The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.

XI. Lesser Novelists.

§ 12. Moir’s Mansie Wauch.


David Macbeth Moir wrote for his friend, Galt, the last chapters of a novel, The Last of the Lairds, and was the author of The Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith (1828), a partly satirical, and very amusing, study of humble Scottish character, so shrewdly observed and neatly set down that the reader regrets its interruption by the interpolated romance The Curate of Suverdsio.   15
  The period, as a whole, was productive of no great fiction, and of very little that can be considered first-rate. Neither Scott nor Jane Austen inspired any eminent follower; and the time, in spite of an immense production of romances and novels, did little more than keep the art of fiction alive till the coming of Dickens and of Thackeray.   16