What purpose, it may be asked, does their preservation serve? Of no class might this be more properly inquired than of the _Religious_, which may be supposed to admit of less scope for originality of treatment than any other; yet an examination of a few of the tracts under this head soon shows us the popular creed in forms of thought and illustration quite unexpected, and with a definiteness and force the originality of which cannot be mistaken. The same character, of course, applies in a more marked degree to classes where the composer was less influenced by prepossessed ideas, and where his only boundaries were the limits of his own imagination, and the deference which he was careful to pay to the prejudices of his readers. That these carelessly got-up publications constituted the popular literature of the peasantry and a large part of the urban population of Scotland for about half a century, is a fact which no student of our recent history will wisely ignore. They possess one advantage over the sensational reading of the present day penny journals, in that they represent the opinions and manners of those who read them, and, consequently, have a truthfulness and reality of which their London-manufactured substitutes are entirely destitute. The Chap-book is a mirror of rural opinions and manners; the Penny Sensational is only evidence of a vitiated popular taste. These remarks are chiefly applicable to the chap-books of Scottish production, which, along with those adopted from foreign sources, but so naturalized as to language and characters as to pass for productions of home growth--in reference to the purposes of this issue--are by far the most important. Keeping this purpose in view, there is no call here to apologise for their coarseness and indelicacy, for which, on the score of taste and morals, from a popular point of view, there is no defence; but their real value to us consists in their being true delineations of the manners and ways of thinking of low rural life, whose grossness was rather the result of the buoyancy of animal vigour than of the indulgence of vicious passions. The English ones are very varied in character, and have been chosen with considerable judgment, to suit the taste and understanding of those for whom they were selected. Their circulation in Scotland has been so large that we are justified in including them in a collection of Scottish peasant literature.