But what offended the Augustan lexicographer and sage delighted the Romantic heart — the impudence of Macpherson’s Ossian was Chatterton’s model, for example, and the wild seas and mountain tops of the Ossianic world were what people now wanted: Goethe’s Werther and Charlotte study Macpherson’s Ossian edition and weep over the ballads; Monk Lewis, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley and Mrs Radcliffe used the turbulence and ancient temples as habitats and habits for their characters — a sublime landscape that also mapped inner states, or souls, from the fear of the maidens in Otranto and Udolpho to Dr Frankenstein himself, putting up a lightning rod in an electrical storm in a bid to bring the dead back to life.

When Macpherson was asked to produce Ossian’s original manuscripts, he obligingly (and laboriously) concocted them. Through forgery and editorializing he brought back to life a dead poet who’d never (perhaps) existed. His probable sources for the myths and legends were the songs, folk tales and apocrypha of rustic recitation — such as were collected, collated and adapted by Scott for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border between 1802 and 1803. Scott’s collaborator was James Hogg. Hogg, a year Scott’s senior, had been born amongst the peasantry of the Ettrick valley. He’d worked most of his life as a shepherd and didn’t read or write until 1794, when he started to try and set down the ballads and pastorals, the winter evening tales, which he had absorbed. He was thus at the centre of the Romantic interest in seeing literature make its way out of the oral tradition to become drafts and printed books. Scott himself was much interested in printing methods and the economics of publishing; so too was Hogg. Robert Wringhim Colwan, towards the end of his career, seeks refuge in a printer’s shop and works as a compositor, where he secretly sets up his memoirs in type. Bound as a book, his confessions will have greater authority and a wider audience — he’s thrilled when ‘I saw what numbers of my works were to go abroad among mankind …’ Unfortunately, the edition is destroyed by fire, save for that set of proofs the antiquarians find in the grave.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner thus filters through to us and is introduced as a combination of chanced-upon manuscript and scholarly apparatus — anything to push it back into the past. The first edition of 1824 even omitted Hogg’s name on the title page. Ten years later he explained, ‘it being a story replete with horrors, after I had written it I durst not venture to put my name to it’. What constitutes the horrors is devil-worship. The book up-ends conventional religious notions; it satirizes the behaviour and aspirations of the devout; it extends the puritanical logic of John Knox to a surreal extreme — so that holiness becomes an ingenious way of justifying slaughter and creating a hell on earth. Over all, the novel is a condemnation of non-benevolent Calvinism — Jean Chauvin (1509-64), or John Calvin, being an influential proponent of predestination: a few of us will be blessed with ‘efficacious grace and the gift of perseverance’ and will enjoy salvation; the rest of us are damned from the outset and no amount of prayers or good offices will protect us from eternal torment. (The biblical authority is John, 10, 26-9: ‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.’)

Being a man who overcame his origins with literacy, Hogg was never going to believe in a doctrine that branded people with original sin and excluded them from achievement. He may have known his place, the Ettrick Shepherd who said he believed in fairies, patronized and indulged by intellectuals like J. G. Lockhart, editor of Blackwood’s, John Wilson, who held Edinburgh’s Chair of Moral Philosophy, and William Maginn, an essayist — but he had no intention of staying in it. (Indeed, as a farmer and agriculturalist he was a disaster, going bust any number of times.) Having altered the course and direction of his life, becoming something of a celebrity who was even offered a knighthood, he was an exemplar of free will — as sketched in his story ‘The Poachers’, published in Ackerman’s Juvenile Forget Me Not, Volume II (1831), where an orphaned boy of the forest attends a dame school and puts himself through college: ‘there is not at this time a more respectable presbyterian clergyman that I know of’. A rise in station that was a fantasy version of Hogg’s own.

Free will, for Hogg, means the best deployment of one’s nature and lights; it is almost a figurative freedom of spirit — as portrayed by George Colwan, Robert’s sporty brother, heir to the Dalcastle estates, his superior ‘in personal prowess, form, feature, and all that constitutes gentility in deportment and appearance’. Against such worldliness and popularity, the madness of Robert’s religion is enviously set. The warfare between the brothers is a continuation, moreover, of the enmity between the parents. Mrs Colwan, Lady Dalcastle, is an ice-queen who flees from her husband on their wedding night. She objects to his enjoyment of dancing and the fiddle (‘I will sooner lay down my life than be subjected to your godless will’). Behind her denial of happiness is a fear of sex — a fear which foreshadows Robert’s own repulsions and repressions. When, having been beaten by her own father for her desertion (‘His strokes were not indeed very deadly, but he made a mighty flourish in the infliction’), she returns to ‘the heathenish Laird of Dalcastle’, the manor house was to be rebuilt. She has a sort of personal nunnery (an ‘elevated sanctuary’) upstairs, linking to its own gardens by concealed doors. From this vantage point she spies upon her husband’s normal life, doing little except censure, reproach, scold. She sees everywhere profligacy, everywhere iniquity.

Her only visitor, up in the tower, is the Rev.