the Presbyterian Scottish clergy was the great Dr. Chalmers, and grouped with him were Dr. Cunningham, Dr. Guthrie, and Dr. Candlish. Chiefest among the Episcopalian Scottish clergy was the much-loved Scotsman, Dean Ramsay, author of _Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character_. In 1842 Queen Victoria paid her first royal visit to her Scottish capital. She came, like George IV., by sea, and arrived at Granton on September 1--most opportunely, for it was St. Giles’s Day. In the following year, 1843, a great event occurred in the history of the Church of Scotland, and the scene of its enactment was St. Andrew’s Church in George Street, Edinburgh. No nation, it is said, knows anything of what lies north of it. France knows nothing about England: England’s ignorance in all regarding Scotland is supreme. Ask the average Englishman what is meant by “the Disruption,” and he will stare at you. And yet the Disruption was the outcome of a controversy that agitated Scotland for years, a controversy strong enough to split the Church of Scotland into two. Three years after the Disruption, the “Philosophical Institution” was founded, and this was an event in the history of intellectual and social Edinburgh that can best be valued when it is remembered that among the first presidents were such men as Lord Macaulay, Lord Brougham, Thomas Carlyle, and Adam Black, and that among the first lecturers who came to Edinburgh by invitation of the Philosophical were Dickens and Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Charles Kingsley, and Ruskin, who so roundly abused our New Town architecture. Through the second half of the century, social Edinburgh was proud of such men as Sir James Y. Simpson, the discoverer of the anæsthetic properties of chloroform; Dr. John Brown, the author of _Rab and his Friends_; Hugh Miller, the geologist, author of _Old Red Sandstone_; Alexander Smith, the poet; John Skelton, the essayist and historian; Alexander Russel, the witty editor of the _Scotsman_; Dr. John Hill Burton, the Historiographer-Royal; and Skene, his successor in that office, who was the son of Sir Walter Scott’s old friend. George Combe lived in Edinburgh until 1858; and in the University, besides those already named, were Sir David Brewster, Sir Robert Christison, Professor Syme, John Goodsir, Lyon Playfair, and Professor Tait. And does not the whole of Listerian surgery date from Edinburgh? And is not Lister’s own great original “spray,” though long since superannuated, still the glory of an Edinburgh Infirmary ward? Through the last hours of yesterday, Edinburgh was familiar with the picturesque figure of Professor Blackie in his plaid, with his beautiful old face framed in its silver hair, and his joyous Celtic exuberance and enthusiasms that so often startled the sober Scot. He, too, is gone.