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Walter Scott Quotes

Browse 19 quotes about Walter Scott.

Walter Scott Quotes

“Jeanie Deans, to our thinking, is the cream and perfection of Scott's work. She is tenfold more, because in all ordinary circumstances she would be much less interesting to us than a score of beautiful Rowenas, than even Flora or Rebecca. She is a piece of actual fact, real as the gentle landscape in which she is first enclosed, true to her kine that browse upon the slope - and yet she is the highest ideal that Scott has ever attained. A creature absolutely pure, absolutely truthful, yet of a tenderness, a forbearance, and long-suffering beyond the power of man, willing to die rather than lie.”

PurityTruthfulnessCattleForbearanceWalter ScottHeart Of MidlothianJeanie Deans
Author:Mrs. Oliphant
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“...the prose tradition had died two centuries before and the recreation of a full canon of all-purpose Scots was beyond even Scott's skill, nor did he attempt it, except, perhaps in the magnificent Wandering Willie's Tale. He took the only course open to him, of writing his narrative in English and using Scots only for those who, given their social class, would still be speaking it: daft Davie Gellatley in Waverley, the gypsies and Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering, the Headriggs in Old Mortality, Edie Ochiltree and the fisher-folk of Musselcrag in The Antiquary, Andrew Fairservice in Rob Roy, the Deanses in The Heart of Midlothian, Meg Dods in St. Ronan's Well, and so on. The procedure gave reality to the Scots characters whose ways and ethos it was Scott's main purpose to portray, and the author in his best English, which lumbered along rather badly at times, did little more than lay out the setting for the action and act as impressario for the characters as they played their roles... ...Scott's felicity in conveying character and action through their Scots speech inspired his imitators for the next hundred years - Susan Ferrier, Hogg, Macdonald, Stevenson, Barrie, Crockett, Alexander, George Douglas, and John Buchan. The tradition of narrative in standard English and dialogue in various degrees of dialect has been the usual procedure since.”

Scots LanguageWalter ScottScots LeidDavie GellatleyEdie Ochiltree
Book:Grampian Hairst: An Anthology of Northeast Prose
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“These great Nordic incursions were to result in the marginalization of the once semi-autonomous Pictish, English and North British Princedoms that had preceded the arrival of the Norsemen on British soil. And, as they disappeared beneath the onslaught of the Viking Hosts, the ancient bardic traditions, which had once been succoured by these previously distinct ethnic groups, gradually became intertwined with one another as a result of widespread migration, inter-marriage and cross fertilization; the ultimate legacy of which was the perpetuation of the fragmentary remains of the ancient traditions which were to come to adorn the ballads that the Laird of Abbotsford himself collected, amongst the eighteenth century descendants of these ancient peoples.”

BritainVikingsBardsEthnic GroupsBritonsWalter ScottPictsAnglo Saxon EnglandBorder Ballads
Book:The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrel Tradition
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“Rosslyn Castle was built in the early 14th century on a promentory surrounded by the River North Esk on three sides. Additions and repairs were made to the castle over the next three centuries due to frequent mishaps, including a fire in 1447. Cromwell's troops attacked the castle in 1651 using canons situated on higher ground. A house built out of the castle's remains is now a holiday let. The castle is also featured in Sir Walter Scott's poem Rosabelle. Legend tells us that it is home to a sleeping lady who, when awake, will show the location of treasure buried deep within its vaults.”

Walter ScottOliver CromwellRiver North EskRosslyn Castle
Book:Midlothian Station Walks
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“Buchan's less polemical evaluation of 1932, with its focus on the historical context of Scott's writing, recognised the author's virtues, but did little to change the narrative of his limitations. Beside the reminder that the author 'knew his native land as no Scotsman had ever known it before', the insight that Scott's popularity and its international extent 'has had a paralysing effect' on his critical study sounded no warning to critics determined to mark themselves separate from Scotland's supposed cultural and literary provincialism.”

ScotlandProvincialismWalter ScottThomas CarlyleJohn BuchanEdwin Muir
Book:The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature
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“Scott's description of the stag in The Lady of the Lake, is much more challenging than the image of Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. He refers to the 'antlered monarch of the waste', a far more appropriate creature of the upper reaches of Glen Artney where Canto I of The Lady of the Lake begins. The problem is that Scott and Landseer have become too closely associated; they have become a conjoined stereotype of the Highlands from which neither can escape. That is not such a problem for Landseer; indeed, without his association with Scott he would be much less known today. But it is a problem for Scott and the Highlands, because Landseer's image of The Monarch of the Glen has been visually conflated with Scott's literary work in the minds of so many.”

StereotypeHighlandsWalter ScottStagScottish Highlands RomanceRed DeerThe TrossachsEdwin Landseer
Book:Literary Tourism, the Trossachs and Walter Scott
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“Time changed for the Romantics. Whether from the rise of industrialism that made visible the accelerating edge of the Anthropocene, from the contrasting awareness of geological time, the effects of accurate time-keeping, or the collapse of time and space made possible by steam travel, their period's momentum seemed resolutely forward, while at the same time operating 'in widely varying scales, paces and planes'. That change came early for Scots, who numbered among them Watt, of the steam engine (1765), and Hutton, who published the seminal Theory of the Earth (1788). For Walter Scott, who belonged to the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1810 and served as its President from 1820, that society having published Hutton's theory, and who knew Watt personally, time's many turns would have been particularly evident.”

TimeRomanticismGeological TimeWalter ScottAnthropoceneJames WattJames Hutton
Book:The International Companion to the Scottish Novel
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“But besides this, my father, though a Borderer, transacted business for many Highland Lairds, and particularly for one old man called Stuart of Invernahyle, who had been out both in 1715 and '45, and whose tales were the absolute delight of my childhood. I believe there never was a man who united the ardour of soldier and tale-teller - a man of "talk" as they call it in Gaelic - in such an excellent degree, and he was as fond of telling as I was of hearing. I became a valliant Jacobite at the age of ten years, and ever since reason and reading came to my assistance I have never quite got rid of the impression which the gallantry of Prince Charles made on my imagination.”

Walter ScottCharles Edward StuartJacobitism
Author:Walter Scott
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“A further stroll among the hills brought us to what Scott pronounced the remains of a Roman camp, and as we sat upon a hillock which had once formed part of its ramparts, he pointed out the traces of the lines and bulwarks, and the praetorium, and showed a knowledge of castramentation that would not have disgraced Oldbuck himself. Indeed, various circumstances that I observed about Scott during my visit concurred to persuade me that many of the antiquarian humours of Monkbarns were taken from his own richly compounded character, and that some of the scenes and personages of that admirable novel were furnished by his own neighbourhood.”

Walter ScottScottish BordersAntiquarianismJonathan OldbuckThe AntiquaryNewstead
Book:Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey
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“Just between Melrose and Bemersyde is a lovely panorama, taking in an oxbow of the Tweed and a fine aspect of the Eildon Hills, which has become known as 'Scott's View', supposedly because the horses stopped there during the funeral cortege. As we have seen, after his death, Scott is over-written onto the places he described. Scott-land is a palimpsest of Scotland and Scott's works.”

ScotlandPanoramaWalter ScottScottish BordersEildonRiver Tweed
Book:Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation
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“As we descended the vale of the Gala, he began to gaze about him, and by degrees it was obvious that he was recognising the features of that familiar landscape. Presently he murmered a name or two - 'Gala Water surely - Buckholm - Torwoodlee'. As we rounded the hill at Ladhope, and the outline of the Eildons burst upon him, he became greatly excited, and when turning himself on the couch his eye caught caught at length his own towers, at the distance of a mile, he sprang up with a cry of delight.”

LandscapeWalter ScottScottish BordersEildon1832AbbotsfordGala Water
Book:Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 5 of 5
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“As Walter Scott showed, one could preserve the most intense passion for Caledonia stern and wild, one's own, one's native land, while rejoicing in the triumphs of the British armed forces over Napoleon and expressing devout loyalty to the Hanovarian dynasty, which, despite the madness of George III and the profligacy of his son and heir, had come to represent for Britons not only the virtues of sturdy monarchy under the sublime Constitution, but, most improbably, family values.”

ScotlandMonarchyFamily ValuesBritonsWalter ScottGeorge IvGeorge IiiHouse Of Hanover
Book:Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland
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