The father of Sir Walter Scott was a writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, an excellent and highly respectable man. His mother, Anne Rutherford, a noble and gentle-hearted woman, was the daughter of a physician, in extensive practice, and Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh. By both parents he was remotely connected with some ancient and respectable Scottish families, a circumstance to which he frequently referred with satisfaction. He was born on the 15th of August, in the year 1771. In consequence of lameness and a delicate state of health, produced by a fall, he was sent, in early life to Sandyknowe, a romantic situation near Kelso, and placed under the care of his grandfather. Here he fortified his constitution by long rambles on foot and on horseback among the picturesque scenery and old ruins of the neighborhood. Smallholm, a ruined tower, and the scene of Scott's ballad, "The Eve of St. John's," was close to the farm, and beside it were the Eildon Hills, the ruins of Ercildoune, the residence, in ancient times, of Thomas the Rhymer, Dryburgh Abbey, the "silver Tweed," with its storied banks, and other localities renowned in song and story. It was here also that he delighted in supplying his memory with the tales of his nurse, and some old grandames, deeply versed in the traditions of the country. All these left indelible impressions on his young imagination, and nursed the latent germ of poetry and romance, so late, but so beautiful in its flowering. Subsequently he resided with another relation at Kelso. Here, under the shadow of a great platanus or oriental palm tree, in an old garden, he devoured "Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," and permitted his fancy to wander at will amid the scenes of Border romance. This explains, in some degree, the peculiar characteristics of his first poems, and that fine strain of romantic feeling which runs through his tales. Speaking of this matter, he says himself: "In early youth I had been an eager student of ballad poetry, and the tree is still in my recollection beneath which I lay and first entered upon the enchanting perusal of 'Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry,' although it has long perished in the general blight which affected the whole race of oriental platanus, to which it belonged. The taste of another person had strongly encouraged my own researches into this species of legendary lore. But I had never dreamed of an attempt to imitate what gave me so much pleasure. Excepting the usual tribute to a mistress's eyebrow, which is the language of passion rather than poetry, I had not for ten years indulged the wish to couple so much as _love_ and _dove_, when finding Lewis in possession of so much reputation, and conceiving that, if I fell behind him in poetical powers, I considerably exceeded him in general information, I suddenly took it into my head to attempt the style by which he had raised himself to fame." He refers to the same thing in the following lines: