{"product_id":"2940014928243","title":"Letters On Demonology \u0026 Witchcraft","description":"INTRODUCTION.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSir Walter Scott's \"Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft\" were his\u003cbr\u003econtribution to a series of books, published by John Murray, which\u003cbr\u003eappeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a collection of\u003cbr\u003eeighty volumes known as \"Murray's Family Library.\" The series was\u003cbr\u003eplanned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature in cheap\u003cbr\u003efive-shilling volumes, and Scott's \"Letters,\" written and published in\u003cbr\u003e1830, formed one of the earlier books in the collection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in\u003cbr\u003ethe autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of\u003cbr\u003ea National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the\u003cbr\u003esuperintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in\u003cbr\u003esixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its \"British Almanac\" and \"Companion\u003cbr\u003eto the Almanac\" first appeared at the beginning of 1829. Charles Knight\u003cbr\u003estarted also in that year his own \"Library of Entertaining Knowledge.\"\u003cbr\u003eJohn Murray's \"Family Library\" was then begun, and in the spring of\u003cbr\u003e1832--the year of the Reform Bill--the advance of civilization by the\u003cbr\u003ediffusion of good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap\u003cbr\u003ebooks, was sought by the establishment of \"Chambers's Edinburgh Journal\"\u003cbr\u003ein the North, and in London of \"The Penny Magazine.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter\u003cbr\u003eScott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February,\u003cbr\u003e1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited by an old friend\u003cbr\u003ewho brought him memoirs of her father, which he had promised to revise\u003cbr\u003efor the press. He seemed for half an hour to be bending over the papers\u003cbr\u003eat his desk, and reading them; then he rose, staggered into the\u003cbr\u003edrawing-room, and fell, remaining speechless until he had been bled.\u003cbr\u003eDieted for weeks on pulse and water, he so far recovered that to friends\u003cbr\u003eoutside his family but little change in him was visible. In that\u003cbr\u003econdition, in the month after his seizure, he was writing these Letters,\u003cbr\u003eand also a fourth series of the \"Tales of a Grandfather.\" The slight\u003cbr\u003esoftening of the brain found after death had then begun. But the old\u003cbr\u003edelight in anecdote and skill in story-telling that, at the beginning of\u003cbr\u003ehis career, had caused a critic of his \"Border Minstrelsy\" to say that\u003cbr\u003eit contained the germs of a hundred romances, yet survived. It gave to\u003cbr\u003eScott's \"Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft\" what is for us now a\u003cbr\u003epathetic charm. Here and there some slight confusion of thought or style\u003cbr\u003erepresents the flickering of a light that flashes yet with its old\u003cbr\u003ebrilliancy. There is not yet the manifest suggestion of the loss of\u003cbr\u003epower that we find presently afterwards in \"Count Robert of Paris\" and\u003cbr\u003e\"Castle Dangerous,\" published in 1831 as the Fourth Series of \"Tales of\u003cbr\u003eMy Landlord,\" with which he closed his life's work at the age of sixty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMilton has said that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write\u003cbr\u003ewell in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem. Scott's life\u003cbr\u003ewas a true poem, of which the music entered into all he wrote. If in his\u003cbr\u003eearlier days the consciousness of an unlimited productive power tempted\u003cbr\u003ehim to make haste to be rich, that he might work out, as founder of a\u003cbr\u003efamily, an ideal of life touched by his own genius of romance, there was\u003cbr\u003enot in his desire for gain one touch of sordid greed, and his ideal of\u003cbr\u003elife only brought him closer home to all its duties. Sir Walter Scott's\u003cbr\u003egood sense, as Lord Cockburn said, was a more wonderful gift than his\u003cbr\u003egenius. When the mistake of a trade connection with James Ballantyne\u003cbr\u003ebrought ruin to him in 1826, he repudiated bankruptcy, took on himself\u003cbr\u003ethe burden of a debt of £130,000, and sacrificed his life to the\u003cbr\u003esuccessful endeavour to pay off all. What was left unpaid at his death\u003cbr\u003ewas cleared afterwards by the success of his annotated edition of his\u003cbr\u003enovels. No tale of physical strife in the battlefield could be as heroic\u003cbr\u003eas the story of the close of Scott's life, with five years of a\u003cbr\u003edeath-struggle against adversity, animated by the truest sense of\u003cbr\u003ehonour. When the ruin was impending he wrote in his diary, \"If things go\u003cbr\u003ebadly in London, the magic wand of the Unknown will be shivered in his\u003cbr\u003egrasp. The feast of fancy will be over with the feeling of independence.\u003cbr\u003eHe shall no longer have the delight of waking in the morning with bright\u003cbr\u003eideas in his mind, hasten to commit them to paper, and count them\u003cbr\u003emonthly, as the means of planting such scaurs and purchasing such\u003cbr\u003ewastes; replacing dreams of fiction by other prospective visions of\u003cbr\u003ewalks by\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Fountain-heads, and pathless groves;\u003cbr\u003e Places which pale passion loves.'","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47074082750704,"sku":"2940014928243","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014928243","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}