"Sir Walter Scott" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Purity—I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens—Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of one still greater than either, Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is cynicism, though the more genial and healthy element predominates; and cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... needle, and a burnt thread," and no good will come of it. It is envy, jealousy—we don't like to see them so much better than ourselves. We dare not tell them what we really think of them, lest they should think less of us. So we speak with a disguise. Sir Walter Scott forgot himself when he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... age of twenty-two he went to London to support himself by literature, began by publishing "Rimes" of his own, and then Scottish Ballads, all issued as ancient, but of which he afterwards admitted that fourteen out of the seventy-three were wholly written by himself. John Pinkerton, whom Sir Walter Scott described as "a man of considerable learning, and some severity as well as acuteness of disposition," made clear conscience on the matter in 1786, when he published two volumes of genuine old Scottish ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... my Meg Merrilies!" exclaimed Sophie. "Yes, spite of her youth, do you not find that she has something of Sir Walter Scott's witch about her? When she grows older, she will be excellent. She has the appearance of being thirty, whereas she is said not to be more than twenty years old: she is ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... King's Park, then, gradually ascending they passed across the Queen's Drive, a splendid carriageway encircling the hill, which we owe to a few lines in one of Sir Walter Scott's romances. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... one morning that her friend, Mr. Corbett, had intimated his intention of awarding a special prize to the pupil who would write the best essay on any of the three following subjects—namely, Christmas joys, a short account of the French Revolution, and a brief review of one of Sir Walter Scott's novels. The babble of tongues that ensued after this intimation was wonderful. Mrs. Elder laughingly beat a hasty retreat, and Miss Smith lay resignedly back in her chair, and waited till peace and ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... he revisited London and Paris, in this last-named city seeing Talleyrand, of whom an interesting anecdote is recorded. In London he met Sydney Smith, Brougham, Frere; in Scotland, where he made a short tour, he visited Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford; on his way back to London he visited Southey and Wordsworth; and once again in that city he saw Hazlitt, living in Milton's house, and Godwin, who, he said, "is as far removed from everything feverish and exciting as if his head had never been filled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... delightful for a well-read American than to visit the scenes in Great Britain with which he has become familiar in his reading. No matter how rapidly he may travel, if he goes over the places made memorable by Sir Walter Scott in the "Waverley Novels," and in his poems, he will have had impressions, thrills, and educational results which will be a pleasure for the rest of his life. The same is true of an ardent admirer of Dickens or of Thackeray, in ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... the praise of Sir Walter Scott and Sir James Mackintosh, and been thought worthy of discussion in the Noctes Ambrosianae, require no further introduction to the reader. The almost exceptional position which they occupy as satirizing ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... early days Wagner felt for the works of Marschner, it is interesting to trace in 'Hans Heiling' the source of much that is familiar to us in the score of 'Der Fliegende Hollaender.' Of Marschner's other operas, the most familiar are 'Templer und Juedin,' founded upon Sir Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' a fine work, suffering from a confused and disconnected libretto; and 'Der Vampyr,' a tale of unmitigated gloom ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... 1812. During the interval, she gave the world a volume of miscellaneous dramas, including the Family Legend, a tragedy founded upon a story of one of the Macleans of Appin, which, principally through the good offices of Sir Walter Scott, was brought out at the Edinburgh Theatre. She visited Scott, in Edinburgh, in 1808, and in the following year the Family Legend was played in that city fourteen nights in succession. Scott wrote for it a prologue, and Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, contributed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... cannot show the difference more completely or fortunately than by comparing Sir Walter Scott's type of libertas, with the franchise of Chartres Cathedral, or Debonnairete of the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the house and the rooms were large enough for the few people in it. Cynthia was interested in her studies, and the girls, and the new books coming in. For now Sir Walter Scott was having a great hearing, and there were some ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Arabic, is a word of similar meaning and use, but some distinguish it as importing a more powerful charm. A talisman, whose "virtues are still applied to for stopping blood and in cases of canine madness,'' figures prominently in, and gives name to, one of Sir Walter Scott's novels. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his study, his day's work over, his feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which Sir Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old Reports. He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but honest, and therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others. He had a great belief in his young partner's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare's plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic; Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic. Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man over ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... appointment to the Presidency of the Board of Trade. A Conservative banker opposed his re-election, and Bright was very much annoyed, in fact he was profoundly indignant at being opposed. When he came on the Town Hall platform, that horse-shoe in the forehead, of which Sir Walter Scott speaks as becoming visible in moments of excitement, was flashing out scarlet. He plunged into his speech at once. He did not say "Ladies and gentlemen," or "Electorate of Birmingham," or anything of the kind. "I call it a piece of impertinence," ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... with the same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or (according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L, per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or five latter years of his ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... when during our war with France the supply of oak timber for shipbuilding almost entirely ran out. Dr. Hunter's editions did much to revive the ardour for planting, which was further stimulated by the Quarterly Review article and by the advice which Sir Walter Scott put into the mouth of the Laird o' Dumbiedykes to his son: 'Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping.' To the impetus then given to planting, many of the woods now growing in different ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Readers of Sir Walter Scott's wonderfully picturesque novel, Kenilworth, will note how he throws the strongest light upon Elizabeth's affection for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Scott's historical instinct is united here with a vein of psychology which goes deeper than ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the writer of the several articles entitled "The Living Authors;" of a good many of the earlier criticisms; of some of the papers on politics; and of some which may be termed "Controversial." The essays on Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Godwin, and Lord Byron are from his hand. He contributed also the critical papers on the writings of Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... many variants in Child's learned but still unfinished collection, and an effort has been made to choose the copies which contain most poetry with most signs of uncontaminated originality. In a few cases Sir Walter Scott's versions, though confessedly "made up," are preferred. Perhaps the editor may be allowed to say that he does not merely plough with Professor Child's heifer, but has made a study of ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... temptation and material enough for as many musical love stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such other composers as we can ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... of the same power of perseverance; and perhaps no career is more instructive, viewed in this light, than that of Sir Walter Scott. His admirable working qualities were trained in a lawyer's office, where he pursued for many years a sort of drudgery scarcely above that of a copying clerk. His daily dull routine made his evenings, which ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... point with the composure of a lawyer of thirty years' standing, I never recollect being in pain or confusion on the subject. In Captain Medwyn's Conversations of Lord Byron the reporter states himself to have asked my noble and highly gifted friend,' If he was certain about these Novels being Sir Walter Scott's?' To which Lord Byron replied, 'Scott as much as owned himself the Author of Waverley to me in Murray's shop. I was talking to him about that Novel, and lamented that its Author had not carried back the story nearer to the time of the Revolution. Scott, entirely off his ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Union of the Crowns, Sir Walter Scott half sadly reminds us in Nigel, one stream of Scottish romance and song ran dry; the end of the Kingdom became the middle of it; and as his namesake, Scott of Satchells puts it, the noble freebooter was degraded to be a common thief. But ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... his French clothes by the agency of his cousin the pedlar, decamped from Coalisnacoan in the night, and marched across country to the house of an uncle in Rannoch. Thence he escaped to France, where he was seen in Paris by an informant of Sir Walter Scott's in the dawn of the French Revolution; a tall, thin, quiet old man, wearing the cross of St. Louis, and looking on at ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... thirty-three years old, began her independent career as a novelist with "Castle Rackrent;" and from that time on, work followed work in illustration of the power of a woman of genius to associate quick wit and quick feeling with sound sense and a good reason for speaking. Sir Walter Scott in his frank way declared that he received an impulse from Miss Edgeworth's example as a story-teller. In the general preface to his own final edition of the Waverley Novels he said that "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... back and forth between the room and the library, delved into books, and even evolved a verse which she audaciously tagged "old play," in imitation of Sir Walter Scott. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... might seem to be intolerable calamities. How universal an experience it is to find that when the expected calamity does come, it is an easier affair than we thought it, so that we say under the blow, "Is that really all?" In that wonderful book, the Diary of Sir Walter Scott, when his bankruptcy fell upon him, and all the schemes and designs that he had been carrying out, with the joyful zest of a child—his toy-castle, his feudal circle, his wide estate—were suddenly suspended, he wrote ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... held in small book-cases between each two of the drawing-room windows, and in Mrs. Hamley's own sitting-room upstairs. Those in the drawing-room were quite enough to employ Molly; indeed she was so deep in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels that she jumped as if she had been shot, when an hour or so after breakfast the squire came to the gravel-path outside one of the windows, and called to ask her if she would like to come out of doors and go about the garden and home- fields ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... tale, and has enough in it of life and interest to keep it for some years to come in request. The prefatory memoir by Sir Thomas Talfourd would be at all times interesting, nor the less so for containing two long letters from Sir Walter Scott to Mr. Deacon, full ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... person they had seen, or that they regretted not having seen. Lady Cecilia now called upon each to name the man among the celebrated of modern days, whom they should most liked to have seen. By acclamation they all named Sir Walter Scott, 'The Ariosto of ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... appear to have been restless after it, for his ghost is averred to have stalked in the hall of the Academy of Berlin, and to have been seen by a brother professor there, the remarkable phenomenon being solemnly recorded in the Transactions of that learned body.* (* See Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, Letter 1.) But of far more practical importance than the appearance of his perturbed shade, was the effect of his Petites Lettres, which suggested twelve projects for the advancement of knowledge, one of which was the promotion of discovery ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... Romances] have been the source of great controversy among antiquaries—a class of men who, be it said with their forgiveness, are apt to be both positive and polemical upon the very points which are least susceptible of proof, and least valuable, if the truth could be ascertained."—Sir Walter Scott, "Essay on Romance," ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the grass, and read, in a chant, or rather in a lilt, the Danish ballad of Chyld Dyring, as translated by Sir Walter Scott. Gibbie's eyes grew wider and wider as he listened; their pupils dilated, and his lips parted: it seemed as if his soul were looking out of door and windows at once—but a puzzled soul that understood nothing of what ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... for truths none is more instructive than that admirable ghost, Mrs. Veal. Like the sonnets of some great poets, it contains in a few lines all the essential peculiarities of his art, and an admirable commentary has been appended to it by Sir Walter Scott. The first device which strikes us is his ingenious plan for manufacturing corroborative evidence. The ghost appears to Mrs. Bargrave. The story of the apparition is told by a 'very sober and understanding gentlewoman, who lives within a few doors of Mrs. Bargrave;' and the character ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... captive Moore and Murray by being beautiful, a genius, and a lord; calling them 'Dear Tom' and 'Dear Murray,' while they were only commoners. He first insulted Sir Walter Scott, and then witched his heart out of him by ingenuous confessions and poetical compliments; he took Wilson's heart by flattering messages and a beautifully-written letter; he corresponded familiarly with Hogg; and, before his death, had made fast friends, in one way or another, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... position about all these matters is, I venture to say, almost identical with that of Sir Walter Scott. A Scot himself, by descent, Kant may have heard tales of second-sight and bogles. Like Scott, he dearly loved a ghost-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at them and at himself for his interest in them. Yet both would take trouble ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... 1851, pp. 331-332). Southey, in a note on a passage of the "Curse of Kehama," went so far as to say that Paltock's winged people "are the most beautiful creatures of imagination that ever were devised," and added that Sir Walter Scott was a warm admirer of the book. With Charles Lamb at Christ's Hospital the story was a favourite. "We had classics of our own," he says, "without being beholden to 'insolent Greece or haughty Rome,' that passed current among us—'Peter ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... place like home" they say, and I thought so; now I think there is, perhaps even better. Our own highlands must have been like this before General Wade and Sir Walter Scott opened them to the tourist; the Pass of Leny or where Bran meets Tay, when there was more forest, and only bridle tracks, and men going armed, must have been like this, even to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... voyage is, perhaps, that of Maelduin, which, Tennyson has transmuted into English under the title The Voyage of Maeldune. This is a voyage undertaken for revenge; but vengeance, as Sir Walter Scott has pointed out in his preface to The Two Drovers, springs in a barbarous society from a passion for justice; and it is this instinct for justice that inspires the Irish hero to endure and to achieve what he does. Christianity has ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... It has a meaning and a purpose. It is the expression of good manners, and good manners have been rightly called the minor morals. This is true in the sense that they are the expression of the innate kindness and good will that sum up what we call good breeding. As to its importance, Sir Walter Scott once said that a man might with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach of good morals than appear ignorant of the points ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Sir Walter Scott—dear Sir Walter, whose "Tales of a Grandfather" and Scottish stories and poems were so delightfully familiar to the boys and girls of the last generation, left a charming little diary of a voyage he made in the summer of 1814, on board a Light-house yacht, in company with the Commissioners of ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has only something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a library—anybody's library does for him. He passes Sir Walter Scott and the "Arabian Nights," and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to be an instinct with him. By help of a dictionary he worries it out in the original Greek. This gives him ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... My first schoolmaster "Preter pluperfect tense" The "penny pig" Country picnics Pupil at the High School Dislike of Latin Love of old buildings Their masonry Sir Walter Scott "The Heart of Midlothian" John Linnell The collecting period James Watt My father's workshop Make peeries, cannon, and "steels" School friendships Paterson's ironfoundry His foremen Johnie Syme Tom Smith and chemical experiments ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the shield, and received a thrust at close quarters, the corslet was pierced more easily than the pad of paper which was said to have been used as secret armour in a duel by the Master of Sinclair (1708). [Footnote: Proceedings in Court Marshal held upon John, Master of Sinclair. Sir Walter Scott. Roxburghe Club. (Date of event, 1708.)] It is desirable to prove this feebleness of the corslet, because the poet often says that a man was smitten with the spear in breast or back when unprotected by the shield, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... in the Vale of Legberthwaite, between High Fell and Great How, is the fairy castle of Sir Walter Scott's 'Bridal of Triermain'. "Nathdale Fell" is the ridge between Naddle Vale (Nathdale Vale) and that of St. John, now known as High Rigg. The old Hall of Threlkeld has long been in a state of ruinous dilapidation, the only habitable part of it having been for many years converted ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... to them and had come to regard them as proper and natural things for bishops to say. For instance, the very first paragraph in this pillory of Lalage's was devoted to a bishop, I forget his name and territorial title, who had denounced Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe." Some evil-minded person had put forward this novel as a suitable reading book for Irish boys and girls in secondary schools, and the bishop had objected strongly. Lalage was cheerfully contemptuous of him. Without myself sharing his feeling, I can quite understand that ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... rhyme is famous in literary annals as having been taught to Sir Walter Scott before his open fire by that dainty little maiden, ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... when I began to be the reader for our little family. Aunt Deel had long complained that she couldn't keep up with her knitting and read so much. We had not seen Mr. Wright for nearly two years, but he had sent us the novels of Sir Walter Scott and I had led them heart deep into the creed battles of ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... [291] Sir Walter Scott has recorded Lord Auchinleck's 'sneer of most sovereign contempt,' while he described Johnson as 'a dominie, monan auld dominie; he keeped a schule, and cau'd it an acaadamy.' Croker's Boswell, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart and Johnny Lockhart as her representatives; Charlotte the Duke of Wellington, the Marquis of Douro, Mr. Abernethy, and Christopher North. This last personage was indeed of great importance in the eyes of the children, for Blackwood's Magazine ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... all of us there are little places here and there, like the indistinguishable spots on a rock which give foothold to moss or stonecrop; on which, if the germ of a myth fall, it is certain to grow, without in the least degree affecting our accuracy or truthfulness elsewhere. Sir Walter Scott knew that he could not repeat a story without, as he said, "giving it a new hat and stick." Most of us differ from Sir Walter only in not knowing about this tendency of the mythopoeic faculty to break out unnoticed. But it is also perfectly true that the mythopoeic faculty is not ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Thrale made Dr. Johnson read some passages which I had been remarking as uncommonly applicable to the present time. He read several speeches, and told us he had not ever read so much of it before since it was first printed.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 96. 'I was told,' wrote Sir Walter Scott, 'that a gentleman called Pot, or some such name, was introduced to him as a particular admirer of his. The Doctor growled and took no further notice. "He admires in especial your Irene as the finest tragedy modern times;" to which the Doctor replied, "If Pot says ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... father says that the Cornish people are wild and imaginative, and my stepmother hasn't any imagination. Years ago I used to read Burns's poems and Sir Walter Scott's stories, but mother took the books from me. She says a farmer's daughter has no time for poetry and romance, but I love it all the same. That is why I am only happy when I am out ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de Bois Guilbert, in his novel, Ivanhoe, we might well believe that some at least of the accusations against them ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... honest labour;—I am not so vain as to apply to these, any part of the high testimony which Sir Walter Scott has so justly paid to the merit of Mr. Lodge's truly splendid work of the portraits of celebrated personages of English history. I can only take leave to disjoint, or to dislocate, or copy, a very few ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... was not deficient in humour. Sir Walter Scott was a Scotchman. .'. Some Scotchmen are not ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... the opinion that history may be more successfully taught through the medium of fiction than by any other form of diction. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, notably "Waverley," "Ivanhoe," are cited as presenting pictures of the times more effectively than any purely historic volume. The same may be said of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," as illustrating the state of affairs ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Sir Walter Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather" are the best history of Scotland you could read: Robertson's may come afterwards, when you ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... was practised, and by some of them with a skill almost rivalling that of Locksley in Sir Walter Scott's novel of Ivanhoe. A carpenter in the town made for us bows of lancewood, and arrows of poplar, tipped with spikes of iron. With these we could not only split our "willow wand" at 80 yards distant, but the more skilful ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... used names like trumpets. 'The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's own joy,' he says, 'when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some resounding names, such as Hildebrand or Charlemagne, the eagles of Rome or the pillars of Hercules. As with Sir Walter Scott, some of the best things in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. That is exactly where Macaulay is great. He is almost Homeric. The whole triumph turns upon mere names.' We have all wondered at the uncanny ingenuity that Bunyan and Dickens displayed ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... but she did not allow any one else to say so. On the contrary, she told Alix at various times that his mother had been one of the old Maryland Percies, and his great-grandfather was mentioned in a book by Sir Walter Scott, and that one had to respect the man, even if one didn't choose to ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... He was also a keen Conservative and a loving member of the Established Church of Scotland. He was warmly beloved and his society was greatly sought after by his friends; a voyage of inspection with him on his tours round the coast was much appreciated. On one occasion Sir Walter Scott made one of the party which accompanied him. Mr Robert Stevenson died in July 1850, a few months before the birth of his grandson, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... as soon as I finished the 'Antiquary' you would read me a description of the spot which Sir Walter Scott selected for the scene of his story. We have read the last chapter; now please ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Sir Patrick Spens, which is given in the collections of Thomas Percy, Sir Walter Scott, William Motherwell, and others, is supposed by Scott to refer to a voyage that may really have taken place for the purpose of bringing back the Maid of Norway, Margaret, daughter of Alexander III., to her own kingdom of Scotland. Finlay ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... a German by birth, was employed by Sir Walter Scott as an amanuensis and "searcher." He edited, in 1810, 'Metrical Romances of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries', a work described by Southey ('Letters', ii. 308) as "admirably edited, exceedingly curious, and after my own heart." He also published editions of Ford, and Beaumont and Fletcher, which ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... imagination of a monk. The English reader will find an amusing account of the German Nibelungen and Heldenbuch, and of some of the Scandinavian Sagas, in the volume of Northern Antiquities published by Weber, the friend of Sir Walter Scott. Scott himself contributed a considerable, no doubt far the most valuable, part to the work. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... to the last, compose in French, without imminent risk of committing some mistake which would have moved a smile in the literary circles of Paris? Do we believe that Erasmus and Fracastorius wrote Latin as well as Dr. Robertson and Sir Walter Scott wrote English? And are there not in the Dissertation on India, the last of Dr. Robertson's works, in Waverley, in Marmion, Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would laugh? But does it follow, because we think thus, that ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... no details of their romance. As for my less immediate ancestry, it is "wropt in mystery." Were we all people of the stage? There was a Daniel Terry who was not only a famous actor in his day, but a friend of Sir Walter Scott's. There was an Eliza Terry, an actress whose portrait appears in The Dramatic Mirror in 1847. But so far as I know I cannot claim kinship with either ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... talk with complacency and even with pride of the most humiliating defeat that his ancestors ever underwent. It would be difficult to name any eminent man in whom national feeling and clannish feeling were stronger than in Sir Walter Scott. Yet when Sir Walter Scott mentioned Killiecrankie he seemed utterly to forget that he was a Saxon, that he was of the same blood and of the same speech with Ramsay's foot and Annandale's horse. His heart swelled with triumph when he related how his own kindred had fled like hares before a smaller ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had been to return the book she had lent me; and then it was that, in casually discussing the poetry of Sir Walter Scott, she had expressed a wish to see 'Marmion,' and I had conceived the presumptuous idea of making her a present of it, and, on my return home, instantly sent for the smart little volume I had this morning received. But an apology ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, was 'The Greek Dunce.' Both of these great men, to their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. 'But what the reason was why I hated the Greek language, ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... to music, which he in great part attributed to our having only one opera, which he kindly informed me was "Bob et Joan." However indisposed to check the current of his loquacity by any effort of mine, I could not avoid the temptation to translate for him a story which Sir Walter Scott once related to me, and was so far apropos, as conveying my own sense of the merits of our national music, such as we have it, by its association with scenes, and persons, and places we are all familiar with, however unintelligible to the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... another difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been many-worded. They have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The eighteenth century in England, with all ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... "Songs, chiefly in the Rural Language of Scotland." After an interval of nine years, sedulously improved by an ample course of reading, he produced in 1822 "Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, a Dramatic Poem." In this work, which is much commended by Sir Walter Scott in the preface to the "Fortunes of Nigel," he depicts the manners and traditions he had seen and heard on the banks of the Nith. In 1819, he began to contribute to Blackwood's Magazine, and from 1822 to 1824 wrote largely ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... carry James with him on one of these expeditions; but in June 1528 the young king escaped from Edinburgh Castle, and rode to Stirling, where he was welcomed by his mother and her partisans. Among them were Arran, Argyll, Moray, Bothwell, and other nobles, with Maxwell and the Laird of Buccleuch, Sir Walter Scott. Angus and his kin were forfeited; he was driven across the Border in November, to work what mischief he might against his country; he did not return till the death of James V. Meanwhile James was at peace with ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... praise from the great. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh Weekly Journal, May 19, 1824) maintained that its creator "has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string of the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones." Goethe (Kunst und Alterthum, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 'a Friar of orders grey,' and murdering the mother instead of the baby, Sir Walter Scott revived the story in one of his most popular ballads. But of all the versions of the tradition that have come under this writer's notice, the one that departs most widely from Aubrey's statement is given in Mr. G.L. Rede's 'Anecdotes ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of a character in the brain's theatre— that character may, in fact, be alive, or dead, or merely fantastical. A very good case is given with this explanation (lost knowledge revived in a dramatic dream about a dead man) by Sir Walter Scott in a note to The Antiquary. Familiar as the story is it may be offered here, for a reason which will presently ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... his feet. Sir Walter Scott, he knew not why or how, was one of those bright names that starred in his historical darkness, like Caesar and Napoleon and Ridley and Latimer and W. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting out creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous novelists whom I meet at the Athenaeum have told me so themselves. Even prodigious people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola—" ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... old, and is, we think, both by its embellishments and literary contents, calculated to attract hundreds of juvenile admirers. Indeed, we are surprised that the children have been so long without their "Annuals," whilst those of "a larger growth" have been supplied in abundance; but, as Sir Walter Scott has set the example of writing for masters and misses, we hope that our nursery literature will rise in character, and it will not henceforth be the business of after-years to correct erroneous ideas imbibed from silly books during our ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... embittered, nor is it strange that he should sometimes, through ignorance, have committed the fault of which his enemies had been guilty in wantonness. Not content with retaliating the full measure of malice upon the heads of his immediate assailants, he turned the stream of his abuse upon Sir Walter Scott, whom he singled out deliberately as the towering head of a supposed literary conspiracy. He is credited with remarking; "To pay these fellows in their own coin, the way would be to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... invariably right. All that was small in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... regarding this great man, but we must now leave him to the active duties of a busy and useful life, surrounded by his family in the comforts of an English home and enjoying the true friendship of the philosopher, the historian, and the poet. Among the most intimate in this list was Sir Walter Scott—the friend of Mrs. Bailie, the foster mother of Sir Howard. Doubtless the name of Douglas was sufficient to awaken in the mind of the Scottish bard a feeling worthy of the friendship of Sir Howard. Together they spent many hours in conversing upon the scenes which had formed subjects for the poet's ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is, except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Jean, they lived to be old, and died on one day, and they are buried at Dryburgh in one tomb, and a green tree grows over them; and the Tweed goes murmuring past their grave, and past the grave of Sir Walter Scott. ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... during the rest of the morning devoted herself to Nora. Nora had varied and strange acquirements at her finger's ends. She was up in all sorts of folk lore; she could clothe her speech in picturesque and striking language. She could repeat poetry from Sir Walter Scott, from Shakspere, from the old Irish bards themselves; but her grammar was defective, although her reading aloud was very pretty and sweet. Her knowledge of history was vague, and might be best described by the expression, up and down. She knew all about the Waldenses; ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... beware, and then in the end the book agent always made the sale, and Miss Sally felt as if she had committed seven or eight deadly sins, and it made her life miserable. Only a few months before she had fallen prey to a man who had sold her a set of Sir Walter Scott's Complete Works, two dollars down, and one dollar a month, and she felt that the work of urging the monthly dollar out of her father's pocket was all ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... Boy-Bishop has been often identified. We shall see presently how far this judgment is correct. An example will, no doubt, readily recur to the reader from a source to which we owe so many impressions of the Middle Ages, some true, others false or at least exaggerated—we mean the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott. That writer has introduced into "The Abbot" an Abbot of Unreason, and he explains in a note that "The Roman Catholic Church connived at the frolics of the rude vulgar, who, in almost all Catholic countries, enjoyed, or at least assumed, the privilege ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... importance of placing a man in the important situation because of his aptitudes.—On the 20th Mr. Cadell, the eminent Scotch publisher, and, in great degree, founder of cheap literature in Great Britain. He was identified with Sir Walter Scott in the cheap issue ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters, the reader cannot fail to recognize. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand, but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader."—by Sir Walter Scott, in ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... locally known for some years as Shakespeare's 'deer-barn,' but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... as they become old and obsolete. Then the traces they have left in words and phrases and figures of speech, their very contrasts with the laws of the present, makes them material eminently literary. We know what effective literary use Sir Walter Scott has made of the antiquities ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... cloughs, and old towns of the county—the bowmen of Lancashire did their share of work upon that field. The use of the bow lingered longer in Lancashire than in some parts of the kingdom—longer in England generally than many people suppose. Sir Walter Scott says, in a note to his "Legend of Montrose:" "Not only many of the Highlanders in Montrose's army used these antique missiles, but even in England the bow and quiver, once the glory of the bold yeomen of that land, were occasionally used during the ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... at the "Castle," though, unhappily, I did not become aware of my romantic good fortune till near the close of my stay. There was no trace of battlement or turret, nothing in the least suggestive of Warwick or Windsor, or of Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the Castle was not a building of any kind, but a hamlet; a small collection of houses—a somewhat scattered collection, it must be owned,—such as, on the bleaker and sandier parts of Cape Cod, is distinguished by the name of village. On one side flowed the river, doubling its course through ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... English period of architecture we may mention Barnard Castle, a mighty stronghold, held by the royal house of Balliol, the Prince Bishops of Durham, the Earls of Warwick, the Nevilles, and other powerful families. Sir Walter Scott immortalized the Castle in Rokeby. Here is ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... became a Baron. "I took the vow of poverty, and it led to an income of twenty thousand pounds a year. I took the vow of obedience and find myself ruler of fifty towns and villages." These are the words which Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth of an Abbot, who became a Baron through the simple law of which I have hinted. And in his novel of "The Abbot," Sir Walter gives a tragic picture of how power and wealth can be lost as well as won. Feudalism began with the rule ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... find, is a Scotticism. I should have said, 'It will not be long before we shall be at Marischal College.' BOSWELL. In spite of this warning Sir Walter Scott fell into the same error. 'The light foot of Mordaunt was not long of bearing him to Jarlok [Jarlshof].' Pirate, ch. viii. CROKER. Beattie was Professor of Moral Philosophy ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Sir Walter Scott, who was a great friend to dogs, as well as a nice and critical judge of their qualities, used to tell this story:—When a young man, first attending, as an advocate, the Jedburgh assizes, a notorious ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... banks of Tweed the chairman was aware that a wizard, still more enchanting than him of Yarrow, lived, or rather, lately lived; and he accordingly gave the health of 'SIR WALTER SCOTT, and a safe return to his native country.' It is needless to say with what rapture the health of this most illustrious of all the sons of Scotland was drunk. This honour—such is the word—was acknowledged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... Pajon. I ought not to have forgotten to mention that he bears the medal of Sir Walter Scott (Introduction to The Abbot) as "a pleasing ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... more than a century ago. Like the apparition it embodies it had always been—and is still to-day even—more or less discredited. Mrs. Radcliffe gave it a new being and even a certain dignity in her "Castle of Otranto"; and after her came Sir Walter Scott who frankly surrendered to the power and charm of the theme. The line of succession has been continuous. The ghost has held his own with his human fellow in fiction, and his tale has been told with increasing skill as the art of the writer has developed. To-day ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... dressing-room, in his charming "Rape of the Lock;" and La Motte Fouque, the beautiful and capricious water-nymph, Undine, around whom he has thrown more grace and loveliness, and for whose imaginary woes he has excited more sympathy, than ever were bestowed on a supernatural being. Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines, or water-sprites. German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Burns the greatest among lyric poets; the most striking characteristics of his poetry are simplicity and intensity, in which qualities he is scarcely, if at all, inferior to any of the greatest poets that have ever lived. "No poet except Shakespeare," says Sir Walter Scott, "ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... and practised observer as Sir Walter Scott, after a week's hard and systematic sight-seeing, could only say of Oxford, "The time has been much too short to convey to me separate and distinct ideas of all the variety of wonders that I saw: my memory only at present furnishes a grand but indistinct picture of ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Sir Walter Scott wrote of her at this period of her life: "This little lady is educated with much care, and watched so closely that no busy maid has a moment to whisper, 'You are heir of England.' I suspect if we could dissect ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne |
