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.

For, in truth, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, while it has all
Hogg's merits and more, is quite astoundingly free from his defects. His
tales are generally innocent of the most rudimentary notions of
construction: this goes closely ordered, with a few pardonable enough
digressions, from beginning to end. He has usually little concentrated
grasp of character: the few personages of the _Confessions_ are
consistent throughout. His dialogue is, as a rule, extraordinarily
slipshod and unequal: here there is no fault to find with it. His
greatest lack, in short, is the lack of form: and here, though the story
might perhaps have been curtailed, or rather "cut" in the middle, with
advantage, the form is excellent. As its original edition, though an
agreeable volume, is rare, and its later ones are buried amidst
discordant rubbish, it may not be improper to give some account of it.
The time is pitched just about the Revolution and the years following,
and, according to a common if not altogether praiseworthy custom, the
story consists of an editor's narrative and of the _Confessions_ proper
imbedded therein. The narrative tells how a drinking Royalist laird
married an exceedingly precise young woman, how the dissension which was
probable broke out between them, how a certain divine, the Reverend
Robert Wringhim, endeavoured to convert the sinner at the instances of
the saint, and perhaps succeeded in consoling the saint at the expense
of the sinner; h