Sir Walter Scott: nationalist or patriot? Sir Walter Scott was famous as a poet before he turned to writing novels. His first three long narrative poems - The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake - were all bestsellers. They did more that anything else to create the idea of Romantic Scotland and, as a by-product, the Scottish tourist industry. The Lady of the Lake had English tourists flocking to the Trossachs to be delighted by the gorgeous scenery described in the poem. Now the Royal Opera House's successful revival of Rossini's opera La Donna del Lago, written less than 10 years after the publication of the poem, may help to revive interest in these poems. Indeed a theatrical version of The Lay of the Last Minstrel will be performed next week at the Borders Book Festival, with Joanna Lumley in the cast. Read one way, these poems are exercises in patriotism. Breathes there the man,/With soul so dead,/ Who never to himself hath said,/ This is my own, my native land! O Caledonia, stern and wild,/ Meet nurse for a poetic child. Such sentiments would inspire nationalist movements throughout Europe in the 19th-century "Age of Nationalism." Yet Scott's nationalism was a long way from jingoism. The central character in Marmion is an Englishman, and the tremendous climax of the poem describes the Battle of Flodden, the greatest military disaster in Scotland's history. Moreover, Scott was a British, as well as a Scottish, patriot. Marmion appeared in 1808, and the introductory verses to Canto I take the form of an elegy for Nelson, the younger Pitt and Charles James Fox: "Deep graved in every British heart,/ O never let these names depart..." Pitt and Fox had been political enemies. Yet, "Here let their discord with them die,/ Speak not for those a separate doom,/ Whom Fate made Brothers in the tomb." Nationalist feeling is stirring again today, not as was the case half a century ago among the subject peoples of European empires, but within the European Union and the United Kingdom itself. Sometimes it seems to be inspired more by resentment of others - or The Other - than by love of country, though doubtless many who vote for nationalist parties - Ukip, the SNP, Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein - would deny this. In the modern world of economic globalism, supra-national institutions, large-scale immigration, and multiculturalism, it is evident that many feel that their national identity is threatened. If their individual freedom is not curtailed by any foreign occupier, they nevertheless feel belittled. In this context it is worth reflecting on Scott, born two generations after the 1707 Treaty of Union ended Scotland's existence as an independent state. Scott was intensely and proudly Scottish. He once said that he would have opposed the Union if he had been alive at the time, but now that it was settled, he accepted it as being for the best. Yet he regretted what he saw as "the melting and dissolving" of the "peculiar features" of Scotland. On the other hand he spoke of England as Scotland's "sister and ally." The union was a partnership, and neither nation should forget this. Patriotism differs from nationalism in that it is founded in love of your country and not resentment or envy of others. It can therefore accommodate itself to change because the patriot recognises, as Scott did, that all societies are subject to change. His greatest novels analyse the process of change. Sentimentally he was a Jacobite, but Jacobitism was obsolete. He responded to the glamour of the Highland clans, but recognised that the Highlanders" way of life was out of key with the demands of a commercial and industrial age. He realised that a successful society will revere its past while adapting to new circumstances. His long poems and novels show us how we can manage to do both these things. He offers us a model of how to live in a time of turbulent change.