Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, _who_ so fit to succeed him in the presidency, _who_ called to it with such acclamation, as the long-known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson, was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the great Sir Walter. Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had vanished there were various intellectual developments, various manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were even alien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example. There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?