.

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.