Produced by Constanze Hofmann, Jeanette Jordan, Lori Scoggins, Norilan, McMartha, sassi, Siobhan Hillman, Tamise Totterdell, Zara Baxter, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net SIR WALTER SCOTT A Lecture at the Sorbonne, May 22, 1919, in the series of _Conferences Louis Liard_ BY WILLIAM PATON KER, LL.D. GLASGOW MACLEHOSE, JACKSON AND CO. PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 1919 NOTE This Essay appeared in the _Anglo-French Review_, August, 1919, and I am obliged to the Editor and Publisher for leave to reprint it. W. P. K. Sir Walter Scott When I was asked to choose a subject for a lecture at the Sorbonne, there came into my mind somehow or other the incident of Scott's visit to Paris when he went to see _Ivanhoe_ at the Odeon, and was amused to think how the story had travelled and made its fortune:-- 'It was an opera, and, of course, the story sadly mangled and the dialogue in great part nonsense. Yet it was strange to hear anything like the words which (then in an agony of pain with spasms in my stomach) I dictated to William Laidlaw at Abbotsford, now recited in a foreign tongue, and for the amusement of a strange people. I little thought to have survived the completing of this novel.' It seemed to me that here I had a text for my sermon. The cruel circumstances of the composition of _Ivanhoe_ might be neglected. The interesting point was in the contrast between the original home of Scott's imagination and the widespread triumph of his works abroad--on the one hand, Edinburgh and Ashestiel, the traditions of the Scottish border and the Highlands, the humours of Edinburgh lawyers and Glasgow citizens, country lairds, farmers and ploughmen, the Presbyterian eloquence of the Covenanters and their descendants, the dialect hardly intelligible out of its own region, and not always clear even to natives of Scotland; on the other hand, the competition for Scott's novels in all the markets of Europe, as to which I take leave to quote the evidence of Stendhal:-- 'Lord Byron, auteur de quelques heroides sublimes, mais toujours les memes, et de beaucoup de tragedies mortellement ennuyeuses, n'est point du tout le chef des romantiques. 'S'il se trouvait un homme que les traducteurs a la toise se disputassent egalement a Madrid, a Stuttgard, a Paris et a Vienne, l'on pourrait avancer que cet homme a devine les tendances morales de son epoque.'