Sir Walter Scott: A Lecture at the Sorbonne

by W. P. Ker

SIR WALTER SCOTT

A Lecture at the Sorbonne,
May 22, 1919, in the series of
Conférences 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 Odéon, 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.'