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The Novels and Poems of Sir Walter Scott: The fair maid of Perth
The Novels and Poems of Sir Walter Scott The fair maid of Perth Author:Walter Scott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. A country lip may have the velvet touch: Though she's no lady, she may please as much. Dbtdbv. Perth, boasting, as we have already mentione... more »d, so large a portion of the beauties of inanimate nature, has at no time been without its own share of those charms which are at once more interesting and more transient. To be called the Fair Maid of Perth would at any period have been a high distinction, and have inferred no mean superiority in beauty, where there were many to claim that much-envied attribute. But, in the feudal times, to which we now call the reader's attention, female beauty was a quality of much higher importance than it has been since the ideas of chivalry have been in a great measure extinguished. The love of the ancient cavaliers was a licensed species of idolatry, which the love of Heaven alone was theoretically supposed to approach in intensity, and which in practice it seldom equalled. God and the ladies were familiarly appealed to in the same breath; and devotion to the fair sex was as peremptorily enjoined upon the aspirant to the honour of chivalry, as that which was due to Heaven. At such a period in society, the power of beauty was almost unlimited. It could level the highest rank with that which wag immeasurably inferior. It was but in the reign preceding that of Robert III., that beauty alone had elevated a person of inferior rank and indifferent morals to share the Scottish throne;1 and many women, less artful or less fortunate, had risen to greatness from a state of concubinage, for which the manners of the times made allowance and apology. Such views might have dazzled a girl of higher birth than Catharine, or Katie, Glover, who was universally acknowledged to be the most beautiful young woman of the city or its vicinity, and whose...« less