 Sir Walter Scott is a poet and a novelist and he's most renowned today for being a novelist and the author of the Waverly series of novels. He had such a profound influence on literature as a result of the poems and novels he wrote in the early 19th century. He was a key romantic figure. The major piece of Walter Scott's work, which is part of the Horner School of Collection at the National Library of Scotland, is the manuscript for Rob Roy. It's the last manuscript that was in private hands. The National Library of Scotland has some of the best collections of Scottish manuscripts to be found anywhere in the world. We have the original manuscript, a Waverly, Horner, Mithlothian, a Red-Gone Wight, and therefore it made sense for Rob Roy to take its place alongside those manuscripts. So this is the complete working manuscript of Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, and Rob Roy is an extremely popular work. 10,000 copies were printed for the first run, which was quite a substantial number for the time, and as with most of the Waverly novels it was another success. Abbotsford is Scott's home. With all Scott's interiors, his collections and his books, more or less as Scott has left them. His dream, I think, was to build somewhere where his collections could be housed. So to actually have these manuscripts back at Abbotsford, I think is really important. I was very excited about the manuscript of the Lea of the Last Minstrel, because that's really the first long poem that Scott writes, and really in some ways is break through poem. So this is the manuscript of the Lea of the Last Minstrel, Scott's first long narrative poem. So it's absolutely wonderful to have a sense of this poem and just how he's working at this early stage in his career. As I far with Scott's manuscripts, there's not a great deal of alteration, but we can't see some changes in the words. We can see him just stretching, trying to work out the right word for what he's trying to say and what he's trying to describe, and so we can see him scoring out words, adding new phrases. So it's absolutely fantastic to see this. So the way that Scott would write his novels is that he would write text on the rectal or the right-hand side of the page, and he would tend to leave the left-hand page blank for corrections and additions. So what you can see here is actually a working living manuscript. When you see on a page where a writer has made alterations and they've made changes, you can almost see their brain working as part of the creative process. I think that's really important. It reminds us that these writers from the past actually were people who were working, thinking carefully about what they were composing, thinking about it, and trying to get their thoughts down on paper. Some of the other highlights in terms of the Scott materials include letters that Scott wrote to the publisher, John Murray. One of the highlights is a reference that Scott makes to a review of Jane Austen's novel, Emma. It's interesting to see that Scott is not just the novelist, but he's also well immersed in the literary world and he's reviewing other people's work as well. There's a sort of commonality among that group of writers, people like Austin and Barnes. Scott are all operating and writing about the same time. Jane Austen, for example, says when Scott publishes his first novel, Mr. Scott has no business writing novels, especially good ones. In other words, get off my patch, you're meant to be a poet, not a novelist. One of the other significant items is his personal journal of what we call the Lighthouse Tour, which is an event that took place in 1814 and Scott kept a journal of that trip. So immediately you can see that as opposed to the poem or a novel, he's written on both sides of the page because this is just something that he's writing for himself. The Lighthouse Journal is one of the few things that we have that is just for Scott. He was writing it for him and that's really fascinating and I think that will really add something to an understanding of Scott and to be able to analyse it and to see what he's actually written when he's just writing for himself. All manuscripts are going to give us crucial information about the writers who've composed them. I think these particular Scott manuscripts will allow us to continue work to reposition Scott alongside other romantic writers. But actually what's been so wonderful about this endeavour is not only have they been saved, the distributed nature of the collection means that the manuscripts and books have gone to the homes where they maybe belong.