the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of _Rab and His Friends_.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation, containing _Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_, and also let us say the _Letter to Dr. Cairns_, and _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, and _Jeems the Doorkeeper_, and the paper called _Mystifications_, and that called _Pet Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh. LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH A GENERAL REVIEW[51] I The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?