"Reiver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; "The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... (page 31), in comparing the modern acquisitive power of capital with that of the lance and sword; the only difference being that the levy of black mail in old times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and reiver frankly quartered himself on the publican for the night; the modern one merely makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy it. One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar; but the result, to the injured ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... our spearmen had found him, Yet at the last, ere a sword-thrust could save, Yet at the last, with his masters around him, He of the Faith spoke as master to slave; Yet at the last, tho' the Kafirs had maimed him, Broken by bondage and wrecked by the reiver,— Yet at the last, tho' the darkness had claimed him, He called upon Allah and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... bed of pine-needles; and by the Lord Harry 'twas none too soon, for if it hadn't been for the kindly moon dipping I'd have been in two pieces by now. 'To Jupiter Optimus Maximus I owe an altar,' says I, in my first recovered breath, and, 'curse that infernal reiver,' says I in my second, 'but I'll be ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease |
