Walter Scott Quotes

“The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”
― Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. — I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it — but fear I must.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“Albert Graeme

It was an English ladye bright,
(The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall)
And she would marry a Scottish knight,
For Love will still be lord of all.

Blithely they saw the rising sun
When he shone fair on Carlisle wall;
But they were sad ere day was done,
Though Love was still the lord of all.

Her sire gave brooch and jewel fine,
Where the sun shines fair on Carlisle wall;
Her brother gave but a flask of wine,
For ire that Love was lord of all.

For she had lands both meadow and lea,
Where the sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,
For he swore her death, ere he would see
A Scottish knight the lord of all.

That wine she had not tasted well
(The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall)
When dead, in her true love's arms, she fell,
For Love was still the lord of all!

He pierced her brother to the heart,
Where the sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,
So perish all would true love part
That Love may still be lord of all!

And then he took the cross divine,
Where the sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,
And died for her sake in Palestine;
So Love was still the lord of all.

Now all ye lovers, that faithful prove,
(The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall)
Pray for their souls who died for love,
For Love shall still be lord of all!

-- Canto 6”
― Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

“Scott calls Bois-Guilbert 'an unprincipled voluptuary,' which is hard to improve on.”
― Richard Armour, The Classics Reclassified

“...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.”
― David Murison, Grampian Hairst: An Anthology of Northeast Prose

“Scott and Terry created a political theatre in which a Hanovarian English monarch could appear on the stage of Edinburgh to act the part of a Stuart king.”
― Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence

“Literary subjects as a whole enjoyed a great popularity at the Salon of 1839. France had a passionate addiction throughout the twenties and thirties to English literature, English history, and Goethe. This addiction is seen, for instance, in the extraordinary popularity of the historical novels of Walter Scott. Their pages held not only events and figures of profound interest to a history-curious society, but also a wealth of descriptive detail about the material side of life in other times: what people did, what their homes were like, how they spoke, how they dressed, what they fought about, what they believed in, and—most entertaining—whom they loved. These accounts, told by a fictional observer of the lower class, found universal favor. The educated admired Scott’s erudition, while all social strata loved his use of local color, description, and melodramatic anecdotes.

Scott’s historical novel, by format and methods, is the primary literary source of the genre historique in history painting. Both were equally popular in the arts. Both directly reflect bourgeois tastes and were dependent for their proliferation on a new literate, commercial society. By the early thirties, the Scott repertoire was so well known that a Salon audience would have found the stories recognizable without a catalog entry.”
― Patricia Condon, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848

“Scott saw its ludicrous proportions; and it is likely that posterity will remember the Pictish question in the discussion between Monkbarns and Sir Arthur Wardour after the volumes of Whitaker, Goodall, Pinkerton, Chalmers, Ritter, and Grant have been long entombed in their proper shelves.”
― John Hill Burton

“Oh Tillietudlem, no matter whaur I be,
Tillietudlem Castle 'll aye be dear tae me.
T'was there I met my Mary when first I went to see
Tillietudlem Castle and its bonny scenery.”
― Neil Munro, Erchie, My Droll Friend

“The gallery context of Scotch Myths puts the objects on display in an interrogatory framework in a way that their presence in souvenir shops does not. Similarly, the exhibition catalogue explicitly poses the correct questions and reinserts the objects into a history spanning the mid-eighteenth century to the present day: James Macpherson (1736-96), Ossianism; European Romanticism; Walter Scott (1771-1832), the appropriation of Scott and Scotland by Europe and America; the internal reappropriation by Scotland itself of earlier external appropriations, via the emergence of Kailyard; Scottish militarism in the context of nineteenth-century colonial wars, both World Wars and beyond; the dissemination of the ensemble of images and categories of thought within successive practices and technologies - literature, lithography, photography, the postcard, the music hall, films, television. It is one thing to see the imagery of Tartanry/Kailyard in its so-called natural habitats of the souvenir shop or the wall of a Scottish home; it is quite another thing to see it reproduced on orange crates from California.”
― Colin McArthur, Cencrastus No. 7: Winter 1981-82

“In short, we had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the Author of Waverley) than Lord Byron a hundred times over, and for the reason just given, namely, that he casts his descriptions in the mould of nature, ever-varying, never tiresome, always interesting and always instructive, instead of casting them constantly in the mould of his own individual impressions.

He gives us man as he is, or as he was, in almost every variety of situation, action and feeling. Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward things, sits in the centre of his thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright day, the glitter and the gloom 'in cell monastic.' We see the mournful pall, the crucifix, the death's-heads, the faded chaplet of flowers, the gleaming tapers, the agonized brow of genius, the wasted form of beauty; but we are still imprisoned in a dungeon; a curtain intercepts our view; we do not breathe freely the air of nature or of our own thoughts. The other admired author draws aside the curtain, and the veil of egotism is rent; and he shows us the crowd of living men and women, the endless groups, the landscape background, the cloud and the rainbow, and enriches our imaginations and relieves one passion by another, and expands and lightens reflection, and takes away that tightness at the breast which arises from thinking or wishing to think that there is nothing in the world out of a man's self!

In this point of view, the Author of Waverley is one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty, narrow, and bigoted prejudices: Lord Byron is the greatest pamperer of those prejudices, by seeming to think there is nothing else worth encouraging but the seeds or the full luxuriant growth of dogmatism and self-conceit. In reading the Scotch Novels, we never think about the author, except from a feeling of curiosity respecting our unknown benefactor: in reading Lord Byron's works, he himself is never absent from our minds. The colouring of Lord Byron's style, however rich and dipped in Tyrian dyes, is nevertheless opaque, is in itself an object of delight and wonder: Sir Walter Scott's is perfectly transparent. In studying the one, you seem to gaze at the figures cut in stained glass, which exclude the view beyond, and where the pure light of Heaven is only a means of setting off the gorgeousness of art: in reading the other, you look through a noble window at the clear and varied landscape without. Or to sum up the distinction in one word, Sir Walter Scott is the most dramatic writer now living, and Lord Byron is the least so.”
― William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age

“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.”
― Stuart Kelly, Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation

“When [Robert] Jamieson, the editor of the 5th edition of Burt's Letters, was in the Highlands in 1814, he met a savage-looking fellow on the top of Ben Lomond who told him that he had been a guide to the mountain for more than forty years, but now 'a Walter Scott' had spoiled his trade. 'I wish,' said he, 'I had him a ferry over Loch Lomond; I should be after sinking the boat, if I drowned myself into the bargain, for ever since he wrote his Lady of the Lake, as they call it, everybody goes to see that filthy hole, Loch Ketterine. The devil confound his ladies and his lakes!”
― John Campbell Shairp, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803

“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.”
― Murdo MacDonald, Literary Tourism, the Trossachs and Walter Scott

“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.”
― John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. 5 of 5

“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.”
― Brian Gould, Midlothian Station Walks

“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.”
― Angus Calder, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“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 Scott

“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.”
― Washington Irving, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey

“Scott found himself caught between a deep-seated loyalty to, and knowledge of, his country and an equally fundamental commitment to the Union with England. He sought to find a way for Scotland to accommodate its sense of identity with the economic and other benefits of being a partner in the greatest empire the world had yet seen, This was both a deliberate and a subconscious for a highly intelligent, complex, energetic and emotional man. To complete it successfully, the Scottish past had to b turned into a kind of serious playground, rich in possibility except for the possibility that it might inform the future in some disruptive way. Scott well knew, because of the way he himself was affected by it, that Scottish history had the potential to release grear energy: fascinated by it, he nevertheless felt a need to keep it, like a wild animal, behind a barrier of time. It was therefore fitting to his purpose that he should make the extraordinary claim to his tens of thousands of readers - in a book aimed particularly at the young - that nothing worth drawing to ther attention had occurred in Scotland in the pasr eighty years.”
― James Robertson, Finding Out the Rest: History and Scotland Now

“Walter Scott needs no celebrations, no feast held in his honour. Scotland herself is his monument. It is with no ephemeral enthusiasm that we regard a man whose thoughts, whose words rise to our lips unawares, whose creations are our familiar friends, and who has thrown a glow of light and brightness over the scenes which are dearest to us. From Schiehallion to Crifel, from the soft coves and lochs of the west to the rugged eastern coast with all its rocks and storms, something of him is on every hillside and glen. We do not know of any poet who has so identied himself with a country, so wrapped himself in its beauty, and enveloped it with his genius, as this greatest of our national writers has done for scotland.”
― Mrs. Oliphant

“Scott was a great poet - one of the greatest - but not in verse. In verse he is ever and at all times a minstrel, and nothing more. He is the modern representative of that most perennially popular of characters, the bard who weaves into living song the exploits and the adventures of heroes.”
― Mrs. Oliphant

“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.”
― Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature

“[Walter Scott] lived in a hiatus, in a country which was neither a nation nor a province, and had, instead of a centre, a blank, an Edinburgh, in the middle of it.”
― Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer

“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.”
― Mrs. Oliphant

“Here was... a revelation of a whole broad country, varied as nature is, and as true. The veil was drawn from the face of Scotland, not only to other nations, but to her own astonished delighted inhabitants, who had hitherto despised or derided the Highland caterans, but now saw suddenly with amazed eyes the courtly figure of Vich Ian Vohr descending from the mists, the stately and beautiful Flora, with all their attendants, such surrounding personages as Evan Dhu and Callum Beg, either of them enough to have made an ordinary man's fortune.”
― Mrs. Oliphant

“Who shall tell us a story?
Sir Walter Scott of course.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“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.”
― Caroline McCracken-Flesher, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“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.”
― Rupert Ferguson, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrel Tradition