Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish poet and novelist, born in Edinburgh and lamed by polio in infancy, who trained as a lawyer and collected Border ballads before becoming the most popular poet in Britain with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. When Byron eclipsed him in verse he turned, anonymously, to fiction: Waverley (1814), Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe and the rest of the Waverley Novels invented the historical novel and made Scotland a destination. The failure of his printers in 1826 left him with enormous debts, which he spent his last six years writing to pay off.