but here his historical knowledge and his candour had been challenged. Scott always recognised the national spirit of the Covenanters, which he remarks on in       “The Heart of Mid-Lothian,” and now he was treated as a faithless Scotsman. For these reasons he reviewed himself; but it is probable, as Lockhart says, that William Erskine wrote the literary or aesthetic part of the criticism (Lockhart, v.174, note).     

       Dr. McCrie’s review may be read, or at least may be found, in the fourth volume of his collected works (Blackwood, Edinburgh 1857). The critique amounts to about eighty-five thousand words. Since the “Princesse de Cleves” was reviewed in a book as long as the original, never was so lengthy a criticism. As Dr. McCrie’s performance scarcely shares the popularity of “Old Mortality,” a note on his ideas may not be superfluous, though space does not permit a complete statement of his many objections. The Doctor begins by remarks on novels in general, then descends to the earlier Waverley romances. “The Antiquary” he pronounces to be “tame and fatiguing.” Acknowledging the merits of the others, he finds fault with       “the foolish lines” (from Burns), “which must have been foisted without the author’s knowledge into the title page,” and he denounces the “bad taste” of the quotation from “Don Quixote.” Burns and Cervantes had done no harm to Dr. McCrie, but his anger was aroused, and he, like the McCallum More as described by Andrew Fairservice, “got up wi’ an unco’       bang, and garr’d them a’ look about them.” The view of the Covenanters is       “false and distorted.” These worthies are not to be “abused with profane wit or low buffoonery.” “Prayers were not read in the parish churches of Scotland” at that time. As Episcopacy was restored when Charles II. returned “upon the unanimous petition of the Scottish Parliament” (Scott’s Collected Works, vol. xix. p. 78) it is not unnatural for the general reader to suppose that prayers would be read by the curates. Dr. McCrie maintains that “at the Restoration neither the one nor the other” (neither the Scotch nor English Prayer Books) “was imposed,” and that the Presbyterians repeatedly “admitted they had 

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