London, to get him to use his influence with manager Raymond, in favour of one of his plays. "We are old fellow-travellers," wTOte Byron of him, "and with all his eccentricities he has much strong sense, experience of the world, and is, as far as I have seen, a good-natured, philosophical fellow." On his return from the continent he married a daughter of Dr. Tilloch, the editor of the Philosophical Magazine, and proprietor of the Star newspaper, on the staff of which he was placed. He next produced his Life and Administration of Cardinal Wolsey (1812, 4to), and his Reflections on Political and Commercial Subjects (1812, 8vo). In the same year he wrote a volume of Tragedies ("Maddalen," "Agamemnon," "Lady Macbeth," "Antonia," and "Clytemnestra)," which Sir Walter Scott pronounced "the worst ever seen"; and he followed this by his Life and Studies of Benjamin West (1816, 8vo). He edited the New British Theatre, and produced for it sundry contributions; inter alia a tragedy of some power, called The Witness. Another tragedy, The Appeal, appeared in 1818.
To some extent, perhaps, dissuaded from poetry and politics by an adverse article in the Quarterly, the literary organ of the party to which he professed to belong, he turned his attention to fiction, and produced the long series of tales, the titles of which with other works, from a pretty complete collection of the original editions before me, I am enabled to give in the interests of bibliography. In 1820, appeared The Earthquake, George III., his Court and Family, and a sort of chronicle, called The Wandering few, published under the pseudonym of Clark; in 1821, Pictures Historical and Biographical, Annals of the Parish, and The Ayrshire Legatees; in 1822, Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk, The Steam-boat, The Provost, and Memoirs of a Life chiefly passed in Pennsylvania; in 1823, The Entail, The Spae-Wife, Ringham Gilhaize, and The Gathering of the West; in 1824, Rothelan, and The Bachelor's Wife, besides a "critical dissertation"' on the tales of Henry Mackenzie, prefixed to an edition of the works of that writer, published by Oliver and Boyd; in 1805, The Omen[1]; in 1826, The Last of the Lairds; in 1830, Southennan, Lawrie Todd, and the Life of Lord Byron; in 1831, The Club-Book, and Lives of the Players; in 1832, The Member, and The Radical; in 1833, Eben Erskine, Stories of the Study, The Stolen Child, Poems, and Autobiography; in 1834, My Literary Life, and Bogle Corbet (without date). In the cultivation of this department of fiction, Gait, like John Wilson, James Hogg and Andrew Picken, was incited by the glory with which it had been invested by Scott, in his Waverley Novels; and his tales of Scottish life, with those strongly individualized characters of now extinct type—the honest "Doctor," and the inimitable "Mr. Pringle," "Sir Andrew Wylie of that Ilk," beau ideal of Scotchmen, "Leddy Grippy," admired of Scott and Byron, and the "Provost," whom Maginn is pleased to style the "first of heroes,"—have possibly salt enough to keep them for awhile. They exhibit, we are forced to admit, no lack of shrewd Scotch humour, pawky sagacity, and occasional pathos; but their humanity, somewhat narrowed and localized by provincialism, is less catholic in its sweep than that which lives and breathes in the immortal fictions of Scott; and they are deficient in those touches of nature which bring the whole world into kinship. The Life of Mansie Wauch,—better than any of them, and of which more anon,—is erroneously attributed to Gait, in the obituary notice in the Gentle-
- ↑ Reviewed by Sir Walter Scott in his Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol, xviii. p. 333, and Blackwoods Magazine, July, 1826.
