Waverley; Or, 'tis Sixty Years Since — Complete
Waverley; Or, 'tis Sixty Years Since — Complete
Waverley invented the historical novel. Before Walter Scott, no one thought to dramatize the past through the eyes of an ordinary person swept up in events far larger than themselves. This is the pioneering work that birthed an entire genre, influencing everyone from Dumas to Tolstoy, and it remains astonishingly alive two centuries later. Edward Waverley is a young English soldier stationed in Scotland whose idle curiosity and romantic temperament lead him into the heart of the 1745 Jacobite Rising. The son of a Whig father and a Tory uncle, Edward carries England's contradictions within him. Drawn to the honor and wild beauty of the Highland clans who take him in, he finds himself torn between duty to his king and loyalty to men who have become his friends. What follows is his education in the costs of loyalty, the seductions of idealism, and the brutal mathematics of civil war. Scott renders a Scotland on the verge of rebellion with incomparable richness, painting a world where sword and slogan carry equal weight, and where one young man's coming of age becomes a meditation on what it means to belong.
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“Wounds sustained for the sake of conscience carry their own balsam with the blow.””
— Walter Scott
“No word of commiseration can make a burden feel one feather's weight lighter to the slave who must carry it.””
— Walter Scott
“In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.””
— Walter Scott
“Trade has all the fascination of gambling without its moral guilt.””
— Walter Scott
“How nearly can what we most despise and hate, approach in outward manner to that which we most venerate!””
— Walter Scott
“Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street; but Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play.””
— Walter Scott
“I should be rather like the wild hawk, who, barred the free exercise of his soar through heaven, will dash himself to pieces against the bars of his cage.””
— Walter Scott
“I had just time to give a glance at these matters, when about twelve blue-coated servants burst into the hall with much tumult and talk, each rather employed in directing his comrades than in discharging his own duty. Some brought blocks and billets to the fire, which roared, blazed, and ascended, half in smoke, half in flame, up a huge tunnel, with an opening wide enough to accommodate a stone seat within its ample vault, and which was fronted, by way of chimney-piece, with a huge piece of heavy architecture, where the monsters of heraldry, embodied by the art of some Northumbrian chisel, grinned and ramped in red free-stone, now japanned by the smoke of centuries. Others of these old-fashioned serving-men bore huge smoking dishes, loaded with substantial fare; others brought in cups, flagons, bottles, yea barrels of liquor. All tramped, kicked, plunged, shouldered, and jostled, doing as little service with as much tumult as could well be imagined””
— Walter Scott
“unfortunate and ill-advised James II. But””
— Walter Scott
