Luzula

I agree about Edward Waverley's passivity (clearly the fault of all that unwise reading in childhood :P ). Scott has a tendency to treat his protagonists more as the means of showing the reader the far more interesting characters and events surrounding them than as characters in their own right—I found that less annoying in Waverley than in some of his other books, partly because the historical drama is just so exciting, but it's definitely still there.

Edward Waverley takes his job less seriously even than Laurent de Courtomer

XD

Scott is definitely interested in showing the Highlands as a more primitive past society since swept away—perhaps, though progress is ultimately a good thing, regrettably—by the march of history ('Tis Sixty Years Since, and look how far we've come...!). I remember thinking that some of the descriptions of Fergus's house sounded a good deal less modern than Ardroy. Apparently Scott based Fergus on his friend Alexander MacDonnell of Glengarry, the great-nephew of Pickle the spy! (and a major perpetrator of clearances, so not all that archaic...)

Did you see the link oursin posted recently about Jane and Anna Maria Porter, slightly earlier historical novelists from whom Scott apparently took quite a lot of inspiration without giving them credit? The specifics of Waverley don't seem to have come straight from them—the only Jacobite novel I can find from either of them was published later—but it's interesting context for the 'development of the historical novel' thing.