Quotes About Sir Walter Scott

The whole scene so reeked of penny romance that it bordered on the ludicrous . . . It was all really happening, but more like fiction come to life, a Waverly novel gone mad. Years later, Mark Twain would only half in jest propose that the American Civil War was to be blamed on Sir Walter Scott, that the people of the South had somehow persuaded themselves that the mythical era of gallant knights and fair damsels of Ivanhoe had come to life in Dixie.

But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

By my faith,' said Wamba, 'it would seem the Templars love the Jews' inheritance better than they do their company.

Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his…. It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

The historian Major-General Sir David Stewart of Garth described them as an 'excellent, orderly regiment of well-behaved serviceable men, fit for any duty' and the novelist Sir Walter Scott used his journal to call them a 'regiment of Sutherland giants'. (One of their number was Samuel McDonald, a native of Lairg, who was seven feet four inches tall. Throughout the army he was known as 'Big Sam'.)