the Baron of Bradwardine from Waverley or Counsellor Pleydell from Guy Mannering. The Edinburgh Review’s initial impression was that Oldbuck, as an “oddity”, was the great blemish on the novel, but later found that he “is so managed as to turn out both more interesting and more amusing than we had any reason to expect”. Lockhart agreed better with the second thoughts of the Edinburgh reviewer, Francis Jeffrey, than his first, going so far as to say that Scott had “nowhere displayed his highest art, that of skillful contrast, in greater perfection…than the oddities of Jonathan Oldbuck and his circle are relieved, on the one hand by the stately gloom of the Glenallans, on the other by the stern affliction of the poor fisherman”. 20th century critics, just like Francis Jeffrey, have debated how well Scott solved the problem of describing a pedant in a way that would make him more interesting to the reader than he is to his fictional compeers. The biographer Edgar Johnson found his humours entertaining, if “a bit prolonged and overindulged”, but Hesketh Pearson called him “the most entertaining bore in literature; his humour redeems him”. For Charles Harold Herford he was a great creation drawn from the heart of Scottish life. Some critics have found that the charm and the main sentimental interest of The Antiquary lies in the antiquary himself more than in any other character. Robert C. Gordon considered him to be “the most fully and extensively developed character” of Scott’s first three novels. Virginia Woolf found that, like Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s characters, he is different every time one reads the novel. V. S. Pritchett declared that Oldbuck “stands solidly and aglow beside all the well-found comics of our literature”. Andrew Lang also had no doubts, calling him “perennially delightful”, and the scholar Aubrey Bell cited Oldbuck in support of his and Georg Brandes' view that Scott was one of the finest drawers of character ever to have lived. Footnotes References Fictional archaeologists Literary characters introduced in 1816 Fictional lairds Fictional lawyers Sir Walter Scott characters