Although Buchanan was one of the greatest scholars of his time in Europe, he was not the founder of a race in minute points of classical scholarship, especially in correct quantities of Latin syllables. Scotland was long lacking, perhaps the reason was the want of rich endowments, but Dr. Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), the physician, the Jacobite, and the scholar, had another reason: “If it had not been for the stupid Presbyterianism we should have been as good as the English at longs and shorts.” Oddly enough, the same complaint was echoed within the national Zion itself. Dalzel, Professor of Greek and Clerk to the General Assembly, was, according to Sydney Smith, heard to declare, “If it had not been for that Solemn League and Covenant we should have made as good longs and shorts as they.” Before I pass from Pitcairne I quote a ludicrous story of which he is the hero. His sceptical proclivities were well known in Edinburgh, and he was rarely seen inside a church. He was driven there, however, on one occasion by a shower of rain. The audience was thin, the sermon commonplace, but the preacher wept copiously and, as it seemed to Pitcairne, irrelevantly. He turned to the only other occupant of the pew, a stolid-visaged countryman, and whispered, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “You would maybe greet yoursel’,” was the solemn answer, “if ye was up there and had as little to say.” I pass from one sceptic to another—one might say from one age to another. Edinburgh, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, according to Smollett’s famous phrase, was a “hotbed of genius.” When Amyot, the King’s dentist, was in Edinburgh he said, as he stood at the Cross, that he could any minute take fifty men of genius by the hand. Of this distinguished company David Hume was the chief. To what extent this historian, philosopher, sceptic, is now read, we need not inquire; he profoundly influenced European thought, and gave a system of religious philosophy the deadliest blow it ever received. He was a prominent and interesting figure, and many and various are the legends about him. What were his real religious beliefs, if he had any, remains uncertain. He was hand in glove with “Jupiter” Carlyle, Principal Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, and other leading moderates. They thought his scepticism was largely pretence, mere intellectual bounce, so to speak; they girded at his unreasonable departure from the normal, and indeed Carlyle takes every opportunity of thrusting at him on this account. The Edinburgh folk regarded him with solemn horror. The mother of Adam, the architect, who was also aunt to Principal Robertson, had much to say against the ‘atheist,’ whom she had never seen. Her son played her a trick. Hume was asked to the house and set down beside her. She declared “the large jolly man who sat next me was the most agreeable of them all.” “He was the very atheist, mother,” said the son, “that you were so much afraid