'Scott's admirers have never agreed on which is his finest or greatest novels. (The same is true of Dickens and his devotees.) There are six or seven candidates. But Rob Roy has always been among the most popular; the first edition of 10,000 copies sold out in a fortnight. No doubt the title helped. It promised readers eager for Romance that Scott was returning to the world of Waverley and the wild landscape of The Lady of the Lake. 

The opening has disappointed many. Scott usually took a few chapters to get into his stride, and this has led some to dismiss him as heavy or plodding. In reality, the reverse is true; once embarked on the story porper, he is wonderfully rapid, sometimes carelessly so. Neverless, a lot of readers - especially schoolboys in those now-distant days when a Scott novel was assigned them as a holiday task - have found these early chapters heavy going, and have wondered when Rob Roy himself would appear and take charge of the novel.

They may have agreed with John Buchan that 'the preliminaries are out of all decent proportion' and so may have 'stuck fast in them and never crossed the Border' into Scotland. 

Yet perseverance is rewarded, and some may be encouraged by the thought that Robert Louis Stevenson named Rob Roy as his favourite Scott novel. '