disguise himself from the keen eyes of Jeffrey and other critics.

The book was received as a revelation. The first volume is not
particularly interesting, but the story continually increases in
interest to its close. It is not a dissection of the human heart; it is
not even much of a love-story, but a most vivid narrative, without
startling situations or adventures. Its great charm is its quiet
humor,--not strained into witty expressions which provoke laughter, but
a sort of amiable delineation of the character of a born gentleman, with
his weaknesses and prejudices, all leaning to virtue's side. It is a
description of manners peculiar to the Scottish gentry in the middle of
the eighteenth century, especially among the Jacobite families then
passing away.

Of course the popularity of this novel, at that time, was chiefly
confined to the upper classes. In the first place the people could not
afford to pay the price of the book; and, secondly, it was outside their
sympathies and knowledge. Indeed, I doubt if any commonplace person,
without culture or extended knowledge, can enjoy so refined a work, with
so many learned allusions, and such exquisite humor, which appeals to a
knowledge of the world in its higher aspects. It is one of the last
books that an ignorant young lady brought up on the trash of ordinary
fiction would relish or comprehend. Whoever turns uninterested from
"Waverley" is probably unable to see its excellencies or enjoy its
peculiar charms. It is not a book for a modern school-boy or
school-girl, but for a man or woman in the highest maturity of mind,
with a poetic or imaginative nature, and with a leaning perhaps to
aristocratic sentiments. It is a rebuke to vulgarity and ignorance,
which the minute and exaggerated descriptions of low life in the pages
of Dickens certainly are not.