Edinburgh in 1806 is painted for us in that incident. Of the two men seen standing together on the Mound, under the tall clump of old houses which still on that spot arrests the eye of the visitor, the stalwart fair-haired one, leaning his head on the wall to conceal his tears, is the genius of the Scottish past, while his less moved companion, of smaller stature, with dark keen features and piercing hazel eyes, is the confident spirit of the Scottish future. There was, indeed, one element, then in making for the Scottish future, no representation of which was discernible in Jeffrey, and which was not logically involved in any ostensible form of Scottish Political Whiggism. This was that fervour of a revived Evangelicism in Theology the effects of which on the national character and the national polity of Scotland have been so strikingly visible through the last two generations and more. But this was a manifestation of later date, which even the closest observer of 1806 could hardly have pre-imagined. The traditional germ existed in Sir Henry Moncreiff; but the full development was to come with the combative Calvinistic and Presbyterian energy of Andrew Thomson, and the grander and richer genius of Thomas Chalmers. THE LAST YEARS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT[8] After the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, a private journal of his, extending over the greater part of the last seven years of his life, and consisting of two thick vellum-bound volumes of close writing, carefully clasped and locked, came into the hands of his son-in-law Lockhart, to be used at his discretion for the biography of his great relative. Accordingly, when that biography was published in 1837, the last portion of it contained a large selection of extracts from this Diary. Naturally, however, the matter in many places being of a kind which it would have been premature then to make public, it was only a selection that _could_ be given by Lockhart. For more than half a century, therefore, the original manuscript volumes have remained at Abbotsford, waiting for the time when it should be judged fit to make that more complete publication of their contents which Scott himself had contemplated as inevitable at some time or other. The time has now arrived; and one of the most interesting literary events of the present season is the publication, by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, of the great Sir Walter’s Journal in perfect form and with all requisite annotations.