LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH

The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?

From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and scholar,poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps, as his foreign admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still, while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life after his return to Scotland, portions were spent atSt. Andrews or in Stirling; but Edinburgh had most ofhimtoo. It was in Edinburgh that he published hisBaptistes, hisDe Jure Regni apud Scotos, and others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last proof-sheets of hisRerum Scoticarum Historia, or Latin History of Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all. Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted thatit was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand.

From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his own literary ambition in hisEssayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesieand other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison?In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’sLettersor Stair’sInstitutes; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking any continuation of the old race of theScoti extra Scotiam agentes, only such small mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or a Cleland, among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!

What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to be found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of the century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of Scotland, in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with the successive phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-Episcopacy in Church government, and its theological and politicalconcomitants. It was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it was with such persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in Scotland, to strangle all the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the historical compensation. There are other interests in a nation, other duties, than those of art and literature; and he would be but a wretched Scotsman who, while hovering over the history of his country in the seventeenth century and noting her deficiencies then in literary respects in comparison with England, should forget that this very century was the time of the most powerful action ever exerted by Scotland in the general history of the British Islands, and that, when the great British Revolution of that century was over, its accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably successful and useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was traceable to Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own peculiar politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been argued or done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such men as Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose, Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we are now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been stated. From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through the Scottish century and a quarter under view, very few roses or other flowers, and not much even of happy thistle-bloom!

A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and theirGeorgian recruits as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Gay, and Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish literary stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn, Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there stepped forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be for so many years the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only supplying the lieges with such songs and poems as they had not had the like of for many a day, but actually shaking them again into some sense of the importance of popular books and of a taste for lightsome reading. Yes, it was Allan Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-cap that one sees in the white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was he that was the real reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in Scotland after their long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:—

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.Hae reared up great poetic stocksOfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,While we neglectTo shaw their betters. This provokesMe to reflectOn the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:Our country then a tale could tell:Europe had nane mair snack and snellIn verse or prose:Our kings were poets too themsell,Bauld and jocose.”

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.Hae reared up great poetic stocksOfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,While we neglectTo shaw their betters. This provokesMe to reflect

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.

Hae reared up great poetic stocks

OfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,

While we neglect

To shaw their betters. This provokes

Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:Our country then a tale could tell:Europe had nane mair snack and snellIn verse or prose:Our kings were poets too themsell,Bauld and jocose.”

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:

Our country then a tale could tell:

Europe had nane mair snack and snell

In verse or prose:

Our kings were poets too themsell,

Bauld and jocose.”

He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an eager interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the “chiels of London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison,Pope, Gay, and the rest,—had recently done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the great literary traditions of England. How strong was his interest in those “chiels of London,” how much he admired them, appears not only from their influence upon him in his own special art of a resuscitated Scottish poetry in an eclectic modification of the old vernacular, but also in the dedication of so much of his later life to the commercial enterprise of an Edinburgh circulating library for the supply of his fellow-citizens with all recent or current English books, and in his less successful enterprise for the introduction of the English drama by the establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre. In short, before Allan Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own example and exertions, what from the stimulus upon his countrymen independently of the new sense, more and more consciously felt since the Union, of an acquired partnership with England in all that great inheritance in the English speech which had till then belonged especially to England, and in the common responsibilities of such partnership thenceforward, Scotland was visibly holding up her head again. Before that date there had appeared, in Ramsay’s wake, some of the other forerunners of that famous race of eighteenth-century Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for any continuance of the imputation of the literary inferiority of Scotland to England, were to command the respect of Europe by the vigour of their co-operation and rivalry with their English coevals.

Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose noble poetic fragment ofHardyknutewas made public by Ramsay, and whose influence on the subsequent course of specially Scottish literatureby that fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged things of the same kind, remains yet to be adequately estimated, one notes that among those juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the career of literature after him and under his observation, but who had died before him, were Robert Blair, James Thomson, and William Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch, once an Edinburghprotégéof Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner since 1723, and Anglicised into Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s Scottish literary survivors, and does not count for much. But, when Ramsay died, there were already in existence, at ages varying from full maturity to mere infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable now, on one ground or another, in the British Literary History of the eighteenth century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle, and Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and Mallet had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are associated locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of Scotland; but by far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay himself, had their homes in Edinburgh, or were essentially of Edinburgh celebrity by all their belongings. Kames, David Hume, Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Dr. Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor Robison, James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton: these, with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern lights of the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in which Dr. Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship ofLondon, and he and Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon, were seen in the London streets. Greater and smaller together, were they not a sufficient northern constellation? Do not we of modern Edinburgh still remember them now with a peculiar pride, and visit, out of curiosity, the houses in the Old Town squares or closes where some of them had their dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of their physiognomies and habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate, the Parliament House, and the site of our University? Was it not the fact that in their days there were two recognised and distinct centres or foci of literary production in Great Britain: the great London on the banks of the Thames being one; but the other 400 miles farther north, in the smaller city of heights and hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur Seat on the banks of the Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring radiance yet, vanishes from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age of the Literary History of Edinburgh.

A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It was in July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that same year that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to Edinburgh. On one particular day in the course of that visit, as all know, Burns encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a lame fair-haired youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the midst of other company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix themselves for a moment or two with some special interest. This was young Walter Scott. In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that another Edinburghboy, two years younger than Scott, standing somewhere in the High Street, and staring at a man whose unusual appearance had struck him, was told by a bystander that he might well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This was young Francis Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming lives of those two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the wondrous man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year appeared the first number of theEdinburgh Review, projected in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the year of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty years to all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history of Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of Scott’s creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other, all Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to the juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind, however, criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze of the completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that the present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the Edinburgh of those thirty following years.

It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott,—the finestmonument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive, even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of theEssays on Taste; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs. Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the starting ofBlackwood’s Magazinein 1817, and the outflashing in that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth Moir; thefirst intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in connection withBlackwoodand other periodicals, of the strange English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.

Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors,whoso fit to succeed him in the presidency,whocalled to it with such acclamation, as the long-known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson, was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the great Sir Walter.

Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had vanished there were various intellectual developments, various manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were evenalien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example. There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?

Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call theScotticism of Scott,—that special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself, and also in Hugh Miller. Itappears in more pronounced form in the long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the character of many of those writings which marked the advance of Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of which by the starting ofChambers’s Edinburgh Journalin the very year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then, unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—

“Let me feel the breezes blowingFresh along the mountain side!Let me see the purple heather,Let me hear the thundering tide,Be it hoarse as CorrievreckanSpouting when the storm is high!Give me back one hour of Scotland;Let me see it ere I die.”

“Let me feel the breezes blowing

Fresh along the mountain side!

Let me see the purple heather,

Let me hear the thundering tide,

Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan

Spouting when the storm is high!

Give me back one hour of Scotland;

Let me see it ere I die.”

In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh to the point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will have been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in what would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are among us some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty again, a season of the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream.Ichabod, they tell us, may be now written on the front of the Register House; and Edinburgh is living on her past glories! As this complaint was raised again and again in previous times to which its application is now a matter of surprise, may we not hope that its recurrence in the present is only a passing wave of that feeling, common to all times, and not unbecoming or unuseful, which underestimates, or even neglects, what is near and round about, in comparison with what is old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh is now despicable intellectually in comparison with her former self, like the larger question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and pressed along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually poor in comparison with her former self, is really a question of statistics. As a certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient basis for a fair inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one remembers, however, that among those who would have to be included in the inventory,inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been suggested as a separating point between the defunct past and the still current, are not only such of the older and already-named ornaments of Edinburgh as David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert Chambers, and Hill Burton, but also such individualities of later conspicuous mark as Alexander Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr. John Brown, then, perhaps, there might be some confidence that, if one were to proceed to the more delicate business of comprising in the list all that suit among the living, together with those of whom there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the town to come,” the total would exhibit an average not quite shameful. Perhaps, however, as has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to count.

Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh naturally find the cause to some extent in the increasing centralisation of the commerce of British Literature universally in London. They point to such facts as that theEdinburgh Reviewhas long ceased to be an Edinburgh periodical, that some Edinburgh publishing firms have transferred their head-quarters to London, and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are understood to be meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place, is there not here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its population of four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that the fair comparison in this matter should not be between London and Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it were found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were even one-twentieth of that ofLondon, the scores between the two places would then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly equal. I cannot pretend to have used all the available means for the computation; but, in view of some facts before me, I should be surprised if it turned out that Edinburgh did not come up to her proportional mark. Edinburgh possesses, at all events, a most flourishing printing industry. The printing of Edinburgh is celebrated all the world over; a very large proportion of the books published in London are printed in Edinburgh. That is something; but what ofpublishingbusiness? From the Edinburgh Directory of this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city there are 62 who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing houses in Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be about 1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—i.e.that London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers, however, do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the proportionally fewer London houses have been doing a much larger amount of business, and may not the publishing machinery of Edinburgh have been lying comparatively idle? Well, I do not know; but the recent publishing lists of our Edinburgh houses show no signs of declining activity. The completed Ninth Edition of the greatEncyclopædia Britannica, for example, has been wholly an Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another Edinburgh Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls most obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of her journalism and her apparatusof periodical literature.Blackwood’s MagazineandChambers’s Edinburgh Journalexist still; but other literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are extinct, and one can recollect the time when there were more newspapers in Edinburgh than there are now. Those, however, were the days of twice-a-week newspapers or once-a-week newspapers; and in the present daily journalism of Edinburgh one has to observe not only the unprecedented amount of energy and writing ability at work for all the ordinary requirements of newspapers, but also (a very noteworthy feature of Edinburgh journalism in particular) the increasing extent to which, by frequent non-political articles and continual accounts of current books, it is annexing to itself the functions hitherto performed by magazines, reviews, and other literary miscellanies. But, suppose that, all these appearances notwithstanding, it should be made out that the publishing machinery of Edinburghisscantier and slacker than it was, there is another consideration yet in reserve. The real measure of the present or the future literary capabilities of Edinburgh, or of Scotland generally, is not the extent of the publishing machinery which either Edinburgh, or Scotland generally, still retains within herself, but the amount and worth of the actual or potential authorship, the literary brain and ability of all kinds, that may be still resident within the bounds of Edinburgh or of Scotland, wheresoever the products are published. Those who are so fond of upbraiding the present Edinburgh more especially with the former literary distinction of Edinburgh in the latter half of the eighteenth century,—the days of Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and others,—seem to be ignorant of a most important fact. The publishing machineryof Edinburgh in those days was very poor; and the chief books of those Edinburgh celebrities were published in London. That there came a change in this respect was owing mainly, or wholly, to one man. His name was Archibald Constable. Of this man, the Napoleon of the British publishing trade of his time, and of such particular facts in his publishing career as his bold association of himself with theEdinburgh Reviewfrom its very outset, and his life-long connection with Scott, all have some knowledge from tradition. But hear Lord Cockburn’s succinct account of him in general. “Constable,” says Lord Cockburn, “began as a lad in Hill’s shop, and had hardly set up for himself when he reached the summit of his business. He rushed out, and took possession of the open field, as if he had been aware from the first of the existence of the latent spirits which a skilful conjurer might call from the depths of the population to the service of literature. Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he stood out as the general patron and payer of all promising publications, and confounded not merely his rivals in trade, but his very authors, by his unheard-of prices. Ten, even twenty, guineas a sheet for a review, £2000 or £3000 for a single poem, and £1000 each for two philosophical dissertations, drew authors from dens where they would otherwise have starved, and made Edinburgh a literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its own citizens.” These words of Lord Cockburn’s are too high-flown, in so far as they might beget wrong conceptions of what was or is possible. But, recollecting what Constable did,—recollecting that it was mainly his example and success that called into being those other Edinburghpublishing firms, contemporary with his own or subsequent, which have maintained till now the place won by him for Edinburgh in the commerce of British literature,—recollecting also how largely he led the way in that enormous change in the whole system of the British book trade, now almost consummated, which has liberated publishers from the good old necessity of waiting for the authors that might come to them, one by one, with already-prepared manuscripts under their arm, the fruit of their careful private labours on self-chosen subjects, and has constituted publishers themselves, to a great extent, the real generators and regulators of literature, projecting serials, manuals, sets of schoolbooks, and whatever else they see to be in demand, and employing literary labour preferably in the service of these enterprises of their own,—recollecting all this, may we not speculate on what might be the consequences in the present Edinburgh of the appearance of another Archibald Constable? The appurtenances are all ready. One has heard complaints lately of the dearth in Edinburgh of those materials in the shape of collections of books which would be requisite for the future sufficiency of the city as a manufactory of such kinds of literature as admit of being manufactured. That is a sheer hallucination. Next to London, and perhaps to Oxford, Edinburgh has the largest provision of books of any city in the British Empire. There are at this moment 800,000 volumes,—say close on a million,—on the shelves of the various public or corporate libraries. Much remains to be done towards making all this wealth of books in Edinburgh as available as it might be; and there ought to be no rest among us till that particular advance is madetowards an ideal state of things which shall consist in the conversion of the present noble library of the Faculty of Advocates into the nucleus of a great National Library for all Scotland. But, even as things are, why be indolent, why not utilise our implements? Doubt not that in the present Edinburgh and in the present Scotland, as in other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions, there are, as Napier of Merchiston phrased it, “good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science,” who, if they were to bestir themselves, and especially if there were another Archibald Constable in the midst of them, would find plenty of excellent employment without needing, unless they chose, to change the territory of their abode!

THE ENDPrinted byR. & R. Clark,Edinburgh.

THE END

Printed byR. & R. Clark,Edinburgh.

1. FromThe Scotsmanof 18th, 19th, and 21st August 1886.

2. Written, and in part delivered, as an Introductory Lecture to the Class of English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in the Session 1867–8.

3. A scrap from unpublished MSS.

4. FromThe Scotsmanof 29th December 1890.

5. Written in 1883, in the form of a Lecture.

6. Written in 1883, as a lecture for the Class of English Literature in the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.

7. Reprinted, with some modifications, from theWestminster Reviewfor Oct.–Dec. 1856; where it appeared, with the title “Edinburgh Fifty Years Ago,” in the form of an article on Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of Edinburgh,” then just published.

8. Opening Address to Session 1890–1 of The Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh.

9. FromMacmillan’s Magazinefor November and December 1881 and January 1882.

10. Another incident which he told me of his first boyish saunterings about Edinburgh is more trivial in itself, but of some interest as showing his observant habits and sense of humour at that early age:—For some purpose or other, he was going down Leith Walk, the long street of houses, stone-yards, and gaps of vacant space, which leads from Edinburgh to its sea-port of Leith. In front of him, and also walking towards Leith, was a solid, quiet-looking countryman. They had not gone far from Edinburgh when there advanced to them from the opposite direction a sailor, so drunk that he needed the whole breadth of the footpath to himself. Taking some umbrage at the countryman, the sailor came to a stop, and addressed him suddenly, “Go to H——,” looking him full in the face. “’Od, man, I’m gaun to Leith,” said the countryman, as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and walked on, Carlyle following him and evading the sailor.

11. Quoted by Mr. Froude in his article, “The Early Life of Thomas Carlyle,” in theNineteenth Centuryfor July 1881.

12. Quoted by Mr. Froude,ut supra.

13. Printed in an appendix to Mr. Moncure D. Conway’s Memoir of Carlyle (1881), with other fragments of letters which had been copied from the originals by Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and which Mr. Ireland put at Mr. Conway’s disposal. The date of this fragment is “August 1814”; and, as it is evidently a reply to Murray’s letter of “July 27,” I have ventured to dissent from Mr. Froude’s conjectural addition of “1816?” to the dating of that letter.

14. The first secession from the National Presbyterian Church of Scotland, as established at the Revolution, was in 1733, when differences on account of matters of administration, rather than any difference of theological doctrine, led to the foundation by Ebenezer Erskine of the dissenting communion calledThe Associate PresbyteryorSecession Church. In 1747 this communion split itself, on the question of the obligation of the members to take a certain civil oath, called The Burgher’s Oath, into two portions, calling themselves respectively theAssociateorBurgher Synodand theGeneral AssociateorAnti-Burgher Synod. The former in 1799 sent off a detachment from itself called theOriginal Burgher SynodorOld Light Burghers, the main body remaining as theAssociate Burgher Synod; and it was to the second that Carlyle’s parents belonged, their pastor in Ecclefechan being that Rev. Mr. Johnston to whose memory Carlyle has paid such a tribute of respect, and whose grave is now to be seen in Ecclefechan churchyard, near Carlyle’s own.

15. This is not the first passage at arms on record between a Carlyle and an Irving. As far back as the sixteenth century, when Irvings and Carlyles were even more numerous in the West Border than they are at present, and are heard of, with Maxwells, Bells, Johnstons, and other clans, as keeping those parts in continual turmoil with their feuds, raids, and depredations, it would happen sometimes that a Carlyle jostled with an Irving. Thus, in the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, under date Aug. 28, 1578, we have the statement from an Alexander Carlyle that there had been a controversy “betwix him and Johnne Irvin, callit the Windie Duke.” What the controversy was does not appear; but both parties had been apprehended by Lord Maxwell, then Warden of the West Marches, and lodged in the “pledge-chalmer,” or prison, of Dumfries; and Carlyle’s complaint is that, while the said John Irving had been released on bail, no such favour has been shown tohim, but he has been kept in irons for twenty-two weeks. This Alexander Carlyle seems to be the same person as a “Red Alexander Carlyle of Eglisfechan” heard of afterwards in the same Record, under date Feb. 22, 1581–2, as concerned in “some attemptatis and slauchter” committed in the West March, and of which the Privy Council were taking cognisance. On this occasion he is not in controversy with an Irving, but has “Edward Irving of Boneschaw,” and his son “Christie Irving of the Coif,” among his fellow-culprits. Notices of the Dumfriesshire Carlyles and Irvings, separately or in company, are frequent in the Register through the reign of James VI.

16. I have been informed, however, that Leslie must have misconceived Carlyle when he took the solution as absolutely Carlyle’s own. It is to be found, I am told, in an old Scottish book of geometry.

17. A letter of Carlyle’s among those contributed by Mr. Alexander Ireland to Mr. Conway’sMemoirproves that the momentous reading of Gibbon was before Feb. 20, 1818; and in a subsequent letter in the same collection, of date “July 1818,” he informs his correspondent, “I have quitted all thoughts of the Church, for many reasons, which it would be tedious, perhaps [word not legible], to enumerate.” This piece of information is bedded, however, in some curious remarks on the difficulties of those “chosen souls” who take up opinions different from those of the age they live in, or of the persons with whom they associate. See the letter in Mr. Conway’s volume, pp. 168–170.

18. Quoted in Mr. Froude’s article, “The Early Life of Carlyle,” in theNineteenth Centuryfor July 1881.

19. Mrs. Oliphant’sLife of Irving(1862), i. 90, 91.

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