CalvinU/project-gutenberg · Datasets at Hugging Face

book_id int64 19 72.2k	title stringlengths 2 416	sentence string
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	E-text prepared by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	See 44573-h.htm or 44573-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44573/44573-h/44573-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44573/44573-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	See https://archive.org/details/entailorlairdsof1913galt Transcriber's note:
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Text enclosed by tilde characters is in bold face (~bold~).
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	THE ENTAIL by JOHN GALT Oxford:
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Horace Hart Printer to the University [Illustration] THE ENTAIL Or
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Lairds of Grippy by JOHN GALT With an Introduction by John Ayscough
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	[Illustration] Henry Frowde Oxford University Press London, Edinburgh, Glasgow New York, Toronto, Melbourne & Bombay JOHN GALT Born, Irvine, Ayrshire May 2, 1779 Died, Greenock April 11, 1839 _'
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Entail' was first published in 1822.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In 'The World's Classics' it was first published in 1913.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	_ INTRODUCTION For many years I have been wondering why John Galt's works are fallen into such neglect: that they should be almost wholly forgotten, even by readers to whom Scott and Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Miss Edgeworth are indispensable, is what I cannot understand.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	If his Autobiography were not a rare book, an explanation might suggest itself.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	For supposing that the public, before reading _The Entail_, _Annals of the Parish_, or _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Ayrshire Legatees_, had been so unfortunate as to attempt the reading of the Autobiography, no one could be surprised that it made up its mind to read no more of him.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	A more tedious, flat, and dull book was never written by a man of genius: it is never interesting, never amusing, and always exasperating to any one who knows what he could do, and has done.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	To wade through it is very nearly impossible, and there is nothing to be gained by the achievement.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Galt's life was not particularly interesting in itself, but many lives less eventful have been so written as to be worth reading, and easy to read.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	There is, however, little danger of Galt's now losing possible admirers by the unlucky accident of their stumbling on his Autobiography before making his acquaintance in the right way--by reading his really excellent works of fiction: for copies of the Autobiography are not at all easy to come at.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	I suppose they have mostly been burned by his admirers.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	There is not much to be told about him; his life does not matter to my purpose.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	At five and twenty he carried himself and an epic poem to London, in quest of literary fame.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Later on he produced half a dozen dramas, which deserved, and met with, as much success as the epic.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In 1820 appeared, in _Blackwood_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Ayrshire Legatees_: and in it he first showed the real power that was in him.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	It has been reprinted in recent years and can easily be read, and should be read by every one.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	None better of the sort exist anywhere in fiction.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In the Autobiography there is nothing quaint, and nothing witty: Dr. and Mrs. Pringle are inimitably quaint and funny.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	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.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He borrowed them nowhere, but made them himself in a jocund humour of affectionate creation.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In 1821 _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Ayrshire Legatees_ was followed up by the _Annals of the Parish_, which displayed Galt's singular and original genius in fuller perfection.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	That his epic failed, and the _Annals_ marked a literary success, is much to the credit of his contemporaries.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Perhaps if Crabbe had not perversely insisted on being a poet we might have had country tales of his as worthy of immortality as the _Annals of the Parish_.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The book is commonly said to be Galt's masterpiece: which it is not.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	But it is unique and perfect.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	That _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Entail_ is really Galt's masterpiece seems to me clear: nevertheless there are weak parts in it, and the less good chapters are lamentably unequal to the best: whereas the _Annals of the Parish_ has no weak chapters, and the balance of excellence is maintained throughout.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	But there is no story in the _Annals_; and, though it is a long gallery of perfect portraits, it has no characters that can even be compared with Watty and the Leddy o' Grippy.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Where the _Annals_ peculiarly excel is in the rare quality of _charm_:
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	it has no hero, and the central figure is enriched with foibles that do not lean to heroism's side: but they are quaintly attractive, and no one but Galt has given to literature any one like him.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Of pathos Galt is shy in the _Annals_; nowhere is he at all disposed to 'wallow' in it: but he draws reverently near, and moves away as reverently.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Nor is he boisterously funny: his wit is all his own, and it crops up at every corner, but not noisily: it cuts few capers, and has a pawky discretion.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	It is singularly void of malice and haughtiness, and has a Shakespearian humanity and blandness that fails to remind one of Thackeray.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The _Annals of the Parish_ prove that a great writer can make a whole book intensely amusing and extraordinarily amiable: that perfectly clear sight need not be merciless, nor wit remorselessly cruel.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The great and just success of the _Annals of the Parish_ made Galt prolific: and in rapid sequence came _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Sir Andrew Wylie_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Entail_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Steamboat_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Provost_, _Ringan Gilhaize_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Spaewife_, _Rothelan_, and _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Omen_.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Almost all of these are worth reading, and to read them is no trouble: but they are of very unequal merit: and only one of them is worthy of being grouped with _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Ayrshire Legatees_ and the _Annals_.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	_
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Sir Andrew Wylie_ is extremely good, and much of it shows Galt in his best vein.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The more romantic tales, _Ringan Gilhaize_, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Spaewife_, _Rothelan_, and _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Omen_, have the defects of their qualities, and the more Galt submits to those qualities the less we are pleased.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	To be romantic was, perhaps, a pardonable compliance with fashion: but Galt had little to make with romance, and idealism was his easiest road to failure.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	To be Ossianic may have seemed to him a literary duty, but the performance of some duties is hard on the public: as the district-visited might plead, to whom the perfecting of district-visitors appeals less than it ought.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Galt had not a rich imagination; what he possessed in a rare degree was the faculty of representation.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In his works of fiction we find a gallery of portraits of singular variety and perfection: of all of them he had seen the originals.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	When he chose to add characters invented by himself his success was not great.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	It must not, however, be supposed that he could only reproduce with pedestrian fidelity: there can be no doubt that from a mere hint in actual experience he could draw a vivid portrait of absolute and convincing reality.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He himself placed _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Provost_ higher than the _Annals of the Parish_ and _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Ayrshire Legatees_, but no one will agree with him.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Almost the only interesting thing he tells us in the Autobiography is that the _Annals_, though published in 1821, the year following the appearance of _The Ayrshire Legatees_, were written in 1813, and laid aside and forgotten.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Of _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Entail_
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	he tells us little, except that the scene of the storm was introduced to admit of the description of a part of Scotland he had never seen.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He speaks complacently of the praise accorded to that description, but betrays no pride in Watty or the Leddy, whom, indeed, he does not mention.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He has plenty to say about _Ringan Gilhaize_, and evidently believes that the book was not accorded its due proportion of praise; chiefly, it would seem, because the thing he tried to do in it was difficult, and success the more meritorious.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Probably Watty and the Leddy were thoroughly spontaneous, as they are inimitably real, and Galt thought the less of them on that account.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He left England for Canada in 1826, _
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Last of the Lairds_ appearing just before his departure.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Three years later he came back ruined, and set to work again, his pen being as industrious as ever.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	_
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Lawrie Todd_ was followed by _Southennan_, and these two novels by his _Life of Lord Byron_.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In 1839, on April 11, he died at Greenock.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Anthony Trollope injured himself with critics of a certain class by a too frank disclosure of his methods of production: and Galt may well have done his literary reputation harm by his oft-repeated assertion that with him literature was always a secondary interest.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Commerce, he would have us believe, was what came first.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	He never depreciates his own literary work, but he so speaks of it as to tempt others to belittle it: this was not modesty but sheer blundering.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Congreve in his old age was more eager to shine in Voltaire's eyes as a social personage than as a famous dramatist; and Galt appears to have cared more to be regarded as a statistician than as an unequalled master of fiction in his own region of it.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	These perversities in men of genius are not so rare as they are provoking.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	_
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	The Entail_ was published in 1822, and, disregarded as it has long been, its merit was not ignored then.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	Gifford, Mackenzie, Lord Jeffrey, and Sir Walter Scott helped to spread its fame.
44,573	The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy	In January, 1823, 'Christopher North' reviewed it at great length in _Blackwood_, and declared it 'out of all sight the best thing he [Galt] has done'--_The Ayrshire Legatees_ and the _Annals of the Parish_, be it remembered, having already appeared.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

E-text prepared by Henry Flower and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (https://archive.org/details/americana)

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

See 44573-h.htm or 44573-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44573/44573-h/44573-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44573/44573-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

See https://archive.org/details/entailorlairdsof1913galt Transcriber's note:

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Text enclosed by tilde characters is in bold face (~bold~).

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

THE ENTAIL by JOHN GALT Oxford:

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Horace Hart Printer to the University [Illustration] THE ENTAIL Or

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Lairds of Grippy by JOHN GALT With an Introduction by John Ayscough

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

[Illustration] Henry Frowde Oxford University Press London, Edinburgh, Glasgow New York, Toronto, Melbourne & Bombay JOHN GALT Born, Irvine, Ayrshire May 2, 1779 Died, Greenock April 11, 1839 _'

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail' was first published in 1822.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In 'The World's Classics' it was first published in 1913.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

_ INTRODUCTION For many years I have been wondering why John Galt's works are fallen into such neglect: that they should be almost wholly forgotten, even by readers to whom Scott and Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Miss Edgeworth are indispensable, is what I cannot understand.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

If his Autobiography were not a rare book, an explanation might suggest itself.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

For supposing that the public, before reading _The Entail_, _Annals of the Parish_, or _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Ayrshire Legatees_, had been so unfortunate as to attempt the reading of the Autobiography, no one could be surprised that it made up its mind to read no more of him.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

A more tedious, flat, and dull book was never written by a man of genius: it is never interesting, never amusing, and always exasperating to any one who knows what he could do, and has done.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

To wade through it is very nearly impossible, and there is nothing to be gained by the achievement.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Galt's life was not particularly interesting in itself, but many lives less eventful have been so written as to be worth reading, and easy to read.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

There is, however, little danger of Galt's now losing possible admirers by the unlucky accident of their stumbling on his Autobiography before making his acquaintance in the right way--by reading his really excellent works of fiction: for copies of the Autobiography are not at all easy to come at.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

I suppose they have mostly been burned by his admirers.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

There is not much to be told about him; his life does not matter to my purpose.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

At five and twenty he carried himself and an epic poem to London, in quest of literary fame.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Later on he produced half a dozen dramas, which deserved, and met with, as much success as the epic.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In 1820 appeared, in _Blackwood_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Ayrshire Legatees_: and in it he first showed the real power that was in him.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

It has been reprinted in recent years and can easily be read, and should be read by every one.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

None better of the sort exist anywhere in fiction.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In the Autobiography there is nothing quaint, and nothing witty: Dr. and Mrs. Pringle are inimitably quaint and funny.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

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.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He borrowed them nowhere, but made them himself in a jocund humour of affectionate creation.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In 1821 _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Ayrshire Legatees_ was followed up by the _Annals of the Parish_, which displayed Galt's singular and original genius in fuller perfection.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

That his epic failed, and the _Annals_ marked a literary success, is much to the credit of his contemporaries.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Perhaps if Crabbe had not perversely insisted on being a poet we might have had country tales of his as worthy of immortality as the _Annals of the Parish_.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The book is commonly said to be Galt's masterpiece: which it is not.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

But it is unique and perfect.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

That _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail_ is really Galt's masterpiece seems to me clear: nevertheless there are weak parts in it, and the less good chapters are lamentably unequal to the best: whereas the _Annals of the Parish_ has no weak chapters, and the balance of excellence is maintained throughout.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

But there is no story in the _Annals_; and, though it is a long gallery of perfect portraits, it has no characters that can even be compared with Watty and the Leddy o' Grippy.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Where the _Annals_ peculiarly excel is in the rare quality of _charm_:

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

it has no hero, and the central figure is enriched with foibles that do not lean to heroism's side: but they are quaintly attractive, and no one but Galt has given to literature any one like him.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Of pathos Galt is shy in the _Annals_; nowhere is he at all disposed to 'wallow' in it: but he draws reverently near, and moves away as reverently.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Nor is he boisterously funny: his wit is all his own, and it crops up at every corner, but not noisily: it cuts few capers, and has a pawky discretion.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

It is singularly void of malice and haughtiness, and has a Shakespearian humanity and blandness that fails to remind one of Thackeray.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The _Annals of the Parish_ prove that a great writer can make a whole book intensely amusing and extraordinarily amiable: that perfectly clear sight need not be merciless, nor wit remorselessly cruel.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The great and just success of the _Annals of the Parish_ made Galt prolific: and in rapid sequence came _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Sir Andrew Wylie_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Steamboat_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Provost_, _Ringan Gilhaize_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Spaewife_, _Rothelan_, and _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Omen_.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Almost all of these are worth reading, and to read them is no trouble: but they are of very unequal merit: and only one of them is worthy of being grouped with _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Ayrshire Legatees_ and the _Annals_.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

_

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Sir Andrew Wylie_ is extremely good, and much of it shows Galt in his best vein.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The more romantic tales, _Ringan Gilhaize_, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Spaewife_, _Rothelan_, and _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Omen_, have the defects of their qualities, and the more Galt submits to those qualities the less we are pleased.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

To be romantic was, perhaps, a pardonable compliance with fashion: but Galt had little to make with romance, and idealism was his easiest road to failure.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

To be Ossianic may have seemed to him a literary duty, but the performance of some duties is hard on the public: as the district-visited might plead, to whom the perfecting of district-visitors appeals less than it ought.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Galt had not a rich imagination; what he possessed in a rare degree was the faculty of representation.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In his works of fiction we find a gallery of portraits of singular variety and perfection: of all of them he had seen the originals.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

When he chose to add characters invented by himself his success was not great.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

It must not, however, be supposed that he could only reproduce with pedestrian fidelity: there can be no doubt that from a mere hint in actual experience he could draw a vivid portrait of absolute and convincing reality.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He himself placed _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Provost_ higher than the _Annals of the Parish_ and _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Ayrshire Legatees_, but no one will agree with him.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Almost the only interesting thing he tells us in the Autobiography is that the _Annals_, though published in 1821, the year following the appearance of _The Ayrshire Legatees_, were written in 1813, and laid aside and forgotten.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Of _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail_

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

he tells us little, except that the scene of the storm was introduced to admit of the description of a part of Scotland he had never seen.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He speaks complacently of the praise accorded to that description, but betrays no pride in Watty or the Leddy, whom, indeed, he does not mention.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He has plenty to say about _Ringan Gilhaize_, and evidently believes that the book was not accorded its due proportion of praise; chiefly, it would seem, because the thing he tried to do in it was difficult, and success the more meritorious.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Probably Watty and the Leddy were thoroughly spontaneous, as they are inimitably real, and Galt thought the less of them on that account.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He left England for Canada in 1826, _

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Last of the Lairds_ appearing just before his departure.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Three years later he came back ruined, and set to work again, his pen being as industrious as ever.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

_

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Lawrie Todd_ was followed by _Southennan_, and these two novels by his _Life of Lord Byron_.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In 1839, on April 11, he died at Greenock.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Anthony Trollope injured himself with critics of a certain class by a too frank disclosure of his methods of production: and Galt may well have done his literary reputation harm by his oft-repeated assertion that with him literature was always a secondary interest.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Commerce, he would have us believe, was what came first.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

He never depreciates his own literary work, but he so speaks of it as to tempt others to belittle it: this was not modesty but sheer blundering.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Congreve in his old age was more eager to shine in Voltaire's eyes as a social personage than as a famous dramatist; and Galt appears to have cared more to be regarded as a statistician than as an unequalled master of fiction in his own region of it.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

These perversities in men of genius are not so rare as they are provoking.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

_

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail_ was published in 1822, and, disregarded as it has long been, its merit was not ignored then.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

Gifford, Mackenzie, Lord Jeffrey, and Sir Walter Scott helped to spread its fame.

44,573

The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

In January, 1823, 'Christopher North' reviewed it at great length in _Blackwood_, and declared it 'out of all sight the best thing he [Galt] has done'--_The Ayrshire Legatees_ and the _Annals of the Parish_, be it remembered, having already appeared.