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1 " From the time when Scots ceased to be the official language of government, since King's Scots had become King's English, the lack of a central authority to promote a standard had meant the growth of a bastard Anglo-Scots as the general lingo of society. "
― Sydney Goodsir Smith , A Short Introduction to Scottish Literature
2 " When MacDiarmid spoke of "Synthetic Scots" he merely referred to another aspect of this necessary revolution; that we should forget the whole poverty-stricken "dialect" tradition that Burns and his immediate predecessors had been unconsciously responsible for, and use again all the rich resources of the language as Dunbar and the Makars had used it, as had Burns and Fergusson, Scott, Galt, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown. "
3 " The typical Scottish writer of the nineteenth century went down to London with great talents, sometimes even genius, attempted for a short time to work in the English tradition for an English public and then, having drifted through hack journalism, either starved to death in a garret or took his own life. "