In addition to being the most celebrated European poet and novelist of the early nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott was an antiquarian and literary scholar of some distinction. The most notable of his contributions to the developing genre of literary biography are the lives of John Dryden and Jonathan Swift that he wrote to accompany his important editions of their works and the biographical prefaces he composed for a reprint series of British novels. With these works Scott helped to establish biography as a formal component of modern textual scholarship and, in deliberate extension of Samuel Johnson's work on behalf of the English poets, dignified the novelist as a fit subject for the genre. More subtly, Scott's novels provided a narrative model for biography as well as for the writing of history. It might be said that Scott's greatest contribution to literary biography turned out to be as...