There is not much to be told about him; his life does not matter to my purpose. John Galt was one of the sons of a sea-captain, in the West India trade, and was born on May 2, 1779, at Irvine in Ayrshire. When he was ten years old the family moved to Greenock, where the boy had his schooling and became a clerk in the Custom House. At five and twenty he carried himself and an epic poem to London, in quest of literary fame. The epic, on the Battle of Largs, he had printed, but it did not establish his repute as a poet, and, to judge by the specimens I have read, the indifference of the public was not a malicious affectation. Later on he produced half a dozen dramas, which deserved, and met with, as much success as the epic. Falling into bad health he made a tour through the Mediterranean and Levant, and had Byron and Hobhouse for fellow-travellers during a part of it. In the Autobiography he does not heap flattery on either ‘Orestes or Pylades’: perhaps, though he does not confess it, he extracted from his brother poet an opinion on his own muse. His experiences of travel were given to the world in _Letters from the Levant_, and the book was by no means a failure, and is much easier reading than the Autobiography. In 1820 appeared, in _Blackwood_, _The Ayrshire Legatees_: and in it he first showed the real power that was in him. It has been reprinted in recent years and can easily be read, and should be read by every one. The book has the rather tiresome form of letters: and the letters of the young lady and young gentleman are not always particularly entertaining: those of Dr. Pringle and his wife are invariably excellent. None better of the sort exist anywhere in fiction. It is astounding that a man of genius, whose fiction is so extraordinarily real, could, when writing of his own real life, make it inhumanly dull and artificial. In the Autobiography there is nothing quaint, and nothing witty: Dr. and Mrs. Pringle are inimitably quaint and funny. It would seem that when Galt looked at life, at men and manners, and things, through imaginary eyes he could see everything there was to be seen, and see it in a light intensely simple and vivid and real: that when he looked at anything through his own eyes he saw nothing at all. The doctor and Mrs. Pringle are indispensable to all readers who love dear oddities, and they are Galt’s very own: you shall not find them anywhere else. He borrowed them nowhere, but made them himself in a jocund humour of affectionate creation.