... though mathematics may teach a man how to build a bridge, it is what the Scotch Universities call the humanities, that teach h...im to be civil and sweet-tempered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've sometimes thought ... that the difference between us and the English is that the Scotch are hard in all other respects but so...ft with women, and the English are hard with women but soft in all other respects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davi...es, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, "Look, my Lord, it comes" ... Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from."M"From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of my country.... [W]ith that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression "come from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to pre...sent itself to the world as a Scotch banker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid sha...wl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol--and the wild waters are upon us now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now ...include my little dog Fala. Well, of course I don't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, learning that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him--at a cost to the tax payers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars--his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinquepace; the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch ji...g, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinquepace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior var...iety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of "Wut," is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »