Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (March 31, 1844, Selkirk – July 20, 1912, Banchory, Kincardineshire) was a prolific Scots man of letters. He was a poet, novelist, and literary critic, and contributor to anthropology. He now is best known as the collector of folk and fairy tales, including the works of Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Sourced

• There’s a joy without canker or cark,
  There’s a pleasure eternally new,
  ’T is to gloat on the glaze and the mark
  Of china that’s ancient and blue.
  • Ballades in Blue China (1880), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Here’s a pot with a cot in a park
  In a park where the peach-blossoms blew,
  Where the lovers eloped in the dark,
  Lived, died and were changed into two
  Bright birds that eternally flew
  Through the boughs of the may, as they sang;
  ’T is a tale was undoubtedly true
  In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.
  • Ballades in Blue China (1880), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• The windy lights of Autumn flare;
  I watch the moonlit sails go by;
  I marvel how men toil and fare,
  The weary business that they play!
  Their voyaging is vanity,
  And fairy gold is all their gain,
  And all the winds of winter cry,
  “My Love returns no more again.”
  • Ballade of Autumn, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Attributed

• He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than illumination.
  • Widely attributed to Lang (e.g. in Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press; and in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press) but the original source has not been found.

External links

• Works by Andrew Lang at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Andrew Lang at Internet Archive
• Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Books
• A Monk of Fife Complete Book Online
• Custom and Myth - full text HTML of original work.
• Andrew Lang, Anthropology and Religion, The Making of Religion, (Chapter II), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 39–64.
• Andrew Lang, Crystal visions, savage and civilised, The Making of Religion, Chapter V, Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 83–104.
• Andrew Lang, The Poltergeist and his explainers, The Making of Religion, (Appendix B), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 324–339.
• Andrew Lang, Letters to Dead Authors, transcribed from the 1886 Longman's edition.