though, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
of narrow intellect--his passion against his brother already excited,
and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination--gliding into
such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones
story of the supernatural.

Now, who wrote it?

No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
not so much as mention it in her _Memorials_, but his various
biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was always trying the supernatural, and
he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
should he on this particular occasion hav