Waverley

of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ etc.] was too much advanced in years and plunged in business to amuse himself by writing novels; and besides, the style in no degree resembles his.” (Lady Abercorn meant “Young Harry Mackenzie,” not the patriarch.) “I am told one of the English reviews gives these works by name and upon alleged authority to George Forbes, Sir William’s brother; so they take them off my hands, I don’t care who they turn to, for I am really tired of an imputation which I am under the necessity of confuting at every corner. Tom will soon be home from Canada, as the death of my elder brother has left him a little money. He may answer for himself, but I hardly suspect him, unless much changed, to be possessed of the perseverance necessary to write nine volumes.” Scott elsewhere rather encouraged the notion that his brother Thomas was the author, and tried to make him exert himself and enter the field as a rival. Gossip also assigned the “Scotch novels” to Jeffrey, to Mrs. Thomas Scott, aided by her husband and Sir Walter, to a Dr. Greenfield, a clergyman, and to many others. Sir Walter humorously suggested George Cranstoun as the real offender. After the secret was publicly confessed, Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott of all the amusement it had given them. Old Mortality had been pronounced “too good” for Scott, and free from his “wearisome descriptions of scenery.” Clever people had detected several separate hands in Old Mortality, as in the Iliad. All this was diverting. Moreover, Scott was in some degree protected from the bores who pester a successful author. He could deny the facts very stoutly, though always, as he insists, with the reservation implied in alleging that, if he had been the author, he would still have declined to confess. In the notes to later novels we shall see some of his “great denials.”

The reception of Waverley was enthusiastic. Large editions were sold in Edinburgh, and when Scott returned from his cruise in the northern islands he found society ringing with his unacknowledged triumph. Byron, especially, proclaimed his pleasure in Waverley. It may be curious to recall some of the published reviews of the moment. Probably no author ever lived so indifferent to published criticism as Scott. Miss Edgeworth, in one of her letters, reminds him how they had both agreed that writers who cared for the dignity and serenity of their characters should abstain from “that authors’ bane-stuff.” “As to the herd of critics,” Scott wrote to Miss Seward, after publishing “The Lay,” “many of those gentlemen appear to me to be a set of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them.” It is probable, therefore, that he was quite unconcerned about the few remarks which Mr. Gifford, in the Quarterly Review (vol. XL, 1814), interspersed among a multitude of extracts, in a notice of Waverley manufactured with scissors and paste. The “Quarterly” recognized “a Scotch Castle Rackrent,” but in “a much higher strain.” The tale was admitted to possess all the accuracy of history, and all the vivacity of romance. Scott’s second novel, Guy Mannering, was attacked with some viciousness in the periodical of which he was practically the founder, and already the critic was anxious to repeat what Scott, talking of Pope’s censors, calls “the cuckoo cry of ‘written out’!” The notice of Waverley in the Edinburgh Review by Mr. Jeffrey was not so slight and so unworthy of the topic. The novel was declared, and not unjustly, to be “very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully, written.” The Scotch was decried as “unintelligible” dialect by the very reviewer who had accused Marmion of not being Scotch enough. But the “Edinburgh” applauded “the extraordinary fidelity and felicity” with which all the inferior agents in the story are represented. “Fastidious readers” might find Callum Beg and Mrs. Nosebag and the Cumberland peasants “coarse and disgusting,” said the reviewer, who must have had in his imagination readers extremely superfine. He objected to the earlier chapters as uninteresting, and⁠—with justice⁠—to the passages where the author speaks in “the smart and flippant style of modern makers of paragraphs.” “These form a strange and humiliating contrast with the force and freedom of his manner when engaged in those dramatic and picturesque representations to which his genius so decidedly inclines.” He spoke severely of the places where Scott explains the circumstances of Waverley’s adventures before he reaches Edinburgh; and Scott himself, in his essay on Mrs. Radcliffe, regrets that explanatory chapters had ever been invented. The reviewer broadly hints his belief that Scott is the author; and on the whole, except for a cautious lack of enthusiasm, the notice is fair and kindly. The Monthly Review differed not much from the Blue and Yellow (the Edinburgh Review).

“It is not one of the least merits of this very uncommon production that all the subordinate characters are touched with the same discriminating force which so strongly marks their principals; and that in this manner almost every variety of station and interest, such as existed at the period under review, is successively brought before the mind of the reader in colours vivid as the original.

“A few oversights, we think, we have detected in the conduct of the story which ought not to remain unnoticed. For example, the age of Stanley and Lady Emily does not seem well to accord with the circumstances of their union, as related in the commencement of the work; and we are not quite satisfied that Edward should have been so easily reconciled to the barbarous and stubborn prejudices which precluded even the office of intercession for his gallant friend and companion-in-arms.

“The pieces of poetry which are not very profusely scattered through these volumes can scarcely fail to be ascribed to Mr. Scott, whatever may be judged of the body of the