A review by jaironside
One Hundred and One Famous Poems, by John James Ingalls, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Francis William Bourdillon, Henry Van Dyke, Thomas Buchanan Read, John Milton, Thomas Hood, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Burns, Sam Walter Foss, Henry Holcomb Bennett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maltbie Davenport Babcock, Edward Lear, Thomas Gray, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Alan Seeger, John McCrae, Eugene Field, James Whitcomb Riley, Frank L. Stanton, Walter Scott, Edmund Vance Cooke, William Wordsworth, Alice Gary, John Greenleaf Whittier, Leigh Hunt, William Shakespeare, Joaquin Miller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward R. Sill, William Ernest Henley, James Russell Lowell, Phillips Brooks, Walt Whitman, Ellen H. Gates, William Herbert Carruth, Roy Jay Cook, Francis Miles Finch, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander Anderson, Rudyard Kipling, Sidney Lanier, John Burroughs, William Cullen Bryant, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron

4.0

This wasn't quite what I was expecting. I've given it four stars as I really like Walter Scott and I enjoyed the style. However Rob Roy himself is a marginal character. It is through Frances' eyes we see the story and I found him to be a bland and not especially engaging character. His observations on other people were acute and well delineated but when it came to himself, he was far less insightful. His clumsy courtship of Diana Vernon was only interesting because she was interesting - and it was hard not feel that she had been shoe-horned in for no other reason than to act as a romantic interest for Frances. Frances was such an unlikely Romantic hero that every time he said something along the lines of ' I reached for my sword...' my immediate thought was 'Where did he get a sword? Can he actually use a sword? He'll just hurt himself. Surely he'd be better off running away.' Which sums up how I felt about the narrator in a nut shell. That said this is described as one of Walter Scott's great Romances and deservedly so. He did after all create the entire genre and this is a good example of it. Not one of my favourites, however this still has much to recommend it - not least of which Scott's beautiful descriptions of the landscape and of a time now lost.