PREFACE. WITH the importance of cultivating the taste for reading as well as the taste for good literature every teacher is well acquainted. Both these points have been kept in view in preparing the following readings from Sir Walter Scott, than whom few of the chiefs of English literature combine in a higher degree interest of narrative with excellence of style. The readings here given from the writings of the “great Wizard of the North,” while serving as samples of the author's style, are equally well suited to exhibit his narrative powers; and the device has been adopted of linking the extracts from the same work one with another so as to present a continuous and interesting story, such as will excite and train both the imaginative and the thinking faculty. The works from which the excerpts have been made, both prose and poetry, have the further advantage of all bearing upon or elucidating some portion of English history. |