During Scott’s lifetime there were living in Edinburgh a remarkable cluster of men; and some of those who, as young men, had been his fellow-citizens, survived him right on until past the middle of the century, and wrote their names large in the annals not only of Edinburgh but of the world, before they too in their turn passed away. In literature, during Scott’s lifetime, there was the immortal Baroness Nairne, of the “weel-kent” Jacobite and Episcopalian family, the Oliphants of Gask. Baroness Nairne, while she lived and when she died,--during the meetings she must have had with Scott at the house of her sister, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston,--was all the time the unavowed author of some of the best-loved and best-known of our national songs. There were Jeffrey the critic, Lord Cockburn, Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Campbell the poet, M‘Crie, the historian and biographer of Knox, Dugald Stewart, and his antagonist, Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Allan, the artist, Sir Henry Raeburn, the great Scottish portrait-painter, Miss Ferrier, the novelist, Dr. Alexander Murray, the philologist, Kirkpatrick Sharpe of the bitter tongue, and David Laing, the kindly antiquary. In 1817 _Blackwood’s Magazine_ had been started in Tory rivalry to the Whiggism of Jeffrey’s _Edinburgh Review_; and in 1832, the very year of Scott’s death, William and Robert Chambers began the publication of _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_. Robert Chambers--who may be regarded, in virtue of his long-unacknowledged _Vestiges of Creation_, as the forerunner of Darwin--had, as a boy of twenty, written his inimitable _Traditions of Edinburgh_. The compiling of the _Traditions_ had brought him at once under the astonished and delighted notice of Scott, and begun a friendship between them, resulting in many walks all about Edinburgh, and many talks--also all about Edinburgh. After Scott’s death there were in Edinburgh many notabilities. There was a brilliant literary coterie scintillating in the Blackwood Saloon: Professor Wilson, “Christopher North”; Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart; Professor Wilson’s son-in-law, Professor Aytoun, the writer of those stirring national ballads that have thrilled so many Scottish hearts; Hogg, enticed from his Ettrick pastures into the turmoil of _Noctes Ambrosianæ_; Dr. Moir, known as “Delta.” These names are associated with the early days of _Blackwood_, as are those of Lord Jeffrey, Lord Brougham, and Lord Cockburn with the early days of the _Edinburgh Review_. Sir William Hamilton was living at 16 Great King Street; and somewhere in Edinburgh, invisible as a microbe, but as far-reaching in achievement, there was the quaint little figure of De Quincey. In one of a row of small houses in Comely Bank, on the north-west outskirts of the city, lived Thomas Carlyle. Among the judges were Lord Jeffrey and Lord Cockburn, survivors of the Whig party of Scott’s days, and Lord Neaves, a staunch Conservative. Chiefest among