In the Library
Old Mortality
Sir Walter Scott, 1816
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 46
- Length
- Length 173k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
we are both fanatics; but there is some distinction between the fanaticism of honour and that of dark and sullen superstition.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
James Hogg
Hogg does the same thing from inside the fanatic's head, taking Scotland's Covenanting inheritance one step further and letting a young man be argued cheerfully into murder.
£1.99
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell
Orwell does the same thing from life: a holy war, a militia splintering into sects over doctrine, and a man hunted by the side he came to fight for.
£1.99
About the book
The letters on the Covenanters' graves stayed legible far longer than weather allows, because for nearly thirty years an old man walked the kirkyards of Galloway with a chisel and a white pony, cutting moss out of the martyrs' names. The tale he told is this one. In 1679 the psalm-singing rebels beat the king's dragoons at Drumclog and were broken three weeks later at Bothwell Bridge, and Henry Morton, who will not be a zealot for anybody, is arrested for one night's shelter given to the man who murdered an archbishop. Scott lets nobody win the argument. The wild preachers are absurd, they are right about what is being done to them, and they condemn Morton to death for not hating hard enough. Claverhouse is courteous, cultivated, gentle with prisoners, and remarks without embarrassment that a ploughman's blood is thinner than a gentleman's. Then the Council calls for the iron boot and the wedges, and the preacher in the chair, asked which leg he will give, stretches out his right and tells the executioner to take the best one.