GREAT SCOTT
Walter Scott was already in his mid-thirties when he began penning the narrative poems that would bring him celebrity status, stirring readers to giddy heights of emotion with his love of Scotland:
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 burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
Such patriotic sentiment, from (1805), typified Scott’s writing and as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth this year it’s timely to reflect on just how much he influenced our image of Scotland: reawakening his countrymen’s pride in their national inheritance while also rehabilitating Scotland’s culture in the wider world after the Jacobite rebellions of the previous century.
