biographers-from-scotland

"From D-wks and Ch-tty at my tail You’ll syllogize that I’m M-CK-L; In all I do I score always, In all I say—à l’écossaise."

"The soul beyond her knowing seems to sweep Out of the deep, fire-winged, into the deep."

"Still ... fair, though scarce less old than Rome. Now once again at rest from wandering Across the high Alps and the dreadful sea, In utmost England let it find a home."

"I have found that men, in all other ways admirable, have insisted upon flattery, upon extreme tact, upon suppression of opinion, in short, upon the sort of extreme and conscious consideration one shows to children or to persons suffering from nervous ailments."

"Good-night, my love, good-night; Farewell! the breeze is sighing Along the harbour height; The fleecy clouds are flying Beneath Astarte’s light. My mariners are crying "In favouring winds away"! And I, my love denying, Must cleave th’ Ægean spray.The song that the sea is singing Is gentle and soft to-night: The lustre the stars are flinging On the bay is tender and bright; And bark like a bird is springing And speeding from thy sight: And a tune in my head is ringing That thrills my heart for flight Across the waves, soon winging, Return to thee; and bringing Treasures for thy delight. Good-night, my love, Good-night."

"Who shuns offence and holds with neither side, Who dreads the deep and never dares to swim, Who fears to trip and never tries to run, May yet in walking stumble."

"The pastime of light minds Is mocking others' grief."

"The Gods are not of Rome or Italy: They dwell in earth's abyss or with the stars, Their shrines are where we bring heroic hearts."

"Greece and the world are Rome's: her stars prevail; But our complexion shifts not with the gale. When ONE against a NATION plays his life, He bears from hosts the glory of the strife: Until the hero's godlike race be run I shall be loyal to the setting sun."

"Life is glad life when led by laughing hours, With joys of love or spoils of battle gilt; When darkness steals the day and shuts the flowers, Our arms are shattered and the wine is spilt, We rise as grateful guests from banquet gay, Resign the wreath, and toss the glass away.Death is dark death when slurred with terrors vain: Whether blest isles or fields Elysian wait, Or all is silent o'er the circling main, We know not ever; but we conquer Fate, Assail the mansions of the Gods, and claim The crown of valour, in a deathless name.Tis well to live for glory, home, and land; And, when these fail us, it is well to die. The latest freedom never fails our hand, From scornful Earth, on wings of scorn, to fly; When Life grows heavy. Death remains, the door To dreamless rest beside the Stygian shore.The portals open to our meteor way: A red dawn breaks the shadows of the hour. We leave the bitter cup of alien sway, To hinds that crouch beneath the heels of power. Ours the triumphal path, the hero's right; And Death hangs o'er us like a starry night!"

"All is light To him that lightly loves."

"To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away ; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man."

"As the owner of a little place on the Isle of Wight, I should declare an interest. Some 80 per cent of properties in my seaside village are second homes, making it difficult for local shops to survive the winter."

"Now we sat in silence over the prawns and cheese, listening to them arguing. She was telling him The Sunday Times was investigating a tip that he had dodged a driving ban for speeding by pretending she had been at the wheel. He was telling her to keep her mouth shut. The recording finished and she switched off the machine, looking up expectantly."

"...it is necessary to recall the contemporary climate of [Mackenzie’s] times. To the Occident, the Orient was a dark continent inhabited by semi savages with no civilization or culture. A study of Orientology was the hobby of the eccentric. What was accepted as normal was to join the East India Company, make easy money by means fair or foul and return home to live in comfort or participate in politics on the security of the fortune made in India. That a few of the Company’s servants did not tread this golden path to fortune, but chose on their own, prompted by the love of learning, ‘to discover the east’ for the benefit of...the east itself was a lucky accident of great historical value."

"Mackenzie and his agents certainly collected a wide range of materials. Not the least of their contributions was to set down in writing a large body of oral tradition which might otherwise have been lost."

"...much patronized, on account of his mathematical knowledge, by the late Lord Seaforth and my late grandfather, Francis, the fifth Lord Napier of Merchistoun. He was for some time employed by the latter, who was about to write a life of his ancestor John Napier, of Merchistoun, the inventor of logarithms, to collect for him... [information] from all the different works relative to India, an account of the knowledge which the Hindoos possessed on mathematics, and of the nature and use of logarithms. Mr Mackenzie, after the death of Lord Napier, became very desirous of prosecuting his Oriental researches in India. Lord Seaforth, therefore, at his request, got him appointed to the engineers on the Madras establishment."

"For example, Robert W. Wink who talks about the “Jesuit policy of Theft, Confiscation and Purchase” of Indian Books, the particular case of Mackenzie becomes “the most impressive orientalist explorations [that] were collaborative, unofficial and voluntary. Among these, none matched the enormous privately funded venture by Colonel Colin Mackenzie. His teams of Maratha Brahmin scholars begged, bought or borrowed, and copied, from village heads, virtually every manuscript of value they could finally acquired. Collections so acquired, reflecting the civilization of South India, manuscripts in every language, became a lasting legacy – something still being explored.”"

"One of the most wide ranging collections ever to reach the Library of the East India Company is formed by the manuscripts, translations, plans, and drawings of Colin Mackenzie, an officer of the Madras Engineers and, at the time of his death in 1821, Surveyor-General of India. Mackenzie spent a lifetime forming his collection which is exceptional, not only for its size, but also for the fact that materials from it are to be found in almost every section of the India Office Collections including Oriental Languages, European Manuscripts, Prints and Drawings, and Maps. Including manuscripts in South Indian languages held in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Madras.... According to Mackenzie’s own estimate, no fewer than fifteen Oriental languages written in twenty-one different characters...according to a statement drawn up in August 1822 by the well known orientalist Horace Hayman Wilson who, after Mackenzie’s death, volunteered to undertake the cataloguing of the collection, there were 1,568 literary manuscripts, a further 2,070 Local tracts, 8,076 inscriptions, and 2,159 translations, plus seventy-nine plans, 2,630 drawings, 6,218 coins, and 146 images and other antiquities."

"Mackenzie was a pioneer in his field. There was no precedent for his special field of research into the antiquities of India...he stood alone. The results of his work were a topographical survey of over 40,000 square miles, a general map of India and many provincial maps, a valuable memoir in seven volumes containing a narrative of the survey...of historical and antiquarian interest."

"All great and low, have their troubles, and we little men should not complain if we have our share. The only remedy is to move on in tranquility, guided by truth and integrity to the best of our judgement and avoiding all intrigue and chicanery."

"A singular relation...grew up between Carlyle and Lockhart. They lived in different circles; they did not meet often, or correspond often; but Carlyle ever after spoke of Lockhart as he seldom spoke of any man; and such letters of Lockhart's to Carlyle as survive show a trusting confidence extremely remarkable in a man who was so chary of his esteem."

"We thought it impossible any publication could raise Sir Walter Scott's talents or character in public opinion or in our private opinion more especially. And yet you certainly have raised high as ever biographer raised his hero — And you have done it without one word of puff or exaggeration or even full-faced eulogy. Sir Walter Scott himself would say — “Well done — my good son.”"

"Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, Who broke the laws of God and man, and metre."

"Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin – Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn."

"Lockhart's Life of Walter Scott may be said to be the most admirable biography in the English language, after Boswell's Samuel Johnson."

"A male Horace Walpole."

"It is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of The Cockney School."

"It is an old belief That on some solemn shore Beyond the sphere of grief Dear friends shall meet once more."

"It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," &c. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry."

"She writes well and concisely, and this has tended to obscure the psychological superficiality and sheer petty malice of her content."

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion."

"Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity."

"New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection."

"It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist."

"It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles."

"I am putting old heads on your young shoulders," Miss Brodie had told them at that time, "and all my pupils are the crème de la crème."

"Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life."

"The one certain way for a woman to hold a man is to leave him for religion."

"A life like mine annoys most people; they go to their jobs every day, attend to things, give orders, pummel typewriters, and get two or three weeks off every year, and it vexes them to see someone else not bothering to do these things and yet getting away with it, not starving, being lucky as they call it."

"One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full."

"I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours."

"Time, they say, must the best of us capture, And travel and battle and gems and gold No more can kindle the ancient rapture, For even the youngest of hearts grows old."

"You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament."

"What do we mean by spiritual development? Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world."

"Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth."

"He was a bad acquaintance for a placid, sedentary soul like me, for though he could work like a Trojan when the fit took him, he was never at the same job very long. In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses for the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get into the semi-final of the racquets championship. I waited daily to see him start a new religion."

"To be watchful, I decided, was my business. And I could not get rid of the feeling that I might soon have cause for all my vigilance."

"It was a very young man's confession of faith, and yet there was the glimmering of a truth at the back of it. It was my instinctive protest against the undue simplification of life. We are all a strange compound, and we shall never reach our full stature by starving certain parts of our nature of their due."

"It was a very happy time, but like all happy times it had no landmarks."