A portrait of the city that made Scott, and the man who made it legendary. Rait, writing in 1906 when memory of Scott's Edinburgh still lived in the city's stones, reconstructs a world of print shops and philosophers, of cobbled closes and Enlightenment debate. This is not biography but archaeology: the layers of Edinburgh's streets, its coffee-house culture, its university and High School, all the influences that would crystallize in the Waverley Novels. For anyone who has walked the Royal Mile or wondered why Scotland's capital produced the world's first fully international literary celebrity, this is the essential account.
