Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh naturally find the cause to some extent in the increasing centralisation of the commerce of British Literature universally in London. They point to such facts as that the _Edinburgh Review_ has long ceased to be an Edinburgh periodical, that some Edinburgh publishing firms have transferred their head-quarters to London, and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are understood to be meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place, is there not here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its population of four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that the fair comparison in this matter should not be between London and Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it were found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were even one-twentieth of that of London, the scores between the two places would then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly equal. I cannot pretend to have used all the available means for the computation; but, in view of some facts before me, I should be surprised if it turned out that Edinburgh did not come up to her proportional mark. Edinburgh possesses, at all events, a most flourishing printing industry. The printing of Edinburgh is celebrated all the world over; a very large proportion of the books published in London are printed in Edinburgh. That is something; but what of _publishing_ business? From the Edinburgh Directory of this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city there are 62 who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing houses in Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be about 1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—_i.e._ that London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers, however, do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the proportionally fewer London houses have been doing a much larger amount of business, and may not the publishing machinery of Edinburgh have been lying comparatively idle? Well, I do not know; but the recent publishing lists of our Edinburgh houses show no signs of declining activity. The completed Ninth Edition of the great _Encyclopædia Britannica_, for example, has been wholly an Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another Edinburgh Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls most obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of her journalism and her apparatus of periodical literature. _Blackwood’s Magazine_ and _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_ exist still; but other literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are extinct, and one can recollect the time when there were more newspapers in Edinburgh than there are now. Those, however, were the days of twice-a-week newspapers