In “Scotland 1941” the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir surveys the pageant of Scottish history. It is not, it must be said, a flattering portrait. “We were a tribe, a family, a people,” he begins, but some fatal decline has set in: under the gaze of “Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,” Scotland has endured a “spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,” an event traceable to the sixteenth-century theologian John Knox and the Reformation. (“Out of that desolation we were born.”) It is a story Muir had already rehearsed in Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936). There Muir passes severe judgment on the central place in Scottish culture of the author of Waverley .…