The most celebrated literary man whom the Islands can lay claim to is Malcolm Laing (1762-1818), the Scottish constitutional historian and protagonist in the Ossianic controversy. A friend of Charles James Fox, and a class-fellow of Lord Brougham, Laing sat in Parliament for the county in the Whig interest from 1807 to 1812. In 1808 he withdrew from the literary circles of Edinburgh to his home in the Islands, and here in 1814 he was visited by Sir Walter Scott. Malcolm Laing’s younger brother, Samuel, was the author of _Travels in Norway_, _A Tour in Sweden_, and _Notes of a Traveller_. A greater work, however, was his translation of the _Heimskringla_, the old Icelandic history of the early Kings of Norway, by Snorri Sturlason, a performance which had an important bearing on the hero-worship gospel of Carlyle. High literary ability appears to run in the blood of the Laings. Samuel Laing’s son, of the same name, was the author of those popular compendiums of nineteenth century science and thought, _Human Origins_, and _Modern Science and Modern Thought_, which are still in wide circulation. [Illustration: Malcolm Laing (_From a portrait by Raeburn_)] David Vedder (1790-1854), an almost self-taught miscellaneous writer, of large output and considerable excellence, was born in the parish of Deerness. In 1830 he conducted the _Edinburgh Literary Gazette_, supported by De Quincey and others. The various works of Vedder, which include _Orcadian Sketches_, and _Poems, Legendary, Lyrical, and Descriptive_, have fallen on an undeserved oblivion. Vedder is the Orcadian poet _par excellence_. Perhaps the once highly popular novels of the amiable Mary Balfour, or Brunton, _Self-Control_, 1811, and _Discipline_, 1815, would not now be considered a passport to fame; but a later member of the family to which she belonged, David Balfour of Trenabie, has in his _Odal Rights and Feudal Wrongs_ written of the Scottish oppressions of Orkney in the sixteenth century in such fine limpid English as makes one regret the purely local interest of his subject. Walter Traill Dennison, who in his _Orcadian Sketch Book_ has given his fellow-islanders some light fiction of a high quality, unfortunately elected to write in the strictly local dialect of the North Isles of Orkney, using a phonetic spelling which is a stumbling-block to many readers who are quite at home in ordinary Scots literature. Traill Dennison, like Vedder, is a humourist, and Orkney gifted to the outside world a greater humourist than either when she sent the father of Washington Irving across the sea.