settled in Edinburgh during the last twenty years of his life in the post of commissioner of customs; the hardly less illustrious Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), elected Professor of Mathematics in the University as early as 1774, but thence transferred in 1785 to the chair of Moral Philosophy, where he completed his fame; and, lastly, not to overburden the list, the novelist and essayist Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), an acknowledged literary celebrity ever since 1771, when he had published his _Man of Feeling_. In a class by himself, unless we choose to associate him with the Creeches, Smellies, and other “wuts” of a lower grade, whose acquaintance Burns made in his leisure hours during his first visit to Edinburgh in 1786, we may mention Burns’s immediate predecessor in the poetry of the Scottish vernacular, the unfortunate Robert Fergusson (1751–1774). He was a native of Edinburgh, and his brief life was squandered in its taverns. It was by virtue of the residence in the Scottish capital through the latter half of the eighteenth century of this cluster of men,—a tolerably brilliant cluster, it will be admitted,—that the city first assumed that position of literary rivalry with London which the names of Scott, Jeffrey, and Wilson enabled it to maintain for thirty or forty years longer. And here we may be permitted, parenthetically, a remark on a subject of some interest to Scotsmen generally. A not unfrequent question is whether Edinburgh will continue to maintain her former activity as a literary capital, or whether in literature, as in other things, the tendency is not to absolute centralisation in London. A little fact involved in the list of names just given is of some pertinence in relation to this inquiry. Let the list be examined, and it will be found that hardly one of the men mentioned in it as having begun the literary celebrity of Edinburgh was _professionally_ a man of letters. They were all lawyers, or clergymen, or university professors, or retired gentlemen who had posts and pensions. Even poor Fergusson the poet owed his living to his industry as copying-clerk to a lawyer. In this respect the literary society of Edinburgh at that date contrasts with that of London. Johnson, Goldsmith, and most of their set were writers by profession; and it was chiefly by such professional writers that the literary reputation of London was then supported. Nay, whenever a Scotsman of that time was led by circumstances to adopt literature as an occupation, it will be observed that, almost of course, he migrated into England, and attached himself to the skirts of the literary world of London. There was there a literary _market_, whereas in Edinburgh there were merely so many resident citizens who were at the same time authors. Thomson, Mallet, Smollett, Macpherson, and many other Scots of less note connected with the British literature of the last century as writers by profession, betook themselves necessarily to London as their proper field.