A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It was in July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that same year that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to Edinburgh. On one particular day in the course of that visit, as all know, Burns encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a lame fair-haired youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the midst of other company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix themselves for a moment or two with some special interest. This was young Walter Scott. In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that another Edinburgh boy, two years younger than Scott, standing somewhere in the High Street, and staring at a man whose unusual appearance had struck him, was told by a bystander that he might well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This was young Francis Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming lives of those two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the wondrous man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year appeared the first number of the _Edinburgh Review_, projected in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the year of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty years to all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history of Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of Scott’s creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other, all Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to the juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind, however, criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze of the completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that the present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the Edinburgh of those thirty following years. II.