From Land's End to John O'Groats, from Maine to Florida, from France to Russia, readers found Scott's novels irresistible. It was Waverley that may be considered as the instrument of that success - the historical novel, properly speaking, did not exist before Scott wrote it. In Waverley, his highly readable story of a romantic young man in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Scott blends realism and romance, the old world and the new, Enlightenment and Romanticism. Waverley stands ultimately for peace and stability, for social and political cohesion and harmony - qualities which may, consciously or unconsciously, account for its immense popularity.