market, the tendency _might_ be resisted; in other words, authors might live in Edinburgh and the publishing machinery might be in London. In literature, however, less than in most trades, is such an arrangement possible. But let not Edinburgh despair. Only let her still have within her, as hitherto, a sufficient number of the right kind of persons, distributed through her official appointments, or in other ways habitually resident, and it is pretty certain that books of all varieties will continue to be shot out from her at intervals, some of them the more valuable perhaps because they will not have been made to order. To return to our more immediate subject:—It will enable us more distinctly to conceive the state of Edinburgh society ninety or ninety-five years ago if we enumerate the more important of the individuals, old and young, who then figured in it. In doing so, it will be well to fix on some one year, at which to take our census. For various reasons the year 1802 may be selected. It was the first year of the short peace, or “armed truce,” which intervened between the two wars with France; it was the first year, also, of that short and perplexing interregnum in home affairs during which Addington was prime minister and Pitt and Dundas were out of office. Few of the intellectual chiefs of the former generation were now alive in Edinburgh. David Hume and the poet Fergusson had been dead more than a quarter of a century; Kames and Gilbert Stuart for nearly twenty years. Dr. Henry, Adam Smith, the physician Cullen, Blacklock, Lord Hailes, the elder Tytler of Woodhouselee, and Robertson the historian, had disappeared more recently, and were still remembered. Fresher still was the local recollection of Lord Monboddo, Dr. Hugh Blair, the chemist Black, whose death had occurred in 1799, and of such minor celebrities as the Rev. Dr. Macknight and Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. Of nearly all these men Lord Cockburn could remember something, either as having known them domestically in his boyhood, or as having watched them taking their daily walk in the “Meadows”; and it was one of the gratifications of his after-life to think that, while privileged to live into the splendours of a new age, he had been born early enough to see the departing skirts of the old. Some remnants of the old age, however, did survive as connecting links between it and the new. Home, the author of “Douglas,” was alive in 1802, an infirm veteran of eighty, with flashes of his former spirit in him, and still capable of his claret. Another survivor was Dr. Adam Ferguson, two years the junior of Home and much of an invalid, but with fourteen years of life still before him. Henry Mackenzie, called “The Man of Feeling,” but as shrewd a man of the world as there was in Edinburgh, was another of the veterans,—fifty-seven years old, but destined to reach the age of eighty-six. Dugald Stewart was verging on his fiftieth year, and his philosophical reputation was