Is it possible that I have got thus far without having named Flora or Vich Ian Vohr—the last Vich Ian Vohr! Yet our minds were full of them the moment before I began this letter; and could you have seen the tears forced from us by their fate, you would have been satisfied that the pathos went to our hearts. Ian Vohr from the first moment he appears, till the last, is an admirably drawn and finely sustained character—new, perfectly new to the English reader—often entertaining—always heroic—sometimes sublime. The gray spirit, the Bodach Glas, thrills us with horror. Us! What effect must it have upon those under the influence of the superstitions of the Highlands?...
Flora we could wish was never called Miss MacIvor, because in this country there are tribes of vulgar Miss Macs, and this association is unfavorable to the sublime and beautiful of your Flora—she is a true heroine.... There is one thing more we could wish changed or omitted in Flora's character.... In the first visit to her, where she is to sing certain verses, there is a walk, in which the description of the place is beautiful, but too long, and we did not like the preparation for a scene—the appearance of Flora and her harp was too like a common heroine; she should be far above all stage effect or novelist's trick.
These are, without reserve, the only faults we found or can find in this work of genius. We should scarcely have thought them worth mentioning, except to give you proof positive that we are not flatterers. Believe me, I have not, nor can I convey to you the full idea of the pleasure, the delight we have had in reading Waverley, nor of the feeling of sorrow with which we came to the end of the history of persons whose real presence had so filled our minds—we felt that we must return to the flat realities of life, that our stimulus was gone, and we were little disposed to read the "Postscript, which should have been a Preface."
"Well, let us hear it," said my father, and Mrs. Edgeworth read on.
Oh! my dear sir, how much pleasure would my father, my mother, my whole family as well as myself have lost, if we had not read to the last page! And the pleasure came upon us so unexpectedly—we had been so completely absorbed that every thought of ourselves, of our own authorship, was far, far away.
Thank you for the honor you have done us, and for the pleasure you have given us, great in proportion to the opinion we had formed of the work we had just perused—and believe me, every opinion I have in this letter expressed was formed before any individual in the family had peeped to the end of the book or knew how much we owed you.
Your obliged and grateful
Maria Edgeworth.
Transcriber's note: Only obvious printer's errors have been corrected (e.g.: 3 s instead of 2, etc.). The author's spelling has been maintained and inconsistencies have not been standardised.