Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature. As an advocate, judge, and legal administrator by profession, he combined writing and editing with his daily work as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. He was prominent in Edinburgh's Tory establishment, active in the Highland Society, long a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–1832), and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1827–1829). His knowledge of history and literary facility equipped him to establish the historical novel genre as an exemplar of European Romanticism. He became a baronet of Abbotsford in the County of Roxburgh, Scotland, on 22 April 1820; the title became extinct on his son's death in 1847. Early life Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771, in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd in the Old Town, Edinburgh, a narrow alleyway leading from the Cowgate to the gates of the University of Edinburgh (Old College). He was the ninth child (six having died in infancy) of Walter Scott (1729–1799), a member of a cadet branch of the Clan Scott and a Writer to the Signet, by his wife Anne Rutherford, a sister of Daniel Rutherford and a descendant both of the Clan Swinton and of the Haliburton family (descent from which granted Walter's family the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey). Walter was, through the Haliburtons, a cousin of the London property developer James Burton (d. 1837), who was born with the surname 'Haliburton', and of the same's son the architect Decimus Burton. Walter became a member of the Clarence Club, of which the Burtons were members. A childhood bout of polio in 1773 left Scott lame, a condition that would greatly affect his life and writing. To improve his lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Scottish Borders, at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, by the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. Here, he was taught to read by his aunt