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Article: 'Will ye no' come back again?' whatever happened to Sir Walter Scott? (Scottish author)
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- May 1, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE golden age of railways recalled earlier nineteenth-century victories at Waterloo or Austerlitz. Scotland's capital chose to honour triumphs of another sort by 'the author of Waverley'. The rail traveller still arrives in Edinburgh at a station called after Sir Walter Scott's romantic novel of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.
The traveller emerges from the station depths to see the Gothic pinnacle of the Scott monument on Princes Street. If he is thirsty, he is not far from the Abbotsford, called after Scott's Tweedside mansion, and the Kenilworth, with a gaudily recognisable sign-portrait of the 'Wizard of the North' swinging above the door. And if the traveller ...