marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all. Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted that it was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand. From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his own literary ambition in his _Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie_ and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison? In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’s _Letters_ or Stair’s _Institutes_; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking