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.