The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border

The Mosstrooper: A Legend of the Scottish Border

After the death of my husband, Robert Scott Fittis, several of his friends suggested to me that some of his earlier writings should be re-published in book form as a Memorial of the Author, especially as it is now quite impossible to procure them otherwise. For these reasons I have chosen The Mosstrooper, which, although now re-published here as he revised it in a subsequent edition, was originally written by my late husband when he was only between sixteen and seventeen years of age. ROBERT SCOTT FITTIS represents a type of the Scottish man of letters which is rapidly disappearing. While it could not justly be said that he was unique as a personality, or that he introduced a novel combination of intellectual qualities and thereby formed an epoch, the honour must be ascribed to him of having continued the best traditions of the Augustan Age of Scottish Literature, and of maintaining the dignity in literary affairs to which his native land had attained. He was a Scotsman through and through, loving the land of his birth with intense devotion, reverencing the heroes whom she had brought forth to adorn the records alike of war and literature, and devoting the energies of a long life to setting before his countrymen the best models of patriotism for their imitation. His natural gifts were so strenuously cultivated that in his later days he was regarded as an inexhaustible encyclopdia of recondite information of the most varied kind. He was[Pg vi] from his youth an omnivorous reader, and he possessed that best of all gifts a reference memory, as Dean Stanley called it, and could bring forth from his treasures, new and old, a surprising variety of apt quotations and original inferences. In some respects his mind was akin to that of the late John Hill Burton, the historian. He had the same finical love of accuracy, the same fervid Scottish spirit, and a similarly broad outlook upon general literature which prevented him from becoming merely a local historian and nothing more. While his labours in connection with Perthshire history were unceasing, and have produced a rich storehouse of facts, he dealt with national history and literature in a manner which showed the breadth of his mind and the variegated nature of his studies. He was a historian, earnest to separate veritable truth from tradition; yet he was one eager to collect these very traditions as fragments of national character. A student of charters and a genealogist, over whom any time-stained charter or antique paper scrawled with crabbed penmanship exercised a fascination, he was still an ardent lover of poetry, especially such as described the flowery banks of Tay or Tummel, the gowany lea of Gowrie, or the Bens and Straths of Garth and Glen Lyon. Upon one of his title-pages he placed two quotations which aptly express his characteristics: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 41323
Author: Fittis, Robert Scott
Release Date: Nov 8, 2012
Format: eBook
Language: English