unanimity of reviewers
when they are unanimous. The "Anti-Jacobin" objected that no
Chateau-Margaux sent in the wood from Bordeaux to Dundee in 1713 could
have been drinkable in 1741. "Claret two-and-thirty years old! It almost
gives us the gripes to think of it." Indeed, Sir Walter, as Lochhart
assures us, was so far from being a judge of claret that he could not
tell when it was "corked." One or two points equally important amused the
reviewer, who, like most of his class, detected the hand of Scott. There
was hardly a possibility, as Mr. Morritt told Sir Walter, "that the poems
in "Waverley" could fail to suggest their author. No man who ever heard
you tell a story over a table but must recognize you at once." To his
praise of "Waverley" Mr. Morritt hardly added any adverse criticism,
beyond doubting the merit of the early chapters, and denouncing the word
"sombre" as one which had lately "kept bad company among the slipshod
English of the sentimental school." Scott, in defence, informed Mr.
Morritt that he had "left the story to flag in the first volume on
purpose. . . . I wished (with what success Heaven knows) to avoid the
ordinary error of novelists, whose first volume is usually their best."

It must be admitted that if Scott wished to make "Waverley" "flag" in the
beginning, he succeeded extremely well,--too well for many modern
readers, accustomed to a leap into the midst of the story. "These
introductory chapters," he observes in a note on the fifth of them, "have
been a good deal censured as tedious and unnecessary; yet there are
circumstances recorded in them which the Author has not been able to
persuade himself to retract or cancel." These "circumstances" are
probably the studies of Waverley, his romantic readings, which are really
autobiographic. Scott was, apparently, seriously of opinion that the
"mental discipline" of a proper classical education would have been
better for himself than his own delightfully desultory studies.
Ballantyne could not see what Waverley's reading had to do with his
adventures and character. Scott persisted in being of another mind. He
himself, writing to Morritt, calls his hero "a sneaking piece of
imbecility;" but he probably started with loftier intentions of
"psychological analysis" than he fulfilled. 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 Dug