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
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