Miss, or as she latterly chose to style herself, Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, is one of the female writers of what may now be called the last age, whose eruption into literature was about as spontaneous and irregular as well as could be; for there was nothing either in the education she received, or in the circumstances of her position, to give her any peculiar impulse towards such a career; yet she may be said to have registered her name there among the classics of our language. If everything else she produced be forgotten, as may almost be said to be already the case, her "Cottagers of Glenburnie" at least will live, and continue to be read, so long as the Scottish dialect remains intelligible. It is the only work written in that dialect, between the era of the poetry of Burns and that of the prose of Scott, which is now remembered. Of Scottish prose writing, there is no earlier subsisting example, until we go back to the sixteenth century. Here it claims the honour of having been the only modern predecessor of the Waverley Novels, if not that of having been, in some degree, their model. In so far as its interest and humour lie in the use of the popular dialect, it is probably to be accounted the offspring of Miss Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent," which is the earliest work still surviving, in which the comedy and expressiveness to be found in the peculiarities of the Irish provincial speech were highly taken advantage of. [Born in Ireland about the middle of the last century, yet of Scotch descent, Miss Hamilton while yet young came to Scotland, where, residing with relations, she went through many changes of life. She wrote a great many books, both on religious and political subjects, some of which challenged without retaining attention; but it was otherwise with the "Cottagers of Glenburnie."] This work was begun, we are told, merely as the amusement of an idle hour; she was encouraged to proceed with it, and to extend the plan, by the mirth which the first sheets of it excited, when she read them to a few friends collected at her own fireside. It was not, her biographer further informs us, without considerable distrust on the part of the publisher that it was committed to the press. Is it indeed the unhappy instinct of publishers to be thus always blindest to the value, before they come out, of the books that succeed the best? or is it thought expedient, for the sake of making the better story, that every instance of remarkably successful publication should be set off by being made to fall out contrary to expectation?