Since the Reformation, there had been various public decrees for the establishment of schools throughout Scotland; but they had been very partially successful in their object, and many parishes continued to be without any stated means of instruction for the young. The Presbyterian or ultra-Protestant party, sensible how important an ability to read the Scriptures was for keeping up a power in the people to resist the pretensions of the Romish Church, had always, on this account, been favourable to the maintenance of schools whereby the entire people might be instructed. Now, that they were placed securely in ascendency, they took the opportunity to obtain a parliamentary enactment ‘for settling of schools,’ by virtue of which it was ordered that the heritors (landowners) of each parish in the realm should ‘meet and provide a commodious house for a school, and settle and modify a salary to a schoolmaster, which shall not be under one hundred nor above two hundred merks [£5, 11_s._ 1_d._⅓ and £11, 2_s._ 2_d._⅔].’[185] It was thus made a duty incidental to the possession of land in each parish, that a school and schoolmaster should be maintained, and that the poorest poor should be taught; and, in point of fact, the community of Scotland became thus assured of access to education, excepting in the Highlands, where the vast extent of the parishes and other circumstances interfered to make the act inoperative. The history of the commencement of our parochial school establishment occupies but a page in this record; but the effects of the measure in promoting the economic and moral interests of the Scottish people are indefinite. It would be wrong to attribute to that act solely, as has sometimes been done, all the credit which the nation has attained in arts, in commerce, in moral elevation, and in general culture. But certainly the native energies have been developed, and the national moral character dignified, to a marked extent, through the means of these parish schools—an effect the more conspicuous and unmistakable from the fact of there having been no similar institution to improve the mass of society in the sister-kingdom. [Sidenote: OCT. 15.] It is a rather whimsical association of ideas, that Sir David [Sidenote: 1696.] Dunbar, the hero of the sad story of the _Bride of Baldoon_[186]—the bridegroom in the case—was an active improver of the wretched rural economy of his day. Some years before his unfortunate death in 1682, he had formed the noted _park_ of Baldoon, for the rearing of a superior breed of cattle, with a view to the demands of the market in England. It was, as far as I can learn, the first effort of the kind made in Scotland, and the example was not without imitation in various parts of the southwestern province of Scotland.