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.] END OF VOLUME FOUR [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.] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume 4 (of 10), by John Gibson Lockhart