In the year of his death, Walter Scott envisaged a trip to Greece, returning through Germany to visit the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was not to be; Scott's personal travel in Europe was limited to two visits to Paris, a trip to the battlefield of Waterloo and a cruise to the Mediterranean in sadly failing health. But his personal and literary lives were substantially European: in 1797 he married a Frenchwoman, Charlotte Charpentier, and his first literary foray in 1796 involved a translation of two German ballads, prompted by Henry Mackenzie's paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on German drama, which Scott remembered described ‘scenes of wildest contrast, and all [the] boundless variety of character mingling, without hesitation, livelier with more serious incidents, and exchanging scenes of tragic distress as they occur in common life, with those of a comic tendency’. Thus liberated from ‘the rules so servilely adhered to by the French school’, the young Scott set about learning German. Translating Goethe's historical play GÖtz von Berlichingen in 1799 consolidated his admiration for the German writer and led indirectly to their correspondence in the 1820s.