lavished on the re-animation of their stern and solemn enthusiasm. This work has always appeared to me the Marmion of his novels.[53] [Footnote 52: [On reading _The Black Dwarf_, Mrs. Leigh believed her brother 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 single word; but such a word! such an anachronism! Claverhouse says he has no time to hear _sentimental_ speeches. My dear sir! tell Jedediah that Claverhouse never heard the sound of those four syllables in his life.