" 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.
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