Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright, and historian. Walter Scott was born to a solicitor and the daughter of a doctor in Edinburgh in 1771 At 18 months, Walter contracted infantile paralysis (or polio) and was lame for the rest of his life. Because of his ill health, the boy was sent to live with his paternal grandparents at Sandknowe Farm, in the hope that being out of the city would improve his health. He stayed there until he began school. Scott is respected for his lively historical romances and the other genres he inaugurated, for example, the ‘nautical novel’. He died in 1832