Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the _Scotticism of Scott_,—that special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself, and also in Hugh Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the character of many of those writings which marked the advance of Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of which by the starting of _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_ in the very year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then, unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?— “Let me feel the breezes blowing Fresh along the mountain side! Let me see the purple heather, Let me hear the thundering tide, Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan Spouting when the storm is high! Give me back one hour of Scotland; Let me see it ere I die.”