Sir Walter Scott: A Lecture at the Sorbonne

The lecture considers how a novelist rooted in Scottish dialect, local humour and border traditions achieved wide European popularity, contrasting homegrown, idiomatic tales with romances set in English or foreign history. It surveys contemporary and later critics, citing praise and reservations from figures such as Stendhal, Balzac, Hazlitt, Thackeray and Byron, and compares the author's descriptive richness with charges that antiquarian detail might substitute for dramatic truth. The speaker defends the intention to preserve character and comic secondary personages, evaluates comparisons with Fenimore Cooper, and addresses objections concerning politics and religion.