d, till latterly, his
books rarely languished. But his writing was very poor in strictly
literary merit, his style was at best bustling prose melodrama, and his
characters were scarcely ever alive.

The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in "Scotch" novels--for Miss
Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen,
was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and _Marriage_ was mainly
written before _Waverley_--was John Galt, who also has some claim to
priority. He was born (2nd May 1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of
his best work, but passed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was
a retired West India captain; and Galt's biographers do not make it very
clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and
enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and
varied life. He had entered the Custom-house; but went to London in
1804, and tried literature in many forms, and for the most part with
very little success. While travelling in the Levant he met Byron, of
whom long afterwards he published a rather absurd life; and after his
return home his _Ayrshire Legatees_ found welcome and popularity in
_Blackwood_. This was in 1821, and after five years' busy writing Galt
went to Canada in charge of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce
called the Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down
completely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed incessantly. But
fortune was not kind to him; and he died, in a way a broken man, at
Greenock on 11th April 1839.

Galt, though with some of the national characteristics which have not
always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been a person of worth
and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a very uncommon thing; and
from Carlyle, whom he met when they were both on the staff of _Fraser_,
he receives unwontedly amiable notice. His literary production was vast
and totally uncritical; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly
worthless, his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his
historical novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a
special walk--the delineation of the small humours and ways of his
native town and county--in which, if not exactly supreme, he has seldom
been equalled. The _Ayrshire Legatees_ is in main scheme a pretty direct
and not very brilliant following of _Humphrey Clinker_; but the letters
of the worthy family who visit London are read in a home circle which