ald Dalgetty and Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Macwheeble, whom he said
he preferred to any person in "Waverley," were the characters he
delighted in. We may readily believe that Shakspeare too preferred
Jacques and the Fat Knight to Orlando or the favoured lover of Anne Page.
Your hero is a difficult person to make human,--unless, indeed, he has
the defects of Pendennis or Tom Jones. But it is likely enough that the
Waverley whom Scott had in his mind in 1805 was hardly the Waverley of
1813. His early English chapters are much in the ordinary vein of novels
as they were then written; in those chapters come the "asides" by the
author which the "Edinburgh Review" condemned. But there remains the
kindly, honourable Sir Everard, while the calm atmosphere of English
meadows, and the plump charms of Miss Cecilia Stubbs, are intended as
foils to the hills of the North, the shy refinement of Rose, and the
heroic heart of Flora Mac-Ivor. Scott wished to show the remote extremes
of civilization and mental habit co-existing in the same island of
Scotland and England. Yet we regret such passages as "craving pardon for
my heroics, which I am unable in certain cases to resist giving way to,"
and so forth. Scott was no Thackeray, no Fielding, and failed (chiefly in
"Waverley") when he attempted the mood of banter, which one of his
daughters, a lady "of Beatrice's mind," "never got from me," he observes.

In any serious, attempt to criticise "Waverley" as a whole, it is not
easy to say whether we should try to put ourselves at the point of view
of its first readers, or whether we should look at it from the
vantage-ground of to-day. In 1811 the dead world of clannish localty was
fresh in many memories. Scott's own usher had often spoken with a person
who had seen Cromwell enter Edinburgh after Dunbar. He himself knew
heroes of the Forty-five, and his friend Lady Louisa Stuart had been well
acquainted with Miss Walkinshaw, sister of the mistress of Charles
Edward. To his generation those things were personal memories, which to
us seem as distant as the reign of Men-Ka-Ra. They could not but be
"carried off their feet" by such pictures of a past still so near them.
Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of Scott's
impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of
Thackeray, and the charm, the magic of his style. Balzac was of the
future; of the future was the Scott of France,--the boyish, the witty,
the rapid