shrewd head and the willing hand; but how to start, how to get capital, skill, and experience—how, in short, to realise the ambitious views she was beginning to cherish! Restricted as merchandise was in the reign of King William, we then find a general acknowledgment of the importance of the mercantile class in Edinburgh, in the practice of receiving the Lord Provost of the city as a member of the Privy Council, which was substantially the government of the country. These provosts, too, were generally knighted. Amongst them we find Sir John Hall, ancestor of the baronets of Dunglass, and of the late ingenious writer, Captain Basil Hall. Sir William Binning and Sir Thomas Kennedy, who had been provosts in the late Stuart reigns, continued in that of King William to be engaged in large undertakings, such as government contracts and farmings of customs. So, also, was an eminent member of our Company, Bailie Alexander Brand, who finally acquired the honour of knighthood. We find Brand, for instance, along with Binning and Kennedy, engaging to import five thousand stand of arms for the state, at one pound sterling each, and getting into trouble from making public in a law-court that he contemplated a _donative_ of two hundred and fifty guineas, with other articles, to some of the principal state-officers with whom the bargain had been made. A certain Sir Robert Dickson, who, with Binning and Kennedy, farmed the customs and foreign excise for five years from 1693, at twenty thousand three hundred pounds a year, got into a worse scrape still with the state-officers; for, in squaring accounts, he found upwards of two thousand pounds unexpectedly on the debit side, for wines given as gratuities to those nobles, and, seeking the king’s protection from this oppression, he found himself liable to a charge, under an old statute, against murmuring at judges, and was glad to buy himself off by craving pardon on his knees. The gratuities, in the latter case, were declared to be according to use and wont; if so, it seems hard that Brand should have been harassed for announcing a compliance with the custom in the other case; but, of course, _quietness_ is everything in these matters.