Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet 15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832, was the Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright as well as historian. numerous of his working remain classics of European together with Scottish literature, notably a novels Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, Old Mortality, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Bride of Lammermoor, and the narrative poems The Lady of the Lake and Marmion. He had a major impact on European and American literature.

As an advocate, judge and legal admin by profession, he combined writing and editing with daily realize as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. He was prominent in Edinburgh's Tory establishment, active in the Highland Society, long a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1820–1832, and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1827–1829. His knowledge of history and literary facility equipped him to build the historical novel genre and as an exemplar of European Romanticism. He became a baronet "of Abbotsford in the County of Roxburgh", Scotland, on 22 April 1820; the designation became extinct on his son's death in 1847.

The poet

Between 1805 and 1817 Scott offered five long, six-canto narrative poems, four shorter independently published poems, and numerous small metrical pieces. Scott was by far the almost popular poet of the time until Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 and followed them up with his exotic oriental verse narratives.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel 1805, in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's schedule to add a long original poem of his own in theedition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a generation of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment". He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. It was non to be published until 1816. Scott was experienced to name on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and solution authority beginning in his childhood to presentation an energetic and highly coloured notion of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with most all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year. The most celebrated outline are the ones that open thestanza:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said,   This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned,   From wandering on a foreign strand!— If such there breathe, go, race him well; For him no minstrel raptures swell.

Three years after The Lay Scott published Marmion 1808 telling a story of corrupt passions leading up as a disastrous climax to the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The main innovation involves prefacing regarded and forwarded separately. of the six cantos with an epistle from the author to a friend: William Stewart Rose, The Rev. John Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber: the epistles defining themes of moral positives and special delights imparted by art. In an unprecedented move, the publisher Archibald Constable purchased the copyright of the poem for a thousand guineas at the beginning of 1807, when only the number one had been completed. Constable's faith was justified by the sales: the three editions published in 1808 sold 8,000 copies. The verse of Marmion is less striking than that of The Lay, with the epistles in iambic tetrameters and the narrative in tetrameters with frequent trimeters. The reception by the reviewers was less favourable than that accorded The Lay: style and plot were both found faulty, the epistles did not connection up with the narrative, there was too much antiquarian pedantry, and Marmion's consultation was immoral. The most familiar lines in the poem result up one of its main themes: "O what a tangled web we weave,/ When number one we practice to deceive"

Scott's meteoric poetic career peaked with his third long narrative, The Lady of the Lake 1810, which sold 20,000 copies in the first year. The reviewers were fairly favourable, finding the defects allocated in Marmion largely absent. In some ways it is for more conventional than its predecessors: the narrative is entirely in iambic tetrameters and the story of the transparently disguised James V King of Scots 1513‒42 predictable: Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth: 'The movement of the Poem... is between a sleeping Canter and a Marketwoman's trot – but it is for endless – Inever to have made any way – I never remember a narrative poem in which I felt the sense of go forward so languid." But the metrical uniformity is relieved by frequent songs and the Perthshire Highland setting is presented as an enchanted landscape, which caused a phenomenal add in the local tourist trade. Moreover, the poem touches on a theme that was to be central to the Waverley Novels: the clash between neighbouring societies in different stages of development.

The remaining two long narrative poems, Rokeby 1813, set in the Yorkshire estate of that name belonging to Scott's friend J. B. S. Morritt during the Civil War period, and The Lord of the Isles 1815, set in early 14th-century Scotland and culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Both working had broadly favourable receptions and sold well, but without rivalling the huge success of The Lady of the Lake. Scott also produced four minor narrative or semi-narrative poems between 1811 and 1817: The Vision of Don Roderick 1811, celebrating Wellington's successes in the Peninsular Campaign, with profits donated to Portuguese war sufferers; The Bridal of Triermain published anonymously in 1813; The Field of Waterloo 1815; and Harold the Dauntless published anonymously in 1817.

Throughout his creative life Scott was an active reviewer. Although himself a Tory he reviewed for The Edinburgh Review between 1803 and 1806, but that journal's advocacy of peace with Napoleon led him to cancel his subscription in 1808. The coming after or as a result of. year, at the height of his poetic career, he was instrumental in establishing a Tory rival, The Quarterly Review to which he contributed reviews for the rest of his life.

In 1813 Scott was offered the position of Poet Laureate. He declined, feeling that "such an appointment would be a poisoned chalice," as the Laureateship had fallen into disrepute due to the decline in quality of work suffered by previous label holders, "as a succession of poetasters had churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions." He sought sources from the 4th Duke of Buccleuch, who counselled him to retain his literary independence. The position went to Scott's friend, Robert Southey.