Raeburn? Or, if any one wanted information about books which old Creech, or Miller, or Bell and Bradfute could not give, from whom was he so likely to obtain it as from the energetic and ambitious young bookseller, Archibald Constable? Looking down in fancy on the sea of 80,000 heads which in the year 1802 constituted the population of Edinburgh,—some gray with age, many wigged and powdered, and many more wearing the brown or light locks of natural youth,—it is on the above-named sixty or seventy that the instructed eye now rests as the most conspicuous in the crowd. But the instructed eye sees something more than the mere mass of heads, with here and there one of the conspicuous sixty. It sees the mass swaying to and fro,—here solid and restful, there discomposed and in motion, and the conspicuous heads unequally distributed amid the wavering parts. In other words, the society of Edinburgh in 1802, like every other society before or since, presented the phenomenon of division into two parties,—the party of rest and conservation, and the party of change or progress. The main fact in the history of Edinburgh at that time was that an incessant house-to-house battle was going on in it between old Scottish Toryism and a new and vigorous Scottish Whiggism. Numerically, the Tories were immensely in the majority, and the Whigs were but in small proportion. But it is not by the numerical measure in such cases that History judges or portions out her interest. The party that is largest may be the lump, and that which is smallest may be the leaven. So it was most remarkably in the Edinburgh of 1802. To any one surveying the society of Edinburgh then, with something of that knowledge which we now possess, two facts would have seemed significant: first, that, though the majority were on the Tory side, most of the conspicuous heads were on the Whig side; secondly, and still more obviously, that among the conspicuous heads the Whigs claimed nearly all the young ones. If, for example, Toryism could claim a full half of the veterans that have been named, the potent old chiefs of the Parliament House included, yet even of those veterans a few, such as Erskine, Dugald Stewart, Playfair, old Dr. Adam, and Sir Henry Moncreiff, were Whigs; if among the middle-aged Toryism was equally strong, yet here also Whiggism could count representatives in Gillies, Clerk of Eldin, Malcolm Laing, and the resolute James Gibson; and, if still, after surveying those two classes, there had been any doubt which of the two political parties had the higher pretensions intellectually, it was only necessary to descend among the young and adolescent to see that among _them_ at least Whiggism had most recruits. Of the younger men of Edinburgh then entering life who afterwards rose to be something in the world’s eye, Scott alone, remarks Lord Cockburn, was unmistakably a Tory. The exception is certainly a weighty one; and