In the midst, however, of all this chaotic work, there is still to be found, though misnamed, one of the most remarkable stories of its kind ever written--a story which, as I have said before, is not only extraordinarily good of itself, but insists peremptorily that the reader shall wonder how the devil it got where it is. This is the book now called _The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Fanatic_, but by its proper and original title, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_. Hogg's reference to it in his _Autobiography_ is sufficiently odd. "The next year (1824)," he says, "I published _The Confessions of a Fanatic [Sinner]_, but, it being a story replete with horrors, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it, so it was published anonymously, and of course did not sell very well--so at least I believe, for I do not remember ever receiving anything for it, and I am sure if there had been a reversion [he means return] I should have had a moiety. However I never asked anything, so on that point there was no misunderstanding." And he says nothing more about it, except to inform us that his publishers, Messrs. Longman, who had given him for his two previous books a hundred and fifty pounds each "as soon as the volumes were put to press," and who had published the _Confessions_ on half profits, observed, when his next book was offered to them, that "his last publication (the _Confessions_) had been found fault with in some very material points, and they begged leave to decline the present one until they consulted some other persons." That is all. But the Reverend Thomas Thomson, Hogg's editor, an industrious and not incompetent man of letters, while admitting that it is "in excellence of plot, concentration of language and vigorous language, one of the best and most interesting [he might have said the best without a second] of Hogg's tales," observes that it "alarmed the religious portion of the community who hastily thought that the author was assailing Christianity." "Nothing could be more unfounded," says the Reverend Thomas Thomson with much justice. He might have added that it would have been much more reasonable to suspect the author of practice with the Evil One in order to obtain the power of writing anything so much better than his usual work.