Paris Revisited, in 1815, By Way of Brussels: Including a Walk over the Field of Battle at Waterloo. Second Edition.

SCOTT, John.

Published by LondonPrinted for Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown ., 1816

About this Item

8vo. (22.5 x 14.5 cm). pp. [6, publisher's adverts]+viii+405. Uncut in original pale blue boards, renewed paper spine with original label, renewed f.f.e.p. Binding a bit scuffed with minor loss of paper to upper cover, generally a very good unsophisticated copy. The author and journalist John Scott (1784-1821) was a friend or associate of many writers of his period, including Byron (his schoolfriend), Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth, edited a number of radical and liberal journals, including The Statesman, The Censor, and Drakard's Stamford News, and was also the owner of Drakard's Paper (later renamed The Champion). In October 1814 he visited Paris for the first time and afterwards recorded his impressions in A Visit to Paris in 1814 (1815). He sent a copy of this work to Wordsworth and, while visiting B. R. Haydon in his studio in April 1815 met the poet, who was sitting for his cast. The two men became close friends. The present work, Paris Revisited in 1815, a sequel to his earlier work, appeared in 1816 and was widely acclaimed. Reginald Heber considered Scott 'the ablest of the weekly journalists' and an excellent 'French tourist' (Heber, 2.432). Walter Scott was an admirer too, and William Beckford made four pages of notes on the two works. Scott later worked as the editor of the projected London Magazine, which was to be a monthly miscellany with a pronounced literary bias and, in its political liberalism, an antidote to the rabid toryism of Blackwood's Magazine, which was edited in Edinburgh by J. G. Lockhart and John Wilson. In May 1820 appeared the first of Scott's many attacks on the writings of Z in Blackwood's, whose venom had been directed at the 'cockney school' of Keats, Cornelius Webbe, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt. He successfully provoked Lockhart, the main object of his assaults, into branding him a 'liar and a scoundrel', but a physical confrontation was averted until February 1821, when a provocative statement from Jonathan Henry Christie, Lockhart's agent in London, was interpreted by Scott as a slur on his character. Christie was challenged to a duel and on 16 February the pair met at Chalk Farm, between Camden Town and Hampstead, at about nine o'clock in the evening. Christie did not fire on the first occasion, but owing to a misunderstanding between the seconds was forced to fire on a second occasion in self-defence. Scott was hit in the lower abdomen and removed to a local tavern, where he lay, attended by family and friends, until his death in the evening of 27 February (ODNB).

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Paris Revisited, in 1815, By Way of Brussels: Including a Walk over the Field of Battle at Waterloo. Second Edition.
• Publisher: LondonPrinted for Longman Hurst Rees Orme and Brown .
• Publication Date: 1816
• Binding: Soft cover
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  • TRAVEL & EXPLORATION