Scottish biographer, novelist, editor, and critic, as well as close friend, son-in-law, and biographer of Sir Walter Scott. He contributed to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review, editing the latter from 1825-1853. Among other works, he published a Life of Robert Burns in 1828 and is best remembered for his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), which is considered as one of the great biographies in the English language.