After the Restoration, things were for a long time not much better, for still unfortunately the bitterness of religious conflict was kept up. A Royal Fishery Company, with a capital of £25,000 sterling, was started, as a rival to the Dutch; but it did not prosper greatly. It had various privileges; and we rather hear of these proving a detriment to private enterprise, than of any distinct good done by the company itself. Amongst the most notable uses for shipping in the reign of the restored Stuart, were some of a melancholy character—privateering against the Dutch during the two shameful wars carried on against Holland, and the transporting of poor people to Barbadoes, and of discontented west-country Presbyterians to the American colonies. The former kind of work is said to have enriched two merchants named Baird, whose descendants have since figured among the Scottish gentry. But all such work was of small advantage to the country at large, as everything is, indeed, except that which gives real labour and its products. Here and there was a speculator like Sir Robert Mylne of Barnton, who made a little fortune by farming the entire national revenue at ninety thousand pounds, and ultimately lost it again, as he well might in that age without any necessary connection of the event with the fact of his having handed the Covenant to the hangman when it was publicly burnt after the Restoration. In this age, too, there was at least one able and successful merchant in our city, namely, Sir James Dick of Prestonfield, a grandson of the Rothschild of the Covenant. In him the fortunes of the family were in some measure restored. As provost of Edinburgh, he acquired the friendship of the Duke of York, when he lived at Holyrood, and used to be consulted by him about means of promoting the prosperity of the country. George Watson, the founder of our hospital, was originally head-clerk or accountant to Dick, at a salary of £16, 13s. 4d. Rather unexpectedly, I am informed that a branch of Sir James’s business has continued to be kept up, and after some changes of situation, now appears under the firm of Craig Brothers, in the South Bridge. There was, however, in this reign, little more than a blind groping towards mercantile enterprise. The contemplation of English prosperity had created a spirit of emulation. Men of enlarged minds were sadly sensible of the national poverty. There was a general sense of uneasiness under the knowledge that perhaps as much as _twenty thousand a year_ went out of this poor country into fat and comfortable England, to buy superfine cloth and other fineries for the upper classes. England, too, it was observed, had those colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, not one of whom could buy a hat, or a coat, or a sheet of glass, from anybody but an Englishman, while Scotland had no such outlets for manufactures, even if the manufactures existed. There was, it appears, in Scotland, the