In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh to the point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will have been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in what would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are among us some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty again, a season of the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream. _Ichabod_, they tell us, may be now written on the front of the Register House; and Edinburgh is living on her past glories! As this complaint was raised again and again in previous times to which its application is now a matter of surprise, may we not hope that its recurrence in the present is only a passing wave of that feeling, common to all times, and not unbecoming or unuseful, which underestimates, or even neglects, what is near and round about, in comparison with what is old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh is now despicable intellectually in comparison with her former self, like the larger question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and pressed along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually poor in comparison with her former self, is really a question of statistics. As a certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient basis for a fair inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one remembers, however, that among those who would have to be included in the inventory, inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been suggested as a separating point between the defunct past and the still current, are not only such of the older and already-named ornaments of Edinburgh as David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert Chambers, and Hill Burton, but also such individualities of later conspicuous mark as Alexander Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr. John Brown, then, perhaps, there might be some confidence that, if one were to proceed to the more delicate business of comprising in the list all that suit among the living, together with those of whom there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the town to come,” the total would exhibit an average not quite shameful. Perhaps, however, as has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to count.