He thus acquired great knowledge of his fatherland; while (for he was, if not exactly a scholar, the most omnivorous of readers) he was also acquiring great knowledge of books. And it ought not to be omitted that Edinburgh, in addition to the literary and professional society which made it then and afterwards so famous, was still to no small extent the headquarters of the Scotch nobility, and that Scott, long before his books made him famous, was familiar with society of every rank. His first love affair did not run smooth, and he seems never to have entirely forgotten the object of it, who is identified (on somewhat more solid grounds than in the case of other novelists) with more than one of his heroines. But he consoled himself to a certain extent with a young lady half French, half English, Miss Charlotte Carpenter or Charpentier, whom he met at Gilsland and married at Carlisle on Christmas Eve 1797. Scott was an active member of the yeomanry as well as a barrister, an enthusiastic student of German as well as a sportsman; and the book of translations (from Buerger) above referred to appeared in 1796. But he did nothing important till after the beginning of the present century, when the starting of the _Edinburgh Review_ and some other things brought him forward; though he showed what he could do by contributing two ballads, "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," to a collection of terror-pieces started by Monk Lewis, and added Goethe's _Goetz von Berlichingen_ to his translations. He had become in 1799 independent, though not rich, by being appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire. His beginnings as an author proper were connected, as was all his subsequent career, partly for good but more for ill, with a school friendship he had early formed for two brothers named Ballantyne at Kelso. He induced James, the elder, to start a printing business at Edinburgh, and unfortunately he entered into a secret partnership with this firm, which never did him much good, which caused him infinite trouble, and which finally ruined him. But into this complicated and still much debated business it is impossible to enter here. James Ballantyne printed the _Border Minstrelsy_, which appeared in 1802,--a book ranking with Percy's _Reliques_ in its influence on the form and matter of subsequent poetry,--and then Scott at last undertook original work of magnitude. His task was _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published in 1805. It may almost be said that from that day to his death he was the foremost--he was certainly, with the exception of Byron, the most popular--man of letters in Great Britain. His next poems--_Marmion_ (1808) and _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810)--brought him fame and money such as no English poet had gained before; and though Byron's following--for following it was--for the time eclipsed his master, the latter's _Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles_, and others, would have been triumphs for any one else.