He knew, and often said, in
private letters, as in published works, that he was no hand at a
respectable hero. Borderers, buccaneers, robber, and humorsome people,
like Dugald 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.
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