From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and scholar, _poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps_, as his foreign admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still, while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of _him_ too. It was in Edinburgh that he published his _Baptistes_, his _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_, and others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last proof-sheets of his _Rerum Scoticarum Historia_, or Latin History of Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely