In respect to the influence of Claverhouse and General Dalzell, the reviewer states that "the author has cruelly falsified history," and relates the actual circumstances in reference to these generals.

"We know little," he says, "that the author can say for himself to excuse these sophistications, and, therefore, may charitably suggest that he was writing a romance, and not a history." In conclusion, the reviewer observed, "We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain trans-Atlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to these volumes than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents.

Yet a critic may be excused seizing upon the nearest suspicious person, on the principle happily expressed by Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow.

He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver who used to hold forth at conventicles.

"I sent to seek the webster (weaver); they brought in his _brother_ for him; though he maybe cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well-principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to the jail with the rest." Mr.Murray seems to have accepted the suggestion and wrote in January 1817 to Mr.Blackwood: "I can assure you, but _in the greatest confidence_, that I have discovered the author of all these Novels to be Thomas Scott, Walter Scott's brother.