"It may be a more sonorous eulogy to aver that such a one is a master of poignant tragedy; of another that his art has conquered the very spirit of exquisite lyric; but to claim for a poet, who comes himself of a martial race, that he has reproduced in stirring poesy the soul of a fighting people; has re-created the traditions and personalities of an age, vanished indeed, but to be born and reborn in the passage of the centuries—this is a tribute to Scott which, had he never set pen to prose, would still leave him high among the Immortals of song."
Walter Scott

January 1, 1970