Sir Walter Scott was for a time Quartermaster, Paymaster and Secretary of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, later merged in the Royal Midlothian Yeomanry Cavalry.

SCOTT, Sir Walter : and Reginald Heber.
The Field Of Waterloo : a poem [BOUND WITH] Europe : lines on the present war by Reginald Heber [BOUND WITH] The Gentleman's Magazine January 1822 *and* Feb 1822. By Sylavanus Urban, gent.
Publisher: Scott's Field Of Waterloo, Edinburgh, Constable &c 1815 : Heber's Europe, London, Hatchard 1809 : Gentleman's Magazine, Lond
First Edition.
Stock No: 9288
3 Titles in 1 Volume. First Edition Scott, pp54 but bound without half-title : First Edition Heber, ppviii + 32 but bound without half-title : First Edition Gentleman's Magazine, frontispiece + 3 plates + pp192. Bound together in contemporary half calf, spine elegantly gilt and titled Poems &c, slight wear or rubbing to extremeties of binding, a little dried along hinges and head of upper joint cracking along 1 inch at the top section, else a very good mellow copy. --oOo-- Scott was fascinated by Napoleon and later wrote a 7-volume biography of him. This famous poem resulted from Scott's trip to the site of Waterloo - in fact his very first trip abroad - a mere six weeks after the battle. The proceeds of the poem went to support the dependents of those who had been slaughtered there. 'Like many of his generation, he saw the Emperor's defeat by Wellington as the decisive moment of history. At Waterloo, Scott found the ground still torn with shot and shell and rutted with the wheels of the ordinance. He was able to buy two cuirasses for his armoury at Abbotsford. He was given a manuscript collection of French songs, picked up on the battlefield, and two of Napoleon's pistols taken from his carriage ... He was conducted over the field by Scottish officers who had fought the action only weeks before. Hitherto Scott's soldiering had been confined to drill with the Edinburgh Volunteer Cavalry, and to his own descriptions of battles in Marmion and Waverley : here was the real thing' [Anderson : TLS 1993]. The poem Europe is an early work by Heber, a friend of Walter Scott and later Bishop of Calcutta. Neither title listed in The Sandler Collection.
GBP £95.00 (USD $153.07)


Not one of Scott's inspired efforts, and reviewers delightedly but on the whole justly called it "a falling off". One wit wrote: "On Waterloo's ensanguined plain / Full many a gallant man was slain, / But none, by bullet or by shot, / Fell half so flat as Walter Scott." Despite this joke there were vigorous and colorful sections in the poem. Lord Byron himself greeted Scott's poem with generous enthusiasm. - Edgar Johnson. Sir Walter Scott. The Great Unknown, 1970, pp.508-9

He also published notes on his trip under the title "Paul's letters to his Kinsfolk"