poetry and other literature of the real Scottish vernacular), Scotland had not given birth to a single poet or other man of letters able to command distinct recognition by his English contemporaries. It was precisely about this time, however, that such men as Hume and Smollett, and Robertson and Adam Smith, and Blair and Kames,—all of them born after the Union, and most of them between the two Rebellions,—began that literary activity of the Scottish mind which, kept up by such of their immediate successors as Burns, Henry Mackenzie, and Dugald Stewart, has been continued, with ever-increasing effect, to our own time, by writers whose name is legion. In short, however we look at the matter, it is a remarkable fact that the most productive period of the History of Scotland is that which has elapsed since Cumberland tore the last relics of autonomy out of her soil, and left her, passive and Parliamentless, to the mere winds and meteors. One reason why, despite this interesting progress of Scottish society since 1745, the Scottish history of the intervening period has not been written is that, according to our common notions, only where there is autonomy can there be proper history. It is over parliaments, monarchs, and seats of government, with an occasional excursion after embassies or in the route of armies to great battle-fields, that the Muse of History hovers; where there is no parliament, monarch, or seat of government, and no embassy or march of armies to make up for the want, she finds it unnecessary to stay, and thinks it sufficient if she leaves other and minor muses as her substitutes. Hence, as we have said, the Muse of History left Scotland in 1707, and returned only hastily and on compulsion to attend to the Highland Rebellions. Whatever claim on her attention Scotland since that time has possessed she considers herself to have amply satisfied by hovering over the Parliament of Westminster, as the centre of British interests in general, or by following those trains of military and international action, emanating from that centre, in which Scotsmen have had part side by side with Englishmen and Irishmen. The task of recording purely Scottish events in their sequence during the last hundred and fifty years,—of taking note of all the flitting social phenomena of which during that period the land north of the Tweed has been the scene,—has accordingly devolved on the muse of individual biography, aided by the muse of economical dissertation and statistics; and it seems somewhat problematical, as has been said, whether the materials which these subordinate muses have gathered, in the shape of miscellaneous lives of remarkable Scotsmen since 1745, and miscellaneous sketches of Scottish life and society since then, will ever be organised into a regular History. To a writer capable of combining the scattered elements of interest lying in such materials the thing would certainly be possible.