With the numerous workmen that were ultimately engaged in all the varied branches of skilled labour, the Hope Park establishment came to be recognized as one of the most important centres of economic industry in the city; and, so far as printing, publishing, and binding are concerned, is spoken of by Mr. Bremner, in his “Industries of Scotland,” as the most extensive house in Scotland. The new buildings, when completed, formed a stately range of offices enclosing three sides of a square, where, under a well-organized division of labour, with the aid of machinery adapted to its varied operations, the entire work, from the setting of the types to the issue of the bound and illustrated volumes, was done on the premises. Compositors, draughtsmen, photographers, lithographers, steel, copper, and wood engravers, electrotypers, stereotypers, folders, stitchers, and binders, plied their industrious skill. The work-men and women employed on the establishment latterly numbered nearly six hundred; and few centres of industry have been characterized by more harmonious relations between the representatives of capital and labour. The printing of books has constituted an important branch of Scottish industry from the days of Chepman and Miller, on through Bassendyne, Hart, and Symson, to our own time. The names of Fowlis, Constable, Ballantyne, Cadell, Blackwood, Oliver and Boyd, Chambers, Blackie, Collins, Neill, Black, and Nelson, are all familiarly associated with the literary history of the century; and, with only three exceptions, they belong to Edinburgh. It was fitting, indeed, that Edinburgh should take the lead in developing the typographer’s art, where, in 1507, Walter Chepman set up the first printing-press in Scotland; and where, in the memorable year when “the flowers o’ the forest were a’ wede away” on Flodden Hill, he built the beautiful Chepman Aisle which still adorns the collegiate church of St. Giles, and endowed there a chaplainry at the altar of St. John the Evangelist. Edinburgh, in the days of the Scottish Caxton, was even more noteworthy for its authors than its typographers. Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, and the makers of that brilliant age, were followed by Montgomery, Drummond, Allan Ramsay, and Fergusson; and along with this array of poets, reaching to him whom Burns owned as his master, Hume, Robertson, Mackenzie, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and Walter Scott, combined to transform their old romantic town into the Modern Athens of later years. Their genius was not without its influence on the special aspect of Edinburgh’s industries, including some of the novel forms of periodical literature which have so largely contributed to the culture of the masses.