(a) From The Edinburgh Literary Journal; or, Weekly Register of Criticism and Belles Lettres 5.131 (14 May 1831), pp. 305–7.

[In Galt’s] novels—from the Ayrshire Legatees down to Bogle Corbet—you find the most unequivocal traces of original and nervous genius. His range is narrow—it is almost exclusively confined to the manufacturing districts of the west of Scotland, and to the present century. His characters are parish ministers, weavers, and master-manufacturers, bonnet-lairds, provosts of small burghs, and maiden ladies living upon small annuities. He narrates the history of these individuals with quiet sly humour. Like the Dutch painters, he represents the whole by painfully and minutely finishing each detail; and, like the same meritorious class of artists, he not infrequently emits flashes of intensest energy. His language is akin to his subjects; it is a strange mixture of burlesque and impressive earnestness. It is quaint, sometimes ludicrous, always powerful.

It is amazing what Galt has contrived to elicit out of the seemingly barren field which he has selected for the scene of his own especial labours. By close and anxious scrutiny, he has enabled himself to trace the currents of human passion, where they run, like the waters of Styria, in subterraneous channels, beneath a barren and stony surface. He shows us the desolating workings of ambition, self-will, and malignity—not in the deeds of arms, and dark excesses of feudal chiefs, or warlike monarchs, but in the even, pertinacious, onward course of the law-conforming, money-making merchant. […]