maxims are still preserved in local memory, lived and died in those days and made them serve their turn! Nay, of the Scotsmen who have been eminent in the intellectual world, what a number belong by their birth to the reign of Dundas, and were nurtured amid its torpid influences! Burns closed his life in the midst of it; Dugald Stewart and James Watt lived through it; Scott, Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Hamilton, and Carlyle are all, more or less, specimens of what it could send forth. _Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_: there was pith in Scotland before there was Parliamentary Reform. Naturally it was in Edinburgh that the various elements of Scottish life at this time were seen in their closest contact and their most intimate union or antagonism. It was here that Dundas lived when he was in Scotland; and here were the central threads of that official network by which, through Dundas, Scotland was connected with the English Government. Edinburgh was then still the chief city of Scotland, even in population; for, though now Glasgow has far outstripped it in that particular, then the two cities were happy in numbering little more than 80,000 each. At least, in the census of 1801 Edinburgh stands for 82,000, or almost exactly neck to neck with Glasgow, which stands for 83,000. Dundee, which came next, reckoned but 29,000; Aberdeen, 27,000; and Leith and Paisley each about 20,000. Few other Scottish towns had a population of more than 10,000. Was there ever another such city to live in as Edinburgh? “And I forgot the clouded Forth, The gloom that saddens heaven and earth, The bitter east, the misty summer, And gray metropolis of the North.”