"[Amongst the persons most pleased here is Lady Charlotte Lindsay. She has the true North humor, and love of humor, and she does enjoy it heartily. They] have, to help [them], an exemplification on two legs in [their] country apothecary, whom you have painted over and over without the honor of knowing him; an old, dry, arguing, prosing, obstinate Scotchman, very shrewd, rather sarcastic, a sturdy Whig and Presbyterian, _tirant un peu sur le démocrate_. Your books are birdlime to him, however; he hovers about the house to obtain a volume when others have done with it. I long to ask him whether Douce Davie was any way _sib_ to him. He acknowledges he would not _now_ go to Muschat's Cairn at night for any money--he had such a horror of it 'sixty years ago' when a laddie. But I am come to the end of my fourth page, and will not tire you with any more scribbling.... "P. S.--If I had known nothing, and the whole world had told me the contrary, I should have found you out in that one parenthesis,--'for the man was mortal, and had been a schoolmaster.'" {p.270} This letter was addressed from a great country house in the south[114]; and may, I presume, be accepted as a fair index of the instantaneous English popularity of Jeanie Deans. From the choice of localities, and the splendid blazoning of tragical circumstances that had left the strongest impression on the memory and imagination of every inhabitant, the reception of this tale in Edinburgh was a scene of all-engrossing enthusiasm, such as I never witnessed there on the appearance of any other literary novelty. But the admiration and delight were the same all over Scotland. Never before had he seized such really noble features of the national character as were canonized in the person of his homely heroine: no art had ever devised a happier running contrast than that of her and her sister, or interwoven a portraiture of lowly manners and simple virtues, with more graceful delineations of polished life, or with bolder shadows of terror, guilt, crime, remorse, madness, and all the agony of the passions. [Footnote 114: [Sheffield Place, the seat of Lord Sheffield, the friend and editor of Gibbon.]] In the introduction and notes to The Heart of Mid-Lothian, drawn up in 1830, we are presented with details concerning the suggestion of the main plot, and the chief historical incidents made use of, to which I can add nothing of any moment.