_Sir Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1771 and died at "Abbotsford"
in 1832, published the first of his Waverley Novels ("Waverley") in
1814. "Redgauntlet," in which "Wandering Willie's Tale" occurs,
appeared in 1824. Wandering Willie, who tells the tale, is Willie
Steenson, a blind fiddler devoted to the Redgauntlet family. Many
critics consider this the finest story in the English language.
Andrew Lang, who calls it "immortal," describes ft as "that perfect
model of a 'conte' in whose narrow range humor, poetry, the
grotesque, the terrible are combined as in no other work of man."_