Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of _Fraser_, he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a special walk--the delineation of the small humours and ways of his native town and county--in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom been equalled. The _Ayrshire Legatees_ is in main scheme a pretty direct and not very brilliant following of _Humphrey Clinker_; but the letters of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which shows Galt's peculiar talent. It is shown better still in his next published work, _The Annals of the Parish_, which is said to have been written long before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected by the publishers because "_Scotch_ novels could not pay." It is not exactly a novel, being literally what its title holds out--the annals of a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, a Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose description of himself and parishioners is always good, and at times charming. _Sir Andrew Wylie_ (a fantastic book of much good fun and much good feeling), _The Entail_, and _The Provost_ (the last two sometimes ranked next to the _Annals_), followed rapidly, and are all good in a way which has been oddly revived of late years by some of our most popular novelists. A better writer than Galt, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir ("Delta"), another _Blackwood_ man, whose chief single performance is _Mansie Wauch_, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and essays, with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very agreeable mixture of serious and comic power.