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.