Although the increase among us of late of the practice of such commemorative tributes to eminent personages of the past has provoked cynical criticism in some quarters, it is really one of the creditable signs of our time. The more numerous the objects of interest to any nation in its own history, or in history generally, in times preceding the bustle of the present, the richer the mind of that nation, and the higher its capabilities. Even the range of time to which it will go back for worthy objects of interest must count for something in the reckoning. The recent is only the departing present, and has so left its residues in the present, whether of admirations or of animosities, that participation in testimonies of regard for public men remembered as having recently moved amidst us signifies little more with many than sensitiveness to the common duties of present social life, or sometimes even of present political partisanship. To be susceptible of the commemorative instinct with respect to objects and persons removed from ourselves by a generation or two, or a century or two, is a rarer thing, and implies a larger and finer endowment of historical knowledge and feeling. ALLAN RAMSAY[5] In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay. Born in 1686, of humble parentage, in the village of Leadhills, in the wild inland parish of Crawfordmuir in Lanarkshire, and educated in the ordinary fashion at the parish school there, Ramsay was brought to Edinburgh in 1701, when he was in his fifteenth year, and was apprenticed to a periwig-maker. The statement sometimes made that he began life as a barber is therefore incorrect. The crafts of the barber and the wig-maker were then distinct. _Wig_ and _periwig_ are one and the same thing, and both are derived, it seems, though one would hardly suppose so, from the Latin _pilus_, hair. Thus,—Latin, _pilus_, hair; old Italian, _pilucca_, a mass of hair or head of hair; this, still in old Italian, corrupted into _perucca_; whence the French _perruque_; that word adopted into English, but generally twirled into _periwig_ to make it native; from which word _periwig_ if you lop off the _peri_, the sole remnant of the original _pilus_, you have the mere twirl or termination _wig_, standing as a substantive word and answering the whole purpose. Now a wig-maker, periwig-maker, or _perruquier_, was no mean tradesman in those old times, extending from the middle of the seventeenth century to near the end of the eighteenth, when it was the strange custom, in all civilised European countries, for people to wear artificial heads of hair, not as mere substitutes for the natural growths in cases of necessity (which had been a usage everywhere from time immemorial), but as fashionable adornments of bulging volume and fantastic device.