This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 Excerpt: ...spoke the famous words to Lockhart, his son-in-law, "Lockhart, I may have but a moment to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous, be religious--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." So died, September 21, 1832, a bravehearted and knightly gentleman. The copyright ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 Excerpt: ...spoke the famous words to Lockhart, his son-in-law, "Lockhart, I may have but a moment to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous, be religious--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." So died, September 21, 1832, a bravehearted and knightly gentleman. The copyright on his works, assigned to the creditors, paid off the balance of the debt in fifteen years. He had liked, in the time of vigor and prosperity, to think of himself as the head of a great house, a survivor into the nineteenth century of the nobleman of heroic times. In this he failed. His poems and tales, valued by himself mainly as a means for providing his estate and later for paying the obligations that he voluntarily assumed, are immortal. Immortal, too, is his personality. In his vast appetite for life, for friendship; in his love for nature and dogs; in his love for old tales and for the simple, straightforward life they dealt with, he reminds one of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike the great American, Scott had no sense of reform or mission. Through the influence of a great personality, each man was greater than the work he performed. Like Ulysses, they were men cast in heroic mold. The Poem The Lady of the Lake is a story dealingwith the life of King James V of Scotland, who lived in the sixteenth century. The events narrated in it may be imagined as having taken place in about 1529, and while the story is not historical, being chiefly the product of Scott's imagination, it is a good example of the poet's power to reconstruct the life of a past time so vividly as to give to it something of the truth of history. The historical background needed for a clearer reading of the poem is here given. As a boy, King James was under the ...
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