SCOTT, SIR WALTER, the great romancer, born in Edinburgh, through both father and mother of Scottish Border blood; his father, a lawyer, a man “who passed from the cradle to the grave without making an enemy or losing a friend,” his mother a little kindly woman, full of most vivid memories, awakening an interest in him to which he owed much; was a healthy child, but from teething and other causes lost the use of his right limb when 18 months old, which determined, to a marked extent, the course of his life; spent many of the months of his childhood in the country, where he acquired that affection for all natural objects which never left him, and a kindliness of soul which all the lower animals that approached him were quick to recognise; he was from the first home-bred, and to realise the like around his own person was his fondest dream, and if he failed, as it chanced he did, his vexation was due not to the material loss it involved, but to the blight it shed on his home life and the disaster on his domestic relationships; his school training yielded results of the smallest account to his general education, and a writer of books himself, he owed less to book-knowledge than his own shrewd observation; he proceeded from the school (the High School, it was) at 15 to his father’s office and classes at the University, and at both he continued to develop his own bent more than the study of law or learning; at his sixteenth year the bursting of a blood-vessel prostrated him in bed and enforced a period of perfect stillness, but during this time he was able to prosecute sundry quiet studies, and laid up in his memory great stores of knowledge, for his mind was of that healthy quality which assimilated all that was congenial to it and let all that did not concern it slip idly through, achieving thereby his greatest victory, that of becoming an altogether whole man.  Professionally he was a lawyer, and a good lawyer, but the duties of his profession were not his chief interest, and though he received at length a sheriffship worth L300 a year, and a clerkship to the court worth L1500, he early turned his mind to seek promotion elsewhere, and chose a literary career.  His first literary efforts were translations in verse from the German, but his first great literary success was the publication, in 1802, of “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” and in this he first gave evidence both of the native force and bent of his genius; it gave the keynote of all that subsequently proceeded from his pen.  This was followed the same year by “Cadzow Castle,” a poem instinct with military ardour, and this by “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” in 1805; the first poem which gained him popular favour, by “Marmion” in 1808, and by “The Lord of the Isles” in 1814.  Much as the rise of Scott’s fame was owing to his poetical works, it is on the ground of his prose writings, as the freest and fullest exhibition of his genius, that it is now mainly founded.  The period of his productivity in this line extended