It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive, even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of the _Essays on Taste_; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs. Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the starting of _Blackwood’s Magazine_ in 1817, and the outflashing in that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in connection with _Blackwood_ and other periodicals, of the strange English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.