Sir Walter Scott, descended from the Harden branch of the great clan that had kept the Marches through centuries of English wars, was born in Edinburgh on 15 August, 1771. Neither from his father (the father of Allan Fairford, in "Redgauntlet") nor from his mother, of another Border clan, the Rutherfords, can he be supposed to have drawn his genius, though Mrs. Scott appreciated literature. In early childhood a mysterious malady inflicted on him a life-long lameness, in contrast with his great physical strength, and his preference for the profession of arms. His early childhood was passed in the heart of the Borders, at Smailholme tower, overlooking Tweed, Teviot, and the scenes of a hundred battles. The old ballads were his earliest reading, and tales of Prince Charles's war, told by veterans of the Forty-five, his great delight. At school he flashed from end to end of the form, rising by his general information, and falling by his indifference to grammar. He was an omnivorous reader, forgetting nothing, a teller of tales, a roamer on foot through the country-side, and he left the High School of Edinburgh, quite Greekless, for the University,—where he learned no Greek. But of Latin, including mediaeval Latin, he had enough for his purposes (his quotations show indifference to quantity and metre); and French, Italian, and German he acquired for the purpose of reading their poetry and romances. His native appreciation of verse astonished people in his childhood; love of the past was his dominant passion; and in nature the historical memories of places were even more to him than natural beauty.
After the customary training in his father's office, he was called to the Scottish Bar, enjoying little practice, but making friends in every rank, and enduring a disappointment in love, by which his heart, though fairly mended by his marriage in 1797, to a Miss Charpentier, was broken but not embittered.
His earliest published verses were translations from German ballads, including the famous "Lenore" of Bürger, and he published a translation of the "Götz von Berlichingen" of Goethe. These essays attracted little attention: more was paid to such imitations of the old ballads as "Glenfinlas," and "Cadzow," and "The Eve of St. John," abounding in poetic spirit, though not archaic in diction.
He obtained a long-deferred reversion of a place as Clerk in the Parliament House, and the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire (the Forest of Ettrick) where in summer he resided, first at Ashestiel on Tweed, the centre of the beauties and legends of the Border. In yearly raids into almost roadless Liddesdale, he learned to know the Dandie Dinmonts, and collected the traditions, and the ballads of "The Border Minstrelsy," of which the first edition, with copious historical and antiquarian notes, was published in 1802.
The famous False Alarm of invasion of 1803, described in "The Antiquary," sent him on a ride of a hundred miles, to Dalkeith, the house of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the trysting-place of the Borderers. A command of the Duchess suggested a ballad on a tradition of a goblin page; parts of Coleridge's unpublished "Christabel," which he had heard recited, gave the model of the irregular octosyllabic verse, and in 1805 the result, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," made Scott by far the most popular of poets. "The Lay" was the most spontaneous, and in many ways the best, of his romances in verse. "Marmion" (1808) more studied, more tragical, and fortunate in the magnificent canto on the battle of Flodden: and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), with its blending of Highland and Lowland characters and scenes in the reign of James V. (about 1535) only confirmed his popularity and success. "Rokeby" (1812) was, despite its excellent songs, and a highly Byronic outlaw preceding Byron, less favourably received; and "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), on the adventures of Bruce, a subject long meditated, was not saved by its battle of Bannockburn, a fight only inferior to the Flodden of "Marmion". Byron, with his modern romance and his living celebrity, had defeated the historical Muse; and Scott did not put forth his strength in "Harold the Dauntless" and "The Bridal of Triermain".
He was the best judge of his own poetry, written "for young people of spirit," he said, though he did not allow his own young people to read it; a deprivation which they took very unconcernedly. It is not to Scott's poetry, except in some of his lyrics, that we look for deep reflection on human destinies, or for delicate subtlety of phrase,
All the charm of all the Muses
Often flowering in a lonely word.
His reflections he kept to himself; he told his story in his galloping "light horseman" style of verse; he made the dead past live again; he repeopled with their dreams the roofless towers of the Borders, the Highland caves and bothies, the deserted palaces and castles, whose last native king was then dying, a priest, in Rome. His verses, read aloud to Wellington's men in Spain, inspirited them in the charge, as they awoke among all men what had long been slumbering, the love of poetry. Scott, like Yama, the first of men who died, "opened a pathway unto many": inclined men to give an ear to verse. He set Byron the model for his popular versified tales of Oriental adventure; and he was unceasing in recommending the poetry, so unlike his own, of Wordsworth, and in applauding Byron with unfeigned generosity; while his devotion to the old English drama displays itself in quotations in his prose, and in imitations, improvised chapter-headings, in his novels. From his first translations of ballads, to the snatches sung by Madge Wildfire, the song of "Proud Maisie," and the ringing lyric of "Bonnie Dundee," he first awoke and then kept vigilant the spirit of ancient popular minstrelsy.
In short his poetry was such as came to a man of his genius, during his "grand gallops among the hills, while he was thinking of 'Marmion'". His laxities in form are, indeed, less glaring than those of Byron, but, from the first, were conspicuous to himself and to his critics. His appeal to names of hill and loch and sea-strait, rivers and burns and towers and glens, makes half of his charm in the ears of those to whom the places are dear and familiar. He was "the latest minstrel," the Homer, the creative and unifying successor of many nameless men who left great verse unto a little clan. Above all he was a narrator, at story-teller, a creator of characters, a Humorist, and his essential genius, his dramatic gift, his knowledge of the past and the present, found its true vehicle in the prose of his novels.
Scott's career falls naturally into two parts: first from the "Minstrelsy" (1802) to "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), and next from "Waverley" (1814) to the authors death in 1832. But in the earlier years were sown the seeds of disaster; Scott had, before 1813, been entangled in financial troubles, owing to his association with the printing and publishing affairs of his old friends, James and John Ballantyne. Despite his common sense, Scott was sanguine and unpractical as a publisher; his enterprises were dominated by preferences, personal or antiquarian; his hospitality and his tastes were expensive, and his associates were not the men to control and direct him; or even to keep the commercial books of the concern. In fact shipwreck, once at least, seemed inevitable, before Scott struck a vein of fairy gold in prose romance.