Waverley
By Walter Scott.
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To
the King’s Most Gracious Majesty
Sire,
The Author of this collection of Works of Fiction would not have presumed to solicit for them your Majesty’s august patronage, were it not that the perusal has been supposed in some instances to have succeeded in amusing hours of relaxation, or relieving those of languor, pain, or anxiety, and therefore must have so far aided the warmest wish of your Majesty’s heart, by contributing in however small a degree to the happiness of your people.
They are therefore humbly dedicated to your Majesty, agreeably to your gracious permission, by
Editor’s Introduction to Waverley
“What is the value of a reputation that probably will not last above one or two generations?” Sir Walter Scott once asked Ballantyne. Two generations, according to the usual reckoning, have passed; “ ’Tis Sixty Years since” the “wondrous Potentate” of Wordsworth’s sonnet died, yet the reputation on which he set so little store survives. A constant tide of new editions of his novels flows from the press; his plots give materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised, praised, condemned: but his romances endure amid the changes of taste, remaining the delight of mankind, while new schools and little masters of fiction come and go.
Scott himself believed that even great works usually suffer periods of temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the difficulty caused by his Scotch, and now many make his “dialect” an excuse for not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate fiction, is incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one of those irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend Lady Louisa Stuart. In she informed him that she had tried the experiment of reading Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling aloud: “Nobody cried, and at some of the touches I used to think so exquisite, they laughed.”1 His correspondent requested Scott to write something on such variations
