Sir Walter Scott

In the summer of 1814, Scott took up again and completed--almost at a single heat,--a fragment of a Jacobite story, begun in 1805 and then laid aside. It was published anonymous...

Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father--a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor--was the first of...

Scott's genius flowered late. _Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802,...

With the year 1825 came a financial crisis, and Constable began to tremble for his solvency. From the date of his baronetcy Sir Walter had launched out into a considerable incre...

As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father, and then in the law classes of the University, he became no...

Before I make mention of Scott's greatest works, his novels, I must say a few words of his relation to the Ballantyne Brothers, who involved him, and were involved by him, in so...

In the month of September, 1831, the disease of the brain which had long been in existence must have made a considerable step in advance. For the first time the illusion seemed...

Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very easily heated, while his knowledge was apt...

In May, 1812, Scott having now at last obtained the salary of the Clerkship of Session, the work of which he had for more than five years discharged without pay, indulged himsel...

I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some slight sketch of his chosen companions, and o...

Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Bürger's _Lenore_, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but cer...

Between 1814 and the end of 1825, Scott's literary labour was interrupted only by one serious illness, and hardly interrupted by that,--by a few journeys,--one to Paris after th...

One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar, Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church during a shower; th...

So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends, without also knowing his external surro...

Sir Walter certainly left his "name unstained," unless the serious mistakes natural to a sanguine temperament such as his, are to be counted as stains upon his name; and if they...

The very same causes which limited Scott's humour and irony to the commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing into his stories characters of the high...

The first relations of Scott with the Court were, oddly enough, formed with the Princess, not with the Prince of Wales. In 1806 Scott dined with the Princess of Wales at Blackhe...