Editing Waverley (novel) (section)

===Quixotism===
As Scott describes him, Edward Waverley is like [[Don Quixote]] in his manner of educating himself by much reading, but as "an unstructured education", and as Scott says in the novel "consisting of much curious, though ill-arranged and miscellaneous information."<ref name=Gaston1991>{{cite journal |url=http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics91/gaston.htm |last=Gaston |first=Patricia S |year=1991 |title=The Waverley Series and Don Quixote: Manuscripts Found and Lost. |journal=Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America |volume=11 |number=1 |pages=45–59}}</ref> Critics of Scott's novels did not see the influence of [[Miguel de Cervantes]] in the same way as Scott describes it.<ref name=Gaston1991 /> Scott further clarifies the degree of this similarity to Quixote in the novel, in his instructions to his readers that:

<blockquote>From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which they unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the supposition. My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring.</blockquote>