SCOTT, SIR WALTER, (1771-1832), Scottish poet and novelist, was born at Edinburgh on Aug. 15, 1771. He came of an old Border family, and it was his pride in their real or supposed feudal dignity and their rough marauding exploits that first directed him to the study of Border history and poetry, the basis of his fame as a poet and romancer. His father, Walter Scott, a writer to the signet (or attorney) in Edinburgh—the original of the elder Fairford in Redgauntlet—was the first of the family to adopt a town life or a learned profession. His mother was the daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, a medical professor in the University of Edinburgh, who also traced descent from the chiefs of famous Border clans.
Scott's health in boyhood was uncertain; an attack of fever in infancy had left him permanently lame, and his nature was so lively and excitable that it was considered dangerous to press him and prudent rather to keep him back. He was therefore left very much to himself in the matter of reading, and began at an early age to accumulate the romantic lore of which he afterwards made such splendid use. At ten his collection of chap-books and ballads had reached several volumes, and he was a connoisseur in various readings. Thus he took to the High School, Edinburgh, when he was strong enough to be put in regular attendance, an unusual store of miscellaneous knowledge and an unusually quick ened intelligence. Throughout his school days and afterwards when he was apprenticed to his father, attended university classes, read for the bar, took part in academical and professional debating societies, Scott steadily and ardently pursued his own favourite studies. He was still a schoolboy when he mastered French suffi ciently well to read through collections of old French romances, and not more than 15 when, attracted by translations to Italian romantic literature, he learnt the language in order to read Dante and Ariosto in the original. In one of the literary parties brought together to lionize Burns, when the peasant poet visited Edin burgh, the boy of 15 was the only member of the company who could tell the source of some lines affixed to a picture that had attracted the poet's attention—a slight but significant evidence both of the width of his reading and of the tenacity of his memory. But he was far from being a cloistered student, absorbed in his books. In spite of his lameness and his serious illnesses in youth, his constitution was naturally robust, his disposition genial, his spirits high : he was always well to the front in the fights and frolics of the High School, and a boon companion in the "high jinks" of the junior bar. At home he had to behave as became a member of a Puritanic, somewhat ascetic, well-ordered Scottish household, but from any tendency to the pedantry of over-culture he was effectually saved by the rougher and manlier spirit of his professional comrades. They were the first mature audience on which he experimented, and it was to this market that he brought the harvest of the vacation rambles which it was his custom to make every autumn for seven years after his call to the bar and before his marriage. His staid father did not much like these escapades, and told him bitterly that he seemed fit for nothing but to be a "gangrel scrape-gut." But, as the companion of "his Liddesdale raids" happily put it, "he was makin' himsell a' the time." His father intended him originally to follow his own business, and he was apprenticed in his 16th year, but he preferred the up per walk of the legal profession, and was admitted a member of the faculty of advocates in 1792. He seems to have read hard at law for four years at least, but almost from the first to have limited his ambition to obtaining some comfortable appointment such as would leave him a good deal of leisure for literary pursuits.
In this he was not disappointed. In 1799 he obtained the office cif sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire, with a salary of £300 and very light duties. In 18°6 he obtained the reversion of the office of clerk of session, which kept him hard at work, his biographer estimates, for at least three or four hours daily during six months out of the twelve, while the court was in session. He dis charged these duties faithfully for 25 years, during the height of his activity as an author. He did not enter on the emoluments of the office till 1812, but from that time he received from the clerkship and the sheriffdom combined an income of F1,600 a year, being thus enabled to act in his literary undertakings on his often quoted maxim that "literature should be a staff and not a crutch." The Poems.—It was as a poet that he was first to make a lit erary reputation. According to his own account, he was led to adopt the medium of verse by a series of accidents. The story is told by himself at length and with his customary frankness and modesty in the Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad, pre fixed to the 183o edition of his Border Minstrelsy, and in the 183o introduction to the Lay of the Last Minstrel. The first link in the chain was a lecture by Henry Mackenzie on German literature, de livered in 1788. This apprized Scott that there was a fresh devel opment of romantic literature in German, and while he was in the height of his enthusiasm for the new German romance, Mrs. Bar bauld visited Edinburgh, and recited an English translation of Burger's Lenore. Scott was moved to attempt such poetry him self, and the impulse was strengthened by his reading Lewis's Monk and the ballads in the German manner interspersed through the work. He hastened to procure a copy of Burger, at once exe cuted translations of several of his ballads, published The Chase, and William and Helen, in a thin quarto in 1796 (his ambition being perhaps quickened by the unfortunate issue of a love affair), and was much encouraged by the applause of his friends. Soon after he composed Glenfinlas, The Eve of St. John, and the Gray Brother, which were published in Lewis's collection of Tales of Wonder (2 vols., 1801). But he soon became convinced that "the practice of ballad-writing was out of fashion," and his study of Goethe's G5tz von Berlicltingen, of which he published a transla tion in 1799, gave him wider ideas. Why should he not do for ancient Border manners what Goethe had done for the ancient feudalism of the Rhine? He was engaged at the time preparing a collection of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the first instal ment of which was published in two volumes in 18o2, and was still hesitating about subject and form for a large original work, when chance at last threw in his way both a suitable subject and a suitable metrical vehicle. The countess of Dalkeith, happening to hear the legend of a tricksy hobgoblin named Gilpin Horner, asked Scott to write a ballad about it. He agreed with delight, and the subject grew in his fertile imagination, till incidents enough had gathered round the goblin to furnish a framework for his long designed picture of Border manners. At the same time a friend of his who had met Coleridge in Malta brought home sufficient reminiscences of the still unpublished poem of Christabel to con vey to Scott that its metre was the very metre of which he had been in search. Scott introduced still greater variety into the four-beat couplet; but it was to Christabel that he owed the sug gestion, as one line borrowed whole and many imitated rhythms testify.