Some forty years before that time, Scotland had parted with her independent autonomy by the Treaty of Union. There was an end of “an auld sang”; and the smaller country, though nominally only united to the larger, was virtually, for purposes of general history, incorporated with it. Scotsmen have recently been complaining that Literature has not even paid Scotland the poor compliment of remembering the fact of her union with England so far as to use the word “Britain,” then specially provided by law as the designation of the composite kingdom, but has gone on speaking of “England” and “English History,” as if the linking of the smaller country to the larger had produced no change of fact worth commemorating by a change of name. The practice is as unscholarly as it is unconstitutional, and is a recent and violent departure from the established usage of the best English writers of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the present. But the continuity of English life _was_ too little disturbed perhaps by the mere admission into the Parliament at Westminster of sixteen peers and forty-five members for counties and burghs from the other side of the Tweed, to make it reasonable to expect that all Englishmen would for ever thenceforth keep to the correct and legal usage, employing the words “England” and “English” only in their proper historical senses, but saying “Britain,” “British,” “Britannic,” etc., whenever the aggregate unity should be in view. It was actually proposed, in the first draft of an inscription to be engraved on a public memorial to a famous statesman recently deceased, to include among his mentioned distinctions that of his having been “twice Prime Minister of England”; and the absurdity had to be stopped by pointing out that for several ages there had been no such office or entity anywhere in the world. Even patriotic Scottish writers,—for example, Sir Archibald Alison,—have given way to the habit of using the word “England” for the conjunct community oftener than the legal word “Britain.” Apart, however, from all controversy in the matter of names, it is plain that from the date of the Union Scotsmen themselves have considered their national history, in all ordinary senses, as then concluded. Our text-books of Scottish History close at the year 1707. For about forty years after that date, indeed, Scotland contrived by vigorous exertions to make her separate existence still felt. The fierce flutter of the tartans in the two Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 drew the historians hurriedly back to her after they thought they had done with her; and so it is not uncommon in books of Scottish History to find the narrative continued, by way of appendix, as far as to 1745. But then the historian takes his final leave. With the furious Cumberland and the Government whom Cumberland served, he scatters the tartans for the last time; he breaks up the Highlands by forts and