Incredible as it may seem, there is evidence that the Scottish people did contrive, in some way or other, to lead not only an endurable but a very substantial and jolly existence through the Dundas Despotism, and that not only a great deal of good, but much of what Scotland must now regard as her best and most characteristic produce, had its genesis in that time, though the exodus has been later. The various liberties of the human subject may be classified and arranged according to their degrees of importance; and a great many of them may exist where the liberty of voting for members of parliament and of openly talking politics is absent. So it was in Scotland through the reign of Henry Dundas and his Toryism. The million and a half of human beings who then composed Scotland, and were scattered over its surface, in their various parishes, agricultural or pastoral, and in their towns and villages, went through their daily life with a great deal of energy and enjoyment, notwithstanding that Dundas, and the lairds and the provosts and bailies as his agents, elected the members of parliament and transacted all the political business of the country; nay, out of the lairds and the bailies themselves, and all the business of electioneering, they extracted a good deal of fun. What mattered it to them that now and then some long-tongued fellow who had started a newspaper was stowed away in jail, or that an Edinburgh lawyer like Muir was transported for being incontinent in his politics? Could not people let well alone, obey the authorities, earn their oatmeal, and drink their whisky in peace? Few of Scott’s novels come down so far as to this period of Scottish life, and it has not been much described in our other literature of fiction; but till lately there were many alive who remembered it, and delighted in recalling its savageries and its humours. O the old Scottish times of the lairds, the “moderate” ministers, the provosts and the bailies!—the lairds speaking broad Scotch, farming their own lands, carousing together, seeing their daughters married, and writing to London for appointments for their sons; the “moderate” ministers making interest for _their_ sons, preaching “Blair and cauld morality” on Sundays, and jogging to christenings or to Presbytery dinners through the week; the provosts and bailies in their shops in the forenoon, or meeting in the morning at their “deid-chack” after a man was hanged! Every considerable town then had its hangman, who was frequently a well-to-do person that sold fish or some such commodity. And then, all through society, the flirtations, the friendships, and the long winter evenings at the fireside, with the cracks between the “gudeman” and his neighbours, and the alternative of a hand at cards or a well-thumbed book for the young folks! What stalwart old fellows, both of the douce and of the humorous type, oracular and respected in their day, and whose physiognomies and