Born in Edinburgh in 1771, Scott was interested all his life in Scottish history, folk tales, and the supernatural, three of the major components of "Wandering Willie's Tale." As a child, he listened to stories and songs about the Jacobite rebellions in which some of his distant relatives had fallen, and he developed a lifelong sympathy for the lost cause of Jacobitism, writing about it in several of his novels, including Redgauntlet, the novel in which "Wandering Willie's Tale" is found. However, his attitude to Jacobitism and the old feudal and heroic ways was ambivalent; he became a lawyer like his father, and was very much a part of the modern world of law and commerce, in opposition to the old feudal Scotland symbolized by the Jacobites.

In a sense, Scott took it upon himself to seek some sort of incorporation of the old Scotland into the...