If January brought the writer of this letter "disappointment," there was abundant consolation in store for February, 1815. Guy Mannering was received with eager curiosity, and pronounced by acclamation fully worthy to share the honors of Waverley. The easy transparent flow of its style; the beautiful simplicity, and here and there the wild solemn magnificence of its {p.026} sketches of scenery; the rapid, ever heightening interest of the narrative; the unaffected kindliness of feeling, the manly purity of thought, everywhere mingled with a gentle humor and a homely sagacity; but, above all, the rich variety and skilful contrast of characters and manners, at once fresh in fiction, and stamped with the unforgeable seal of truth and nature: these were charms that spoke to every heart and mind; and the few murmurs of pedantic criticism were lost in the voice of general delight, which never fails to welcome the invention that introduces to the sympathy of imagination a new group of immortal realities. The earlier chapters of the present narrative have anticipated much of what I might, perhaps with better judgment, have reserved for this page. Taken together with the author's Introduction and Notes, those anecdotes of his days of youthful wandering must, however, have enabled the reader to trace almost as minutely as he could wish, the sources from which the novelist drew his materials, both of scenery and character; and the Durham Garland, which I print in the Appendix to this volume, exhausts my information concerning the humble groundwork on which fancy reared this delicious romance.[10] [Footnote 10: I leave my text as it stood in the former editions; but since the last of these appeared, a writer in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ (July, 1840) has pointed out some very remarkable coincidences between the narrative of _Guy Mannering_ and the very singular history of James Annesley, claimant in 1743 of the honors and estates of the Earls of Anglesey, in Ireland. That Sir Walter must have read the records of this celebrated trial, as well as Smollett's edition of the story in _Peregrine Pickle_, there can be no doubt. How the circumstance had not recurred to his memory when writing the explanatory Introduction to his Novel, I can offer no conjecture. Very possibly the _Garland_ itself may have been framed after the Annesley trial took place.--(1841.) [The paper in _The Gentleman's Magazine_, referred to above, will be found in the Appendix to this volume.]]