But to come again to our Chaldee Manuscript, the correspondent says concerning Hogg’s claim to its authorship: “There is a bouncer!--The Chaldee Manuscript!--Why, no more did he write the Chaldee Manuscript than the five books of Moses.... I presume that Mr. Hogg is also the author of Waverley.--He may say so if he chooses.... It must be a delightful thing to have such fancies as these in one’s noodle;--but on the subject of the Chaldee Manuscript, let me now speak the truth. You yourself, Kit ... and myself, Blackwood and a reverend gentleman of this city alone know the perpetrator. It was the same person who murdered Begbie!”--Begbie, by the way, was a bank porter, whose murder was one of the never solved mysteries of Edinburgh. “It was a disease with him to excite 'public emotion’. With respect to his murdering Begbie ... all at once it entered his brain, that, by putting him to death in a sharp and clever and mysterious manner ... the city of Edinburgh would be thrown into a ferment of consternation, and there would be no end of ‘public emotion’.... The scheme succeeded to a miracle.... Mr. ---- wrote the Chaldee Manuscript precisely on the same principle.... It was the last work of the kind of which I have been speaking, that he lived to finish. He confessed it and the murder the day before he died, to the gentleman specified, and was sufficiently penitent.... “After this plain statement, Hogg must look extremely foolish. We shall next have him claiming the murder, likewise, I suppose; but he is totally incapable of either.”[77] [77] Ibid., V. x, p. 49-50