The Justified Sinner is still extraordinary thirty years later

I am rereading the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, which is extraordinarily good. You never read the same book twice because you become a different person. Still this wonderful, extremely modern novel (written in 1821) is probably as good as I remember. In my twenties I thought it the best novel written in English, and it might be, beating even Conrad. 

But can any novelist beat Miss Austen?

It's like a meteor from outer space embedded in the canon of great novels.

Like Brideshead Revisited or The End of the Affair, it might even convert a reader to Catholicism.

Hogg was a shepherd.  I think Sir Walter Scott adopted him informally and had him taught to write, but I might be wrong about this. 

It's the first thriller. Much better than anything by Scott, whose protégé Hogg was, better than Dickens and very exciting. 

It's a psychological thriller and eviscerates Calvinism. 

I said this to a nice woman in Glasgow Cathedral with an English (Edinburgh Morningside) accent and added 'You're not a Calvinist are you? One has to be so careful what one says in Scotland.'

'No I'm not, but one has to be so careful everywhere. Stop the world I want to get off!'

'I have stopped the world and got off. I live in Romania.' 

'Oh you are very lucky!'

Yes, I really am. Romania is an outpost of civilisation in a world ruled by barbarians.