The criticism that Scott cannot draw a heroine has to be modified after we have read The Heart of Midlothian. To judge by this book Scott could not draw a hero. For neither the pious, pettifogging Butler nor the wicked George Staunton can be called human beings of anything but conventional interest. Effie and Jeanie Deans are quite another matter. They are peasants and Scott condescends to them with the gentlemanliness of his time, but they are alive as his peasants always are...

The greatness of The Heart of Midlothian arises, first of all, in the scope that the problem of conscience gave to Scott’s imagination. He was not arguing in a void. His argument was creating real people and attracting real people to it. He made the story of Effie’s murdered baby a national story. And then how wide his range is! The scenes in theTolbooth are remarkable, and especially those that are built about the figure of Ratcliffe when the governor is working to turn him into an informer. Scott had the eighteenth-century taste for rogues, and their talk is straight from nature... Scott has looked it all up, but his own version is so alive, so effortless, so fast moving. Every detail tells; the very pedantry of it is pedantry washed down by the rough wine of life.