Quotes About Walter Scott

The stag at eve had drunk his fill,Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,And deep his midnight lair had madeIn lone Glenartney's hazel shade.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

Oh, poverty parts good company.

What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.

for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like young Lochinvar.

I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.

Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it.

Courtesy of tongue, said Rowena, when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown.[]

we resign to civil society our natural rights of self-defence only on condition that the ordinances of law should protect us.

The education of our hero, Edward Waverley, was of a nature somewhat desultory. In infancy his health suffered, or was supposed to suffer (which is quite the same thing), by the air of London.

Fools should not have chapping sticks'; that is, weapons of offence.

In Waverley the reader is introduced to one of the great ideas of the modern novel: that reading has the power to mediate and deflect experience. Six

Now I protest to thee, gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that if my quill displays no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From

The tale of the Surgeon's Daughter formed part of the second series of Chronicles of the Canongate, published in 1827; but has been separated from the stories of the Highland Widow, &c., which it originally accompanied, and deferred to the close of this collection, for reasons which printers and publishers will understand, and which would hardly interest the general reader. The Author

As living in this ideal world became daily more delectable to our hero, interruption was disagreeable in proportion. The

O rake not up the ashes of our fathers! Implacable resentment was their crime, And grievous has the expiation been.

Chapter XVII The Hold of a Highland Robber

religious house called Campsie, the ruins of which still occupy a striking situation on the Tay. It

Buchan was brought up in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and enjoyed many summer holidays with his grandparents in Broughton, in the Scottish Borders, where he developed a fascination of Scottish history and tales of old heroes, much like how his great idol Sir Walter Scott had done a century before. The young Buchan also developed a love of the local scenery and wildlife, which often feature in detail throughout his novels.