By 1780 Scotland could afford to smile at Johnson’s dictum that her northern lights were only farthing candles. In literature at least she could face English competition on equal terms. James Thomson had become a classic; Adam Smith and Hume and Robertson had demonstrated that the north could more than hold its own with the south in history and philosophy; Mackenzie’s lachrymose _Man of Feeling_ disputed with _The Vicar of Wakefield_ the claim to be the most popular short novel of the century. In Edinburgh a _Scots Magazine_ was emulating the methods and materials of the English _Gentleman’s Magazine_, though when Mackenzie and his friends tried, first in _The Mirror_ and later in _The Lounger_, to produce a Scottish _Spectator_ they found the city not metropolitan enough to support such an enterprise. Many people took anything sharp in the way of satire as a personal attack, but namby-pamby was not read, and so between poverty of material and poverty of support the journals’ straw-fire flickered and went out. But while the poor relations of England were thus looking forward hopefully to the day when their speech and writing should no longer betray their provincial origin, the social life of the country changed more slowly. The gentry added silks and laces to their clothing, and tea and other luxuries to their tables, but felt no special urgency for greater cleanliness. George Dempster, fresh from a visit to Brussels in 1756, was shocked to find that a baronet’s son of his acquaintance had been calling on a lady of title ‘in a valet de chamber’s frock and an unpowdered brown greezy head’. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the inhabitants of a Highland mansion, though they had got beyond the point where they were satisfied to give themselves ‘a “good wash” on Sundays, and make that do for the week’, found their domestic routine upset by a guest who not only insisted on a daily bath but refused to go to the river to take it. Servants in the better houses were provided with shoes and stockings, but the general standards of neatness were still so low as to make the cleanliness of Holland a constant source of wonder to the visiting Scot.