Well, it's actually the Edinburgh edition that I've read.

This is Scott's first novel, and one of the best of his I've read. I won't add much with this review to a book that's been exhaustively discussed for almost two hundred years. Scott was a sort of romantic rationalist -- he admired the Scottish traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but knew that the future of his country lay in the modern and "English" ways that were established by the early nineteenth century, and saw them as ultimately healthier. (In this he reminds me of his countryman Adam Smith who also saw the overwhelmingly positive effects of modern trade and industrialization, without closing his eyes to the significant harm it inflicted on the persons and characters of the people of Scotland.)

I have to add that in Bertrand Russell's early work on logic, he used the claim "Scott is the author of 'Waverly'" to explore what it means for a statement to be true or false, and to show the problems with a simple theory of naming (since Scott WAS the author of Waverly, the statement could be seen as tantamount to saying that Scott is Scott, which would be a tautology.) Waverly was initially published anonymously (because Scott did not want to risk his literary reputation in the field of poetry) and he only formally admitted authorship much later; several of his later novels were published as work "by the author of 'Waverly'".