No sooner had the morning of the Reformation shone upon Scotland, than her horizon was obscured by the clouds of civil war; and scarcely were her men prepared for taking up the pen for the information and amusement of their fellows, when they were obliged to draw the sword for their defence; and that energy which in happier times would have trimmed the lamp of science, and tuned the harp of song, was obliged to struggle night and day, if so be that it could preserve but a spark of liberty, or even keep the life. That despotism and debauchery, which Mary the Regent and Mary the Queen attempted, through their French connexions, and by means of their French mercenaries, to introduce into Scotland, was of itself sufficient to render the intellectual improvement of the country stationary for an age; and though the resistance with which it met tended not only to preserve but to strengthen the free spirit of the people, it forbade the cultivation of the arts of peace. The conduct of James, all shuffling and pedantic as it was, did not, while he remained in Scotland, tend to make matters improve; and upon his removal to England, Scotland may be said to have been given up to that delegated despotism of influence, which, under various forms and names, has continued to afflict her to the present day, and must so continue till an uniformity of civil and political law be established over the whole island. From the beginning of the troubles under Charles, to the Revolution in 1688, the state of Scotland was such as to leave literature entirely out of the question. The great body of the people--at least of that part of them who otherwise might have studied, or rewarded the study of literature, were not only driven from all places congenial for literary purposes, but even from the fastnesses of the mountains, and the caves of the rocks; and though a Scotchman was occasionally returning from foreign parts to let his countrymen know what the rest of the world were doing, terror and oppression were too general for promoting any imitation. At that time, too, one half the extent of Scotland was in a state of the most abject ignorance: the feudal law, in the Highlands, was in full exercise; and when all the chiefs could not read, it was not to be expected that there would be much taste for literature among their vassals. Thus, it was not till the termination of the second rebellion in favour of the Stuarts, in 1745, that the people of Scotland generally began to have a literary taste. A sure foundation for such a taste had, indeed, been previously laid, in the provision that within every parish in Scotland there should not only be a school, but a school so regulated as that the poorest, as well as the most opulent, might reap the benefit of it; but up to this period, and indeed for some time after, the literature of those schools was confined to the catechisms of the church and the reading of the Bible; and if any