Walter Scott

"The Knight’s bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— His soul is with the saints, I trust."

"You whirled them to the back of beyond."

"Trusting to your indulgence I venture to take exception to your treating Sir Walter Scott's most noble verses in the 'Lay' as a translation of the Dies Irae ... My contention is that the Dies Irae supplied Scott with a suggestion, not an original; and that, setting out from that suggestion, he composed what is not only an original but very decidedly the grandest piece of sacred poetry in the English language; such a piece as would have compelled Johnson, could he have read it, to alter his doctrine respecting that kind of composition."

"Rouse the lion from his lair."

"The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered—the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various—the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his renown which, in all probability, a remote generation alone will furnish forth. It is true that we have been long prepared for the event—it does not fall upon us suddenly—leaf after leaf was stripped from that noble tree before it was felled to the earth at last;—our sympathy in his decay has softened us to the sorrow for his death."

"I know nothing more sublime in the writings of Sir Walter Scott—certainly I know nothing so sublime in any portion of the sacred poetry of modern times, I mean of the present century—as the ‘Hymn for the Dead,’ extending only to twelve lines, which he embodied in The Lay of the Last Minstrel."

"And better had they ne'er been born, Who read to doubt, or read to scorn."

"When Israel, of the Lord belov'd, Out of the land of bondage came, Her fathers' God before her mov'd, An awful guide in smoke and flame."

"Ah! County Guy, the hour is nigh, The sun has left the lea, The orange flower perfumes the bower, The breeze is on the sea."

"Blessed be His name, who hath appointed the quiet night to follow the busy day, and the calm sleep to refresh the wearied limbs and to compose the troubled spirit!"

"When I look back upon his career, upon his teaching, upon the inspiration which he has breathed for so many years into the youth of the Empire, I think of him rather as a great Briton. I recall that over a period of years charged with crisis, not only to the fortunes of Scotland, but to the fortunes of that Empire in which Scotland is a shining unit, there was none more eloquent, none more untiring, in his presentation of the national case against the tyranny of the Napoleonic system than Walter Scott."

"What Deus ex machina could have come to my aid more effective than the sunny cheerfulness, strong, healthy vitality, catholic human sympathy, deep-rooted patriotism, fine pictorial eye, and rare historic furniture of Walter Scott? To the poetry of this greatest literary Scot, whom I soon learned to associate in æsthetical bonds with the sunny sobriety of Homer and the great Greeks, I owe, in no small measure, that close connection with the topography and the local history of my country which appears in my poetical productions, and which, if these are destined in any smallest degree to live in the memory of my countrymen, will be the element that has most largely contributed to their vitality."

"I have known Walter Scott long and well, and in occasional situations which call forth the real character—and I can assure you that his character is worthy of admiration—that of all men he is the most open, the most honourable, the most amiable ... I say that Walter Scott is as nearly a thorough good man as man can be, because I know it by experience to be the case."

"Scott was the first to discover, or at least the first to exploit on a large scale, the mediaeval sentiment. It is consequently all the more significant that we can see in Scott, the high priest of mediaevalism himself, that the taste for the Middle Ages was more than a taste merely for a picturesque period of history. It was for certain things which could be found more particularly in the Middle Ages, it is true, but which could be found also in other fields. Was not feudal society supremely distinguished from modern by its recognition both in theory and practice of the value and significance of communal life, of the natural interdependence of individuals and of classes, and of the beauty of self-devotion to a corporate ideal? Not only in mediaeval Europe, but wherever he finds qualities such as these Sir Walter is at home. Does not his voice take on a new ring of spiritual exaltation when he comes to his Highland clans? The love of comradeship which had to be satisfied with drilling in the Volunteers, and the loyalty which could be bestowed on no worthier object than the Prince Regent, found in the devotion of clansmen to their clan and its chief a more stirring social relationship, even as he had found the same in mediaeval ties of allegiance and the code of chivalry."

"Chivalry!-why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection-the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant-Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword."

"What remains?" cried Ivanhoe; "Glory, maiden, glory! which gilds our sepulchre and embalms our name."

"The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances."

"Within that awful volume lies The mystery of mysteries!"

"The stores of history are accessible to every one, and are no more exhausted or impoverished by the hints thus borrowed from them than the fountain is drained by the water which we subtract for domestic purposes. And in reply to the sober charge of falsehood against a narrative announced positively to be fictitious, one can only answer by Prior's exclamation - 'Odzooks, must one swear to the truth of a song?'"

"It is a strong castle, and strongly guarded; but there is no impossibility to brave men."

"You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has, indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air."

"The playbill, which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out."

"I think you have the poetry of Scott best described in the title of his first sustained effort in verse, the Lay of the Last Minstrel. He was the last great Minstrel and probably the last epic poet to write in our language."

"The industrial revolution was far from him; he was the soul of feudalism in its highest sense. His scheme of society was feudal alike in its simplicity and its nobility. In the first year after the peace we find him making work for a score or more of additional labourers on his estate to incur, as he said "the expense of several years at once to serve mine honest neighbours who were likely to want work but for such exertion." He realised his duty to his own community, and fulfilled it."

"I do not know of the career of any great man of letters more consistent, simpler, nobler, braver, than the career of Walter Scott. It made, inevitably made, when once the brilliancy of his literary equipment was realized, a strong and lasting appeal to the loyalty and admiration of the Scottish people. In every bone, in every fibre of his inmost being, he was Scottish. He was sprung from the loins of men who had ridden hotly in many a mad foray, in many a bloody raid."

"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."

"Scott perhaps illustrates more clearly than other writers the gap between the ideas of the general educated reader and those of the professional academic. The non-professional thinks of him as the mildly spurious Laird of Abbotsford, the sentimental reviver of a heroic Border and Highland past, who was still in the early 19th century more than half a Jacobite. The literary academic, especially since the appearance in English of Georg Lukacs’s Historical Novel in 1962, has seen him as an intellectual of quite a different cast: the first novelist to represent the historical process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve."

"And think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance,"

"Shakespeare and Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues."

"Someone having observed that the next Waverley novel was to be 'Rob Roy', Wordsworth took down his volume of Ballads, and read to the company 'Rob Roy's Grave'; then, returning it to the shelf, observed, "I do not know what more Mr. Scott can have to say upon the subject.""

"Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!"

"Thou and I are but the blind instruments of some irresistible fatality, that hurries us along, like goodly vessels driving before the storm, which are dashed against each other, and so perish."

"For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears."

"Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours-ambition is the serious business of life."

"There is yet spirit in him, were it well directed- but, like the Greek fire, it burns whatever approaches it."

"You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and weakness; the value of these toys, ten times multiplied, would not influence half so much as your slightest wish."

"But with the morning cool reflection came."

"As old as the hills."

"Meat eaten without either mirth or music is ill of digestion."

"I am she, O most bucolical juvenal, under whose charge are placed the milky mothers of the herd."

""Lambe them, lads! lambe them!" a cant phrase of the time derived from the fate of Dr. Lambe, an astrologer and quack, who was knocked on the head by the rabble in Charles the First's time."

"The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small consequence, but in enlarging, improving, and correcting the information you possess, by the authority of others."

"Ridicule, the weapon of all others most feared by enthusiasts of every description, and which, from its predominance over such minds, often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble."

"Look to a gown of gold, and you will at least get a sleeve of it."

"Tell that to the marines—the sailors won't believe it."

"Those who follow the banners of Reason are like the well-disciplined battalion, which, wearing a more sober uniform, and making a less dazzling show, than the light troops commanded by Imagination, enjoy more safety, and even more honour, in the conflicts of human life."

"Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit."

"Under the influence of this feeling of distrust in his poetical powers, the all but forgotten manuscript of Waverley was drawn forth from its obscurity, the novel was finished, and given to the world in July 1814. From that moment the historical romance was born for mankind. One of the most delightful and instructive species of composition was created; which unites the learning of the historian with the fancy of the poet; which discards from human annals their years of tedium, and brings prominently forward their eras of interest; which teaches morality by example, and conveys information while giving pleasure; and which, combining the charms of imagination with the treasures of research, founds the ideal upon its only solid and durable basis—the real."

"At one blow, as it were, he made Scotland realise herself. North and South, East and West, and he threw a glamour of romance over her, not only in England, but in every civilised country of the world. Who but Scott could have put George IV into a kilt?"

"Spur not an unbroken horse; put not your ploughshare too deep into new land."