LIFE.  Scott was born in Edinburgh, on August 15, 1771.  On both his mother’s and father’s side he was descended from old Border families, distinguished more for their feuds and fighting than for their intellectual attainments.  His father was a barrister, a just man, who often lost clients by advising them to be, first of all, honest in their lawsuits.  His mother was a woman of character and education, strongly imaginative, a teller of tales which stirred young Walter’s enthusiasm by revealing the past as a world of living heroes.

As a child, Scott was lame and delicate, and was therefore sent away from the city to be with his grandmother in the open country at Sandy Knowe, in Roxburghshire, near the Tweed.  This grandmother was a perfect treasure-house of legends concerning the old Border feuds.  From her wonderful tales Scott developed that intense love of Scottish history and tradition which characterizes all his work.

By the time he was eight years old, when he returned to Edinburgh, Scott’s tastes were fixed for life.  At the high school he was a fair scholar, but without enthusiasm, being more interested in Border stories than in the text-books.  He remained at school only six or seven years, and then entered his father’s office to study law, at the same time attending lectures at the university.  He kept this up for some six years without developing any interest in his profession, not even when he passed his examinations and was admitted to the Bar, in 1792.  After nineteen years of desultory work, in which he showed far more zeal in gathering Highland legends than in gaining clients, he had won two small legal offices which gave him enough income to support him comfortably.  His home, meanwhile, was at Ashestiel on the Tweed, where all his best poetry was written.

Scott’s literary work began with the translation from the German of Buerger’s romantic ballad of Lenore (1796) and of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen (1799); but there was romance enough in his own loved Highlands, and in 1802-1803 appeared three volumes of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which he had been collecting for many years.  In 1805, when Scott was 34 years old, appeared his first original work, The Lay of the Last Minstrel.  Its success was immediate, and when Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) aroused Scotland and England to intense enthusiasm, and brought unexpected fame to the author,—­without in the least spoiling his honest and lovable nature,—­Scott gladly resolved to abandon the law, in which he had won scant success, and give himself wholly to literature.  Unfortunately, however, in order to increase his earnings, he entered secretly into partnership with the firms of Constable and the brothers Ballantyne, as printer-publishers,—­a sad mistake, indeed, and the cause of that tragedy which closed the life of Scotland’s greatest writer.