POETICAL WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART., CONTAINING LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, MARMION, LADY OF THE LYRICS, AND SONGS. WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON & CO., 90, 92 & 94 GRAND ST. MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. SIR WALTER SCOTT was one of the sons of Walter Scott, Esq., writer to the signet, by Anne, daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, professor of the practice of medicine, in the University of Edinburgh; and was born in that city, on the fifteenth of August, 1771, being the third of a family consisting of six sons and one daughter. His paternal grandfather, Mr. Robert Scott, farmer at Sandyknow, in the vicinity of Smailholm Tower, in Roxburghshire, was the son of Mr. Walter Scott, a younger son of Walter Scott of Raeburn, third son of Sir William Scott of Harden. The above-mentioned Walter lived at the time of the restoration, and embraced the tenets of Quakerism; but for this he endured no little persecution, both from Presbyterian and Episcopalian. Walter, the second son of this gentleman, and father to the novelist's grandfather, was so zealous a Jacobite, that he made a vow never to shave his beard till the exiled house of Stuart should be restored, whence he acquired the name of Beardie. Dr. John Rutherford, maternal grandfather to the subject of this memoir, and one of the pupils of Boerhaave, was the first professor of the practice of physic in the University of Edinburgh, to which office he was elected in 1727, and which he resigned in 1766, in favor of the celebrated Dr. John Gregory. His wife, the maternal grandmother of Sir Walter, was Jean Swinton, daughter of Swinton of Swinton, in Berwickshire, one of the oldest families in Scotland, and at one period very powerful. Sir Walter has introduced a chivalric representative of this race into his drama of "Halidon Hill." Existence opened upon the author of Waverley, in one of the duskiest parts of the northern capital, which was the head of the College Wynd, a narrow alley leading from the Cowgate to the gate of the college; and before he was two years old, he received a fall ont of the arms of a careless nurse, which injured his right foot, |