STUART Kelly, the author of a new book on Sir Walter Scott, was brought up in Lilliesleaf and educated at Galashiels Academy where he became a member of the school house, not of Eildon or Tweed, but of Abbotsford.

But the youngster with a precocious passion for English literature felt no sense of pride at this arbitary designation for he was no fan of the creator of the extravagant Borders mansion.

It was an embarrassment which intensified as Kelly's love of his favourite subject burgeoned under the tutelage of his English teacher Alan Slater.

Indeed, as a 16-year-old, Kelly was offered as part payment for helping carry out the the terms of a will his pick of the remants of a library.

"I took the collected works of Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning and Masefield," recalled Kelly this week.

"My father asked me why I had not taken a complete set of the Waverley Novels and and I told him that, to my mind, Scott was a second-rate Dickens and a pale shadow of Dumas.

"In fact, I hadn't actually read a word of Scott, but to my supercilious mind he was old fashioned, while the ubiquitous references in plaques and street names to Scott, Waverley and Abbotsford represented the macho-cultured Borders I wanted to escape from."

Stuart Kelly did, indeed, escape - to Baliol College at Oxford.

"It was a different world in which I learned that my liking something was a pretty paltry measure of its aesthetic and cultural worth, but there was also an ingrained attitude that Scots literature, with the possible exception of poets like Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid, was second rate," recalled Kelly.

"Liking Scott started with liking writers who liked Scott. If Byron, Goethe and Hugo, as well as modern authors like Allan Massie and A. N. Wilson, found him admirable, who was I to gainsay their enthusiasm?"

Kelly began reading Scott. He said: "I found a novelist who was anything but a second-rate Dickens, but was the successor to the most daring writers of the 18th century, such as Fielding, Swift and Sterne. Scott spoke about politics and people and wrote with wit, emphathy and originality."

Stuart Kelly's conversion to Scott was complete by the time he returned to his native country and became literary editor of Scotland on Sunday.

And today, the 38-year-old will be at Abbotsford House at 7pm to discuss his just-published biography, Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Polygon, £16.99).

Kelly accepts that some of Scott's work has creaky plots and cardboard cut-out characters, but claims that should not detract from his legacy.

"In Scott's own lifetime he was more widely read among the literate classes than J.