Ivanhoe

women who have devoted their thoughts to Heaven, and their actions to works of kindness to men—tending the sick, feeding the hungry, and relieving the distressed. Among these will Rebecca be numbered. Say this to thy lord, should he chance to inquire after the fate of her whose life he saved.”

There was an involuntary tremour on Rebecca’s voice, and a tenderness of accent, which perhaps betrayed more than she would willingly have expressed. She hastened to bid Rowena adieu.

“Farewell,” she said. “May He who made both Jew and Christian shower down on you His choicest blessings! The bark that wafts us hence will be under weigh ere we can reach the port.”

She glided from the apartment, leaving Rowena surprised as if a vision had passed before her. The fair Saxon related the singular conference to her husband, on whose mind it made a deep impression. He lived long and happily with Rowena, for they were attached to each other by the bonds of early affection, and they loved each other the more from the recollection of the obstacles which had impeded their union. Yet it would be inquiring too curiously to ask whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved.

Ivanhoe distinguished himself in the service of Richard, and was graced with farther marks of the royal favour. He might have risen still higher but for the premature death of the heroic C?ur-de-Lion, before the Castle of Chaluz, near Limoges. With the life of a generous, but rash and romantic, monarch perished all the projects which his ambition and his generosity had formed; to whom may be applied, with a slight alteration, the lines composed by Johnson for Charles of Sweden—

His fate was destined to a foreign strand,
A petty fortress and an ‘humble’ hand;
He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a TALE.⁴

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

1 (p. 3) Parnell’s Tale: The poetry that follows is from Thomas Parnell’s “A Fairy Tale, in the Ancient English Style” (1729; lines 97-99), slightly altered.

2 (p. 4) Men bless their stars and call it luxury: The line, slightly altered, is from Thomas Addison’s Cato (1713; 1.4.70).

3 (p. 5) “wonder that they please no more”: From Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749; line 263).

4 (p. 5) Logan’s tragedy of Runnamede: John Logan (1748-1788) was forced to give up his ministry in the Church of Scotland because of his success as a playwright. Runnamede, which concerns the events surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, was first staged in 1783.

5 (p. 6) trick upon trick: Scott misquotes from Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life (1802; 3.95).

6 (p. 7) Il Bondocani: Stories of II Bondocani, a robber chief featured in The Arabian Nights, were known in Europe in various forms beginning in the late Middle Ages.

7 (p. 11) Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe … And glad he could escape so: The historical circumstance of the rhyme is disputed, as these villages (with their manors) never belonged to the Hampden family. What is certain is that they are located in Buckinghamshire, far away from the action of the novel.

8 (p. 12) the freedom of the rules: Scott’s first profession was the law, and this refers to the right Scottish lawyers enjoyed to appear in English courts.

DEDICATORY EPISTLE

1 (p. 13) Rev. Dr. Dryasdust, F.A.S.: A fictitious character of Scott’s invention who first appears in his 1816 novel The Antiquary, Dryasdust is also the addressee for the “Introductory Epistle” to The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) and is the “author” of frame matter in two other Scott novels. His name has become proverbial, signifying the pedantic, fact-laden practice of history.

2 (p. 14) a second M’Pherson: James Macpherson (1736-1796) was responsible for the greatest literary hoax of the eighteenth century. His translations (1760-1763) of “Ossian,” an ancient Scottish bard who was greeted as the Celtic Homer, were fakes, written by himself.

3 (p. 14) Mohawks and Iroquois: The Iroquois, of which the Mohawks are one tribe, fought with the English against the French in the seventeenth century, and against the Americans in the War of Independence. In Scott’s time, an analogy between Native American tribes and the Highland clans of Scotland was commonly drawn.

4 (p. 15) the Bruces and Wallaces of Caledonia: Robert (the) Bruce (1274-1329) was crowned king of Scotland in 1306; he defeated the English in a famous battle at Bannockburn in 1314. Sir William Wallace (1270-1305) was another storied champion of Scottish independence, captured and executed by the English in 1305.

5 (p. 15) Erictho … in corpore qu?rit: Erictho, the witch consulted by Roman general Pompey in Lucan’s Pharsalia (first century A.D.), resurrects a corpse from the battlefield: “Prying into the inmost parts cold in death, till she finds the substance of the stiffened lungs unwounded and still firm, and seeking the power of utterance in a corpse” (6.629-231), translated by J. D. Duff (London, 1928), p. 351. The “Scottish magician” to whom Erictho is likened is Scott himself.

6 (p. 16) valley ofJehoshaphat: Scott seems here to confuse two biblical references: the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, and the valley of Jehoshaphat, referred to in Joel 3:12.

7 (p. 17) Dr. Henry … Mr. Strutt… Mr. Sharon Turner: Robert Henry, Joseph Strutt, and Sharon Turner were late-eighteenth-century historians whose work was vital to Scott’s reconstruction of the Middle Ages in Ivanhoe.

8 (p. 17) goblin tale: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) is considered the first modern Gothic novel in English, inaugurating a genre whose popular appeal is undiminished today.

9 (p. 19) “well of English undefiled”: The quoted phrase is from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596; 4.2.32). Spencer is referring to Chaucer’s English, not his own.

10 (p. 19) the unfortunate Chatterton: Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was the so-called “marvelous boy” whose forgeries of fifteenth-century poems were uncovered by Horace Walpole—which prompted his early suicide. Chatterton afterward became an icon of the Romantic movement.

11 (p. 19) “eyes, hands, organs, dimensions … same winter and summer”: These passages are near-quotations from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 3, scene