Scotland, my lord, may well be proud of such men, but she can no longer call these exclusively her own; their names have become household words in every land. Mankind claims them as the common inheritance of the human race. Look around us, and we shall see on every side decisive proofs how far and wide admiration for their genius has sunk in the hearts of man. What is it that attracts strangers from every part of the world into this distant land, and has more than compensated a remote situation and a churlish soil, and given to our own Northern Isle a splendour unknown to the regions of the sun? What is it which has brought together this mighty assemblage, and united the ardent and the generous from every part of the world, from the Ural mountains to the banks of the Mississippi, on the shores of an island in the Atlantic? My lord, it is neither the magnificence of our cities, nor the beauty of our valleys, the animation of our harbours, nor the stillness of our mountains; it is neither our sounding cataracts, nor our spreading lakes; neither the wilds of nature we have subdued so strenuously, nor the blue hills we have loved so well. These beauties, great as they are, have been equaled in other lands; these marvels, wondrous though they be, have parallels in other climes. It is the genius of her sons which has given Scotland her proud pre-eminence; this it is, more even than the shades of Bruce, of Wallace, and of Mary, which has rendered her scenes classic ground to the whole civilized world, and now brings pilgrims from the most distant parts of the earth, as on this day, to worship at the shrine of genius. "Yet Albyn! yet the praise be thine, Thy scenes with story to combine; Thou bid'st him who by Roslin strays List to the tale of other days. Midst Cartlane crags thou showest the cave, The refuge of thy champion brave; Giving each rock a storied tale, Pouring a lay through every dale; Knitting, as with a moral band, Thy story to thy native land; Combining thus the interest high Which genius lends to beauty's eye!" But, my lord, the poet who conceived those beautiful lines, has himself done more than all our ancestors' valour to immortalize the land of his birth; for he has united the interest of truth with the charms of fiction, and peopled the realm not only with the shadows of time, but the creations of genius. In those brilliant creations, as in the glassy wave, we behold mirrored the lights, the shadows, the forms of reality; and yet "So pure, so fair, the mirror gave, As if there lay beneath the wave, Secure from trouble, toil, and care, A world than earthly world more fair." Years have rolled on, but they have taken nothing, they have added much to the fame of those illustrious men. "Time but the impression deeper makes, As streams their channels deeper wear."