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.
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