That system of the government of Scotland by proconsulship of which he had been so conspicuously the representative did not by any means die with him. It was continued, with variations and modifications, through those successive ministries of the later part of the reign of George III. and the whole of the reign of George IV. which fill up the interval between the death of Pitt and the eve of the Reform Bill; nay, not only so continued, but continued with the accompanying phenomenon that it was still a Dundas that exercised, occasionally at least, what did remain of the proconsulship. Robert Dundas, 2d Viscount Melville, who died as late as 1851, was a member of most of the successive administrations mentioned, from Perceval’s of 1809–12, through Liverpool’s of 1812–27, to Canning’s and the Duke of Wellington’s of 1827–30, holding one or other of his father’s old posts in these administrations, and so or otherwise maintaining the hereditary Dundas influence in Scottish affairs while Toryism kept the field. But, while this prolongation of the Dundas influence in the second Lord Melville is not to be forgotten, it is the father, Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, that has left the name of Dundas most strikingly impressed upon the history of Scotland, and it is the stretch of two-and-twenty years between 1783 and 1806, during which this greatest of the Dundases exercised the proconsulship, that has to be remembered especially and distinctively in Scottish annals as the time of the Dundas Despotism. * * * * * “The Dundas Despotism!” O phrase of fear, unpleasing to a modern ear! What a Scotland that must have been which this phrase describes! A country without political life, without public meetings, without newspapers, without a hustings: could any endurable existence be led in such a set of conditions,—could any good come out of it?