Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose noble poetic
fragment of _Hardyknute_ was made public by Ramsay, and whose influence
on the subsequent course of specially Scottish literature by that
fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged things of the same kind,
remains yet to be adequately estimated, one notes that among those
juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the career of literature after him
and under his observation, but who had died before him, were Robert
Blair, James Thomson, and William Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch,
once an Edinburgh _protégé_ of Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner
since 1723, and Anglicised into Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s
Scottish literary survivors, and does not count for much. But, when
Ramsay died, there were already in existence, at ages varying from full
maturity to mere infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable
now, on one ground or another, in the British Literary History of the
eighteenth century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle,
and Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and Mallet
had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are associated
locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of Scotland; but by
far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay himself, had their homes
in Edinburgh, or were essentially of Edinburgh celebrity by all their
belongings. Kames, David Hume, Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh
Blair, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith,
Dr. Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor
Robison, James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor
Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton: these,
with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern lights of
the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in which Dr.
Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and he and
Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon, were seen in the
London streets. Greater and smaller together, were they not a sufficient
northern constellation? Do not we of modern Edinburgh still remember
them now with a peculiar pride, and visit, out of curiosity, the houses
in the Old Town squares or closes where some of them had their
dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of their physiognomies and
habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate,
the Parliament House, and the site of our University? Was it not the
fact that in their days there were two recognised and distinct centres
or foci of literary production in Great Britain: the great London on the
banks of the Thames being one; but the other 400 miles farther north, in
the smaller city of heights and hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur
Seat on the banks of the Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring
radiance yet, vanishes from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age
of the Literary History of Edinburgh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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