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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 have been saved from himself? and who saved him?–for that great part of the book at least is his there can be no doubt.

By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart’s name actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg’s literary allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of Peter’s Letters hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes him in his Autobiography as “a warm and disinterested friend.” He tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this, that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd’s) works, for discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the vein of the Confessions is very closely akin to, if not wholly identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of “Adam Blair” (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and “Matthew Wald,” which is itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very different kind, as the Confessions themselves. That editing, and perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart’s part would have been exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd’s disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified Sinner–to give Hogg’s loose though by no means vulgar style the dress of his own polished manner–to weed and shape and correct and straighten the faults of the Boar of the Forest–nobody who knows the undoubted writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote that the Shepherd’s views of literary morality were peculiar. As for Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed perhaps with something of the habit of literary supercherie which the society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least as any one of its members.