Sir Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh on 15 August 1771 and dead at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832, became one of the most influential writers in the English language: a poet who dominated the reading public before Byron, a novelist who effectively established the modern historical novel, an editor and antiquarian who preserved Scottish oral traditions, a lawyer and public official, a conservative political figure, an…
“But it must be by your own exertions, my dearest boy, that you must render yourself qualified to avail yourself of the opportunities which you may have offered to you.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Romantic Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, born in 1730 and dead on 13 February 1809, occupies an unusual but revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was a career cavalry officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, a man connected by birth and service to the highest military and courtly circles, and the author of a short poem whose best-known stanza has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. “One crowded ho…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Sorrow, Longing
