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Adam Smith, 1723-90
ECONOMIST

Adam Smith (1723-90) is generally regarded as the founder of economics as a separate discipline;Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh (1748-51) and Glasgow (1751-63). His two major books were The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the Wealth of Nations (1776), which is claimed to be the most successful not only of all books on economics but, with the possible exception of Darwin's Origin of Species, of all scientific books that have appeared to this day." Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, and his boyhood friends included the Adam brothers, who were destined to achieve their own fame as architects.


Allan Ramsay the Elder, 1686-1758
POET

Ramsay was originally a wig-maker in Edinburgh, which he gave up for bookselling. He founded what is thought to have been the first circulating library in Britain. He published his collected poems a few years later. His best known work, The Gentle Shepherd, on a pastoral theme, had instant success. Ramsay is said to have been a great conversationalist and immensely interested in the theatre, He opened a playhouse in Carrubber's Close, but it was closed down by the Town Council. Ramsay built an octagonal home, the "Goose-pie", which still stands at Ramsay Garden, Castlehill, near the top of the Royal Mile.
He is buried in Greyfriars Churchyard and his marble statue stands at the junction of Princes Street with the Mound; the medallion portraits around the pedestal are members of his family and descendants.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-94
WRITER
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh (at 8 Howard Place) on 13 November 1850. He adopted the more romantic "Louis" as a student. Both his father (Thomas Stevenson) and his grandfather were lighthouse engineers; his mother, Margaret Isabella Balfour, was the daughter of a church minister. He was a sickly child and his closest companion was his nurse Alison Cunningham. His days in bed stimulated his imagination, and later inspired "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), which he dedicated to "Cummy". In 1857 the family moved to 17 Heriot Row, and after periods recuperating in England and abroad Stevenson matriculated at Edinburgh University in 1867. He initially intended to follow his father's example and study engineering, but switched to law. He qualified as an advocate in 1875. In the same year he met W. E. Henley, and Stevenson began his literary career with contributions to Henley's "London Magazine", and also the "Cornhill Magazine" edited by Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). Henley (who is remembered for his poem "Invictus") had had a leg amputated, and it has been suggested that he may have been the inspiration for Long John Silver. Stevenson was to collaborate with him on four plays during the 1880's, one of which ("Deacon Brodie") is based on the well-known Edinburgh figure who was a respectable councillor by day and a criminal by night, partly inspiring the character of Dr. Jekyll. Stevenson's first published books were travelogues: "An Inland Voyage" (1878) describes a canoe trip in Belgium and France; "Travels with a Donkey" (1879) is based on his tour of the Cevennes. He had spent time at the artist's colony at Fontainbleau, and there he met Fanny Osbourne, a married American ten years his senior. Stevenson followed her to California and they were married in May 1880. They lived in Bournemouth until 1887, the year in which Thomas Stevenson died in Edinburgh. Stevenson wrote his first novel, "Treasure Island" (1883), after a summer holiday in Braemar. It was first serialised in "Young Folks Magazine", then published in volume form soon after. This was followed by two more books for young people, before Stevenson found fame with "Kidnapped" (1886) and "The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886). The death of his father marked Stevenson's final break with Scotland. He and Fanny went to America, and in 1888 they chartered a yacht and sailed to Tahiti and Honolulu, then settled in December 1889 at Upolu on Samoa, where they bought the estate of Vailima. Stevenson died there on 3 December 1894. His last work, the unfinished "Weir of Hermiston" (1896), is widely considered his masterpiece.

James Connolly, 1868-1916

SOCIALIST
Probably Edinburgh's most famous son, yet least known or recognised by the people of the city itself.
James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, at 107, the Cowgate, Edinburgh. His parents, John and Mary Connolly, had emigrated to Edinburgh from County Monaghan in the 1850s. His father worked as a manure carter, removing dung from the streets at night, and his mother was a domestic servant who suffered from chronic bronchitis and was to die young from that ailment.
James Connolly went to St Patricks School in the Cowgate, as did his two older brothers, Thomas and John. Connolly took a job as a printer's devil at the tender age of eleven. When he was fourteen he joined the British Army, spending seven years stationed in Cork, Ireland. These years were spent educating himself and Connolly soon developed a healthy interest in Socialism and Nationalism. After getting married, Connolly returned to his native city where he befriended the Scottish socialist John Leslie, who converted him to Marx. He accepted a job in Dublin in 1896 as organiser for the Socialist Society. Within a few days of his arrival, Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party and soon after established a newspaper, the Workers' Republic. The party proved a fairly unsucessful venture, although Connolly was becoming renowned for his social thinking. He left for a trip to America, touring and lecturing until his return to Ireland, where he accepted the position of organiser for the Belfast branch of James Larkin's new union, the ITGWU (Irish Transport and General Workers Union). Connolly came to Dublin to help during the 1913 Lockout and was instrumental in founding the Irish Citizen Army.
With the outbreak of World War One, Connolly began to agitate for a rising against British Rule , and was brought into secret talks with the IRB. Connolly was Commander-General of the Dublin Brigade during the 1916 Easter Rising . He was stationed in the GPO, the Rebel HQ, and was badly wounded in the fighting. He was brought to Kilmainham Gaol on the 12th of May 1916, strapped to a chair because he was too weak from his wounds to stand, and was shot by a British firing squad.
A march is held in Edinburgh each year in June to commemorate this heroic man.




EQUALITY FOR ALL

Allan Ramsay theYounger, 1713-84
PAINTER
The eldest son of the poet, Alan Ramsay excelled as a portrait painter, particularly of women.
After receiving training in Edinburgh and London, he went on to Italy and studied further there for some two years. He then made his name in London and was appointed portrait painter to George III. Ramsay had charm, liked conversation, was popular in society and enjoyed travel, particularly in Italy.
His burial Place in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh. His work can be seen in the National Gallery at the Mound and in the National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street.

Alexander Graham Bell, 1847-1922

INVENTOR
The inventor of the telephone was born in a house in South Charlotte Street in the city, where there is an inscribed stone beside the doorway. Bell, like his father, was an educator of the deaf. He went first to Canada and then to the United States, where in 1873 he was
appointed a professor in the School of Oratory, Boston University.
It was in pursuing his studies on behalf of the deaf that Bell constructed his first rough telephone in Boston in 1875. The instrument that was to revolutionise communications throughout the world was introduced at Philadelphia in 1876 and into Britain and France in the following year. Bell returned to his native city on visits, and in 1920 was made a freeman of Edinburgh.
He moved to Nova Scotia and died there in 1922.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930 WRITER
One of seven children, Doyle was born on 22 May, 1859, the son and grandson of artists (his grandfather was a political cartoonist in "Punch" magazine). He was educated at Stoneyhurst and studied medicine at Edinburgh University. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was born at no. 11 Picardy Place. He graduated as a doctor at Edinburgh University, where, it is said, the remarkable ability of one of his teachers, Dr Joseph Bell, to make accurate deductions from his observations led Conan Doyle later to create the character of the great detective.
Sherlock Holmes first appeared in a series of short stories in the Strand Magazine in 1891. Conan Doyle's talents as a story-teller are also demonstrated in his novels Micah Clarke (1887), The White Company (1890) and The Sign of Four (1890). In 1896 Doyle became a war correspondent in the Sudan
and he served as a doctor in the 1899-1902 Boer War in South Africa. He was knighted in 1902 for his service in the war. He wrote a history of the Boer War which proved popular at the time and as a war correspondent he later wrote an account of the British campaign in France and Flanders.
His interest in spiritualism became known during World War I and he wrote a number of books on the subject. In 1927 the Sherlock Holmes stories were published as "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes."
Doyle was married twice and died in Sussex in 1930.

Irvine Welsh, 1961-
WRITER
Scottish author who is acknowledged as the voice of British youth culture in the '90s. Irvine Welsh was born in 1961 in Scotland. Welsh grew up in the heart of Edinburgh's working-class district of Muirhouse, left school at 16, changing jobs a myriad of times. He migrated to London with the punk movement, and with the move came a dependency on drugs. At the end of the 80's he returned to Scotland, taking a job with the Edinburgh District Council and started an MBA course in computer studies while writing on the side.
He had his first published work in 1994, a collection of short stories entitled The Acid House. His first novel (actually written in 1993) was published later that year and is his best known work Trainspotting. It reached the last top ten for the Booker prize.
The book was adapted to film and in 1996 became a notable success, reaching cult like status. He completed his second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares in 1995, and Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, a collection of short stories that was published in 1996. His most recent work Filth, was his most recent novel published in 1998. Welsh also has written a stage play, You'll have had your hole and several short stories. His books have been translated into eleven languages around the world.
He currently has homes in both London and Edinburgh.

David Octavius Hill, 1802-70

PAINTER & BIOGRAPHER
Landscape and portrait painter, D.O. Hill is nevertheless best known to history as a pioneer photographer. Hill was born in Perth and established himself as a fine landscape painter. By the age of 19 he had published a series of landscapes printed by a lithographic process. He was also a founder member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1826 and was the secretary of the RSA until his death. He was also involved in the creation of the National Gallery of Scotland in 1850. He was the first artist to apply the new invention of photography to portraiture, and many of the calotypes which he made of eminent figures are now a valued part of the national photographic archive. Hill had a studio on Calton Hill, and was closely associated in his photographic work with Robert Adamson, of St Andrews.
In the free church assembly hall, Edinburgh, is a historic picture by Hill, containing no fewer than 500 portraits of all the leading lay and clerical members who demitted from the Church of Scotland at the Disruption in 1843. The picture shows the act of signing the deed of demission, and it took Hill more than 20 years to make all the portraits. Hill is buried in the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh, where there is a bronze bust of him by his widow.

David Hume, 1711-76

PHILOSOPHER & HISTORIAN
Born in Edinburgh into a Calvinist family in 1711, Hume
entered Edinburgh University at the age of 12 to study law,
leaving less than three years later, having concentrated more
on his own interests than his course work. He was described as the most acute thinker in Britain in the eighteenth century and his intellectual powers were recognised with the publication of his Essays, Moral and Political in two volumes in 1741 and 1742. Employed as librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, he wrote a six- volume History of England which was extremely popular and admired for its elegant and lucid style. It placed him in the first rank of historians.
In France in 1763, Hume found himself lionised in the salons of Paris, honoured by royalty and regarded as a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Good natured, an engaging mix of simplicity and shrewdness, Hume was on friendly terms with virtually everyone. A recent poll of academics voted Hume as the Scot who had made the greatest impact on Scotland in the last 1,000 years. Hume, who never married, had several homes in Edinburgh, the last of them in what is today St David Street. His tomb is in the Old Calton, Waterloo Place.


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Sean Connery, 1930-

ACTOR
Born and brought up in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, Sean Connery earned an early wage as a delivery boy on a horse-drawn milk cart and as a coffin polisher after leaving school. He gained his stage breakthrough as a chorus boy in the musical South Pacific (1951) and shot to stardom in films as the first James Bond in Dr No (1962), after both Cary Grant and Noël Coward had turned the role down. Connery played Bond a further seven times. However, by this time the role, although a moneyspinner, had become stereotyped and he moved on to more demanding parts - as an obsessive lover in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), as a prison-camp rebel in Sidney Lumet's The Hill (1965), as an ageing Robin Hood in Robin and Marian (1976), and as a medieval monk-detective in The Name of the Rose (1986). Connery won an Oscar for best supporting actor portraying a tough but honest police officer in The Untouchables (1987), which starred Kevin Costner. As 'Indy' Jones's professorial father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), he revelled in parodying his screen persona.
Latterly, he has also become known as a high-profile supporter of the movement for Scottish national independence.

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, 1924-
SCULPTOR
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi Paolozzi was born in Crown Place, Leith, on 7 March 1924, the only son of Italian parents who owned an ice cream shop in the town. His paternal grandfather was named Michelangelo but he says that did not influence his interest in art. As a boy he attended Leith Walk School and Holy Cross Academy. He trained at Edinburgh College of Art, worked in Paris for several years shortly after the end of the Second World War, and then taught in London.He was influenced by cubist and surrealist artists but his early works were collages of clippings from media Images, advertisements and comic strips (he had been brought up on a diet of US films in Leith). A group of three of his major sculptures, which were commissioned jointly by the City of Edinburgh and businessman Tom Farmer, are on permanent display at Picardy Place. Sir Eduardo has been Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste, Munich, since 1981, and he holds honorary degrees from several universities. He was admitted a member of the Royal Academy in 1979.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1968, and has been Her Majesty's Sculptor-in-Ordinary in Scotland since 1986.

Elsie Inglis, 1864-1917
MEDICAL PIONEER
Elsie Inglis was a pioneer in a number of ways - most of them associated with the study and practice of medicine. Born in India, she studied medicine at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin, became a general practitioner in Edinburgh, and in 1901 inaugurated a maternity hospice, staffed entirely by women, at Edinburgh Bruntsfield Hospital. A recent collection of letters and diary extracts has been published about Elsie Inglis which shows that Elsie was not just a compassionate heroine but also a stern disciplinarian who struck fear into patients and medical staff.
In 1906 Elsie Inglis founded the Scottish Women's Suffrage Federation, from which sprang, at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the organisation of Scottish Women's Hospitals. In the following year she joined this organisation's Serbian unit, and worked in the war-torn Balkans. She also served in Russia and Romania, and her humanitarian work was remembered with gratitude long afterwards in the Balkans. She worked long hours in appalling conditions but was forced to return home in October 1917, suffering from cancer. She died on 26 November 1917 in Newcastle and was buried in Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.
In Edinburgh her name was commemorated for many years in one of the city's maternity hospitals, but the Elsie Inglis Hospital is now closed.

James Clerk Maxwell, 1831-79
PHYSICIST
James Clerk Maxwell, Born in Edinburgh on 13th June 1831, Maxwell showed earlysigns of curiosity but was nicknamed "daftie" by his fellowpupils at Edinburgh Academy. Nevertheless, he sent his first paper to the Royal Society in Edinburgh at the age of 15 and entered Edinburgh University at age 16. He moved to Cambridge University in 1850 and graduated there in 1854. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest physicists the world has ever seen. Einstein placed on record his view that the Scot's work resulted in the most profound change in the conception of reality in physics since the time of Newton. Maxwell's researches united electricity and magnetism into the concept of the electro-magnetic field. He died relatively young, and indeed some of the theories he advanced in physics were only conclusively proved long after his death. For example, he did not live to see proved in the laboratory his theory that when a charged particle is accelerated, the radiation produced has the same velocity as that of light: it is a unification that remains one of the greatest landmarks in the whole of science. It paved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity. Maxwell's ideas also ushered in the other major innovation of twentieth-century physics, the quantum theory.
He died on 5th November 1879 and is buried in the village of Parton, Dumfriesshire.


William Playfair, 1789-1857
ARCHITECT

More than any other architect, Playfair was the man who earned Edinburgh its label, "the Athens of the North". His classical buildings, many on dramatic sites, adorn the city, and lend the physical environment a stature and dignity that is unique in Britain. Playfair was the leading influence in the shaping of Edinburgh's architectural soul.
He was born in London, the son of the architect James Playfair, and as a boy came to live in Edinburgh with an uncle, Professor John Playfair. On qualifying as an architect, Playfair built a considerable private practice in Edinburgh before designing, in 1820, Royal Terrace, Carlton Terrace and Regent Terrace, in the New Town. His most important works include the Royal Scottish Academy, the National Gallery of Scotland, New College and Assembly Hall, the Royal College of
Surgeons, Donaldson's Hospital, Advocates' Library and the National Monument on Calton Hill. He also enlarged the Old College of Edinburgh University following the death of Robert Adam.





Greyfriars Bobby


John Knox, 1505-72
THEOLOGIAN & PREACHER
John Knox (1505-72), was born at Haddington; and the site of his birthplace in Giffordgate is marked by a tree which was planted in 1881 in accordance with one of the last wishes of Thomas Carlyle.The dominant figure of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, Knox is associated in the public mind with a narrow bigotry, the promotion of guilt and joylessness, and a philosophy that effectively stunted artistic expression. Knox was a powerful preacher and influential leader, has inevitably drawn the blame for the consequences of powerful forces which were abroad in the land and with which Scots by temperament felt an emotional sympathy.
Knox was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.
In 1546 he supported the murder of David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews, and was imprisoned for 18 months on a French galley (The French Mary of Guise, widow of James V, was Regent of Scotland at this time). After his release he travelled extensively, gaining favour at the English court of the Protestant King Edward VI.
While in Geneva, he was influenced by the ideas of Calvin and in 1558 he published his "First Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women". In it he wrote "to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm is repugnant to nature, contrary to God." This was aimed at Mary of Guise but Queen Elizabeth of England, who came to the throne in the same year, took it personally. Knox came back to Scotland in 1559 and became minister at St Giles in Edinburgh. In 1560 the Scottish Parliament, with guidance from Knox, drew up the "Confession of Faith" which established Protestantism and government in the Church of Scotland along the lines he had learned in Geneva. The Catholic Mary Queen of Scots returned from France in 1561 and she was subjected to an unrelenting onslaught from Knox.

Muriel Spark, 1918-

WRITER

Muriel Spark was already well known for her critical studies and verse before embarking on the novels that have established her reputation as one of this country's most respected writers.
She was born in Edinburgh and educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls and Heriot-Watt College.
Her first novel was The Comforters (1957), which she has described as `a novel about writing a novel', ie an experiment in, and exploration of what it means to write fiction. At about the same time she became a convert to Roman Catholicism,and her novels since have tended to take a parabolic form combining overt, often wittily satirical realism with implications of an extra-realist, spiritual dimension. One of her best-known works is The Prime ofMiss Jean Brodie (1961), the story of the influence over a group of schoolgirls of a progressive spinster school teacher in Edinburgh. Her three novellas, The Public Image (1968); The Driver's Seat (1970) and Not to Disturb (1971) exemplify the economy, precision and hardness of her work; they invite little sympathy for their characters, but rather convey a strong sense of pattern and fate underlying an apparent contingency of events. Her other novels are: Robinson (1958); Mememto Mori (1959); The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960); The Bachelors (1960); The Girls of Slender Means (1963); The Mandelbaum Gate (1965); The Hothouse by the East River (1972); The Abbess of Crewe (1972); The Takeover (1976); Territorial Rights (1979); Loitering with Intent (1981); The Only Problem (1984); A Far Cry From Kensington (1988).
Other writings include a stage play Doctors of Philosophy (1962), radio plays collected in Voices at Play (1961), a further volume of poetry, Going Up to Sotheby's (1982) and short stories in Collected Stories I (1967); and The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985). Her recent work includes Symposium (1990).
She was appointed OBE in 1967 and has been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University ofStrathclyde (1971) and the University of Edinburgh (1989).

Sir Patrick Geddes, 1854-1932
PLANNER
A Scot who has been called the father of modern town planning, Geddes did much of his pioneering work in the Old Town ofEdinburgh, having made his married home there in 1886. Geddes' name and spirit are imperishably associated with Ramsay Garden and the Outlook Tower, both in Castlehill. He acquired the Outlook Tower in 1892, and it became the nerve centre from which his enlightened ideas on civics and country and town planning radiated.
Patrick Geddes grew up and was educated in Scotland, and studied biology in London. He began his professional career as a biologist in London and France, but settled in the late 1880s in Edinburgh. There he became involved in the renewal of Edinburgh's Old Town, which was manifested most prominently in the Ramsay Garden complex and the Outlook Tower, the former a development of private flats, a student hall of residence and artists' studios, the latter a regional-sociological
laboratory. In 1889 Geddes became Professor of Botany at Dundee University College after a personal friend and benefactor endowed a chair which required Geddes to be in Dundee for a period of only three months each year. In the following decades Geddes developed a deep fascination with the organization of human societies and their spatial manifestation in the city and the country. Geddes propagated a highly individualistic theory of societies and cities drawing from regional theories in biology and geography, philosophical ideas (especially those of Plato) and political anarchist thought.
In 1911 he created a milestone exhibition, Cities and Town Planning, which was studied appreciatively not only throughout Britain but also abroad. From 1920-23 he was Professor of Civics and Sociology at the University of Bombay, and in 1924 he settled at Montpellier, in France. He died there in 1932, having been knighted that year.

Robert Adam, 1728-92
ARCHITECT
Robert Adam (1728--1792), British architect, the second son of William Adam of Maryburgh, in Fife, and the most celebrated of four brothers, John, Robert, James and William Adam, was born at Kirkcaldy in 1728. For few famous men have we so little biographical material, and contemporary references to him are sparse. He certainly studied at the University of Edinburgh, and probably received his first instruction in architecture from his father, who gave proofs of his own skill and taste in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary (now demolished). His mother was the aunt of Dr W. Robertson, the first English historian of Charles V., and in 1750 we find Robert Adam living with her in Edinburgh, and making one of the brilliant literary coterie which adorned it at that period.
Robert Adam is renowned for his fine buildings, both public and private, in classical style throughout Britain. In Edinburgh his works include Register House, the north side of Charlotte Square, and Edinburgh University Old College. The magnificent
Hopetoun House, at Queensferry, has been described as Scotland's greatest Adam mansion.
Adam regularly worked in conjunction with his architect brothers, John, James and William. They were responsible for much Georgian development in London, particularly town housing that took the form of elegant terraces. Robert became architect to George III, and with James designed a number of important mansions in different parts of the country. Robert Adam is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Robert Fergusson, 1750-74
POET
Robert Fergusson, one of Scotland's greatest poets, was born at a house in Cap and Feather Close, Edinburgh, on 5 September 1750. His parents were from Aberdeenshire and had lived in Edinburgh since 1748, where Robert's father, William Fergusson, worked as a solicitor's clerk. Robert attended the Edinburgh High School, and in 1762 he won a bursary to Dundee Grammar School and then to St. Andrews University, where in April 1765 he wrote his first known poem, the comic "Elegy on the Death of Mr David Gregory, late Professor of Mathematics". His father's death in May 1767 cut short his education; he left the University a year later without graduating in order to support his mother and sister. He worked as a clerk in the Commissary Office in Edinburgh, copying legal papers for a penny a page, and found relief from this drudgery in his poetry, contributing many pieces to Walter Ruddiman's journal "The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement". His first appeared on 7 February 1771, written in English in the pastoral style, but the poems in Scots which Ruddiman published throughout the following year (beginning with "The Daft Days" in January) brought Fergusson to the attention of a small but enthusiastic circle of admirers. Ruddiman was Fergusson's chief literary patron, independently publishing a
collection of his poems, as well as the long poem "Auld Reekie" (1773).
A hectic literary career of just three years ended with "Codicile to Rob Fergusson's Last Will", the last poem published in his lifetime, which appeared in "The Weekly Magazine" on 23 December 1773. He had become ill with depression, and had been forced to leave the Commissary Office in the same month. His friends rallied to his support, but his condition worsened, and after collapsing and falling down a flight of stairs in July 1774 he was taken to the Edinburgh Bedlam, where he died in squalid conditions on 17 October 1774. He left 50 poems in English and 33 in Scots (a mixture of Edinburgh and Aberdeenshire dialect), and it was these latter which were to have such a great influence on Robert Burns, who called him "my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse". Burns paid for Fergusson's gravestone in Edinburgh's Canongate Churchyard

Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832

WRITER
Born in Edinburgh, the ninth child of a lawyer, Scott contracted polio as a child which left him with a permanent limp. He trained as a lawyer and it was not until 1802 that he first published a collection of ballads "The Border Minstrelsy" and in 1814 his first novel "Waverley" was published.
This was an instant success and he produced a string of novels in the following years, such as Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, Ivanhoe, Old Mortality, and The Talisman.
Called to the bar at 21, he served on the bench as sheriff depute for a spell before being appointed a clerk of session in 1806.
A prominent figure in Edinburgh society, he entertained famous people like Washington Irving and William Wordsworth. He was knighted in 1820 and organised the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822. Scott's interest in things Scottish led him to rediscover the Scottish crown and sceptre which had been left, forgotten, in Edinburgh Castle. He also fought
a successful defence of Scottish Banknotes - his portrait is on current Bank of Scotland notes in memory of that event.
Scott's management of his financial affairs left much to be desired. He was extravagant both in expanding his baronial country mansion at Abbotsford in the Borders and in buying historical Scottish artefacts. In 1826 he found himself 100,000 pounds in debt. Until that time all his novels had been published anonymously (under the name "The Great Unknown") but from 1827 to 1831 we worked furiously to produce work which would pay off his debts. He had cleared 70,000 pounds by the time he died in 1832 and the remainder was paid by selling copyrights. In 1840 a grateful nation erected a magnificent monument to him in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh.

The Scott Monument being refurbished.






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