Waverley, that creature of romance, considered as a lover, is really not romantic enough.

He loved Rose because she loved him,--which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour.

Scott, in "Waverley," certainly does not linger over love-scenes.

With Mr.Ruskin, we may say: "Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight and sometimes scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness." But his mind entertained other themes of interest, "loyalty, patriotism, piety." On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr.
Ruskin when he says that Scott "never knew 'l'amor che move 'l sol e l' altre stelle.'" He whose heart was "broken for two years," and retained the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and tired, and near his death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty years before he had cut in Runic characters on the turf at the Castle-gate of St.
Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all.
He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her: she was with him always, because she had been unattainable.

"There are few," he says, "who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of love and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn over,--and we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely than 'Julia de Roubigne.'" He could not be very eager to recall them, he who had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and always knew "l'amor che move 'l sol e l'altre stelle," a seal was on his lips, a silence broken only by a caress of Di Vernon's.' This apology we may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern readers may think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott.