"If the tradition doesn't exist, he'll have to discover it." (March 20, 1814)

That king of epigraphs, Walter Scott, frequently gives "Old Ballad" or "Old Song" as his source, and I've recently noticed that Elizabeth Gaskell has a suspicious number of "Anonymous" epigraphs, too. Someone has probably done extensive research about this. If it's you, can you tell me whether my hunch is correct, and they simply used these attributions when they'd made the epigraph up themselves, or couldn't be bothered to trace it?

from Walter Scott, Old Mortality

 

And while we're on the topic of quotations, there is an unattributed, untranslated Latin tag on p. 136, where Justin says, "Non sum qualis eram." This is from Horace, Odes, book 4, no. 1, l. 3, and translates as "I am not what I was." While Justin may have studied Horace at school, it is equally possible that he simply picked up the tag, along with a vague idea of what it means, from his surroundings, as one does, without ever really thinking about it. Either way it firmly places him in his social class.

This is how to do it! An example from Walter Scott's Redgauntlet

Quotations may be an elegant way of adding colour to a character, but they are also a tool of social exclusion, which is why I try never to use them without translation or attribution. Sorry about the omission, and thanks to Lona Manning for alerting me to it!