Works
Napier's reputation was literary rather than legal: his only strictly legal works were The Law of Prescription in Scotland, 1839, 2nd edit. 1854, and Letters to the Commissioners of Supply of the County of Dumfries, in Reply to a Report of a Committee of their Number on the Subject of Sheriff Courts, 1852, 2nd edit. 1852.
In 1834 Napier published Memoirs of John Napier of Merchiston; and in 1839 he edited Napier's unpublished manuscripts with an introduction. His other biographical works suffered from partisan exaggerations arising from his Jacobitism. On the Marquis of Montrose he published Montrose and the Covenanters, 1838, Life and Times of Montrose, 1840, Memorials of Montrose and his Times, a collection of original documents edited for the Maitland Club (vol. i. 1848, and vol. ii. 1850); and the summation in Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose, two vols. 1856.
Napier's Memorials of Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 1859–62, included letters of Claverhouse and other documents not previously in print. Its publication led to controversy about the drowning of the two women, Margaret Maclachlan and Margaret Wilson, known as the "Wigtown Martyrs". Napier raised doubts as to whether the execution took place; and he replied to his objectors in the Case for the Crown in re the Wigtown Martyrs proved to be Myths versus Wodrow and Lord Macaulay, Patrick the Pedlar and Principal Tulloch, 1863; and in History Rescued, in Reply to History Vindicated (by the Rev. Archibald Stewart), 1870.
Napier in 1835 published a History of the Partition of Lennox; the Napiers had an historical connection with the earldom of Lennox. He also edited vols. ii. and iii. of John Spotiswood's History of the Church of Scotland for the Bannatyne Club in 1847. The Lennox of Auld, an Epistolary Review of “The Lennox” by William Fraser was published posthumously in 1880, edited by his son Francis.
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.”
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“I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.”
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“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
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