itself felt in British literature; though, of course, why it should have given to Britain at nearly the same time its two greatest historians, its first and greatest political economist, and a philosophy destined to be known as peculiarly the Scottish philosophy all over the world, cannot, of course, be so readily shown.

It is greatly easier to say why such talent should have found a permanent centre in Edinburgh. Simple as it may seem, the prescriptive right of the capital to draft to its pulpits the elite of the Established clergy did more for it than almost aught else. Robertson the historian had been minister of Gladsmuir; Henry the historian, minister of a Presbyterian congregation in Berwick; Hugh Blair, minister of Collessie; Finlayson, so distinguished at one time for his sermons, and a meritorious logic professor in the university, had been minister of Borthwick; Macknight, the Harmonist of the Gospels, minister of Jedburgh; and Dr John Erskine, minister of Kirkintilloch. But after they had Encceeded in making themselves known by their writings, they were all concentrated in Edinburgh, with not a few other able and brilliant men; and, in an age in which the Scottish clergy, whatever might be their merely professional merits as a class, were perhaps the most literary in Europe, such a privilege could not fail to reflect much honour on the favoured city for whose special benefit it was exerted. The university, too, was singularly fortunate in its professors, and in especial in its school of anatomy and medicine, long maintained in high repute by the Monroes, Cullens, and Gregories, and which reckoned among its offshoots, though they concentrated their energies rather on physical and natural than on medical science, men such as Hutton and Black. In mathematics it had boasted in succession of a David Gregory and Colin Maclaren, both friends and protégés of Sir Isaac Newton; and in later times, of a Matthew Stewart, John Playfair, and Sir John Leslie. Both these last, with their predecessor Robison, had also rendered its chair of natural philosophy a very celebrated one; and of its moral science, it must be enough to say that its metaphysical chair was filled in succession by Dr Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and latterly by the brilliant Wilson, who, if less distinguished than his predecessors in the walks of abstract thought, more than equalled them in genius, and in his influence over the general literature of the age. Such men are the gifts of Providence to a country, and cannot be produced at any given time on the ordinary principle of demand and supply. But even when they exist, they may be kept out of their proper places by an ill-exercised patronage; and it must be conceded to the old close corporation of Edinburgh, that in the main it exercised its patronage with great discrimination, and for the best interests of the city. It was of signal advantage

that the established religion of the country was numerically and politically so strong at the time, that the disturbing element of denominational jealousy could have no existence in the body, and, influenced and directed by the general intellect of the city, its choice fell on the best possible men, whether Episcopalian or Presbyterian, that lay within its reach. Further, the legal profession contributed largely to the earlier intellectual glory of Edinburgh. Kames was one of its first cultivators of letters on the English model. Monboddo, with all his vagaries a very superior man and very vigorous writer, belonged to the same class. Mackenzie, though in a different walk, and of a later time, belonged also to the legal profession. Almost all the contributors to the two periodicals which he edited in succession-the Mirror and the Loungerwere also lawyers. And in Edinburgh's second intellectual group the legal faculty greatly predominated. Scott, Wilson, Lockhart, were all, at least nominally, of the faculty; and the editor of the Edinburgh Review, with his most vigorous contributors, were, even when they wrote most largely for its pages, busied with the toils of the bar. Such were the elements of that intellectual greatness of the Scottish capital which gave it so high a place among the cities of the world. How have they now so signally failed to keep up the old supply?

It would of course be as idle to inquire why Edinburgh has at the present time no Scotts, Humes, or Chalmerses, as to inquire why Britain has no Shakespeares, Newtons, or Miltons. Such men always rank among the rarest produc tions of nature; and centuries elapse in the history of even learned and ingenious nations in which there appear none so large of calibre or so various of faculty. Further, it must be confessed that both the bar and the university have in a very considerable degree come under that law of paroxysm which leaves occasional blank spaces in the production of men of a high class, and the equally obvious law that gives to a highly cultivated age like the present great abundance everywhere of men of mere talent and accomplishment. Aberdeen, Glasgow, and the great second-class towns of England, are all, from this double circumstance of a lack of the highest men and a great abundance of men of the subordinate class, much nearer the level of Edinburgh than they were only a quarter of a century ago, when Scott and Jeffrey might be seen every day in term-time at the Parlia ment House, and Chalmers, Wilson, and Sir William Hamilton lectured in the university. That change, too, which has passed over the pervading literature of the age, and given a first place to the daily newspaper, and only a second place to the bulky quarterly, has of necessity militated against the capital of a small country whose most successful newspapers must content themselves with a circulation of but from two to

three thousand.* For the highest periodic literature London has, of consequence, become the only true mart; and the Scotsman who would live by it must of necessity make the great metropolis his home. Yet further, the source whence Edinburgh derived so much of at least her earlier halo of glory can scarce be said any longer to exist. Edinburgh has still the old privilege of drafting to her Established churches the elite of the body that can alone legally occupy them; but that great revolution in matters ecclesiastical which has rendered the abolition of the tests so essential to the efficient maintenance of the educational institutions of the nation, has manifested itself within the pale of the Establishment; and we suppose there is no one who will now contend that aught of the old ability is to be derived from this privilege. We have before us a bulky volume, entitled "Men of the Time," which, with its biographic notices of only the living, forms a sort of supplement to those ordinary works of biography which record the names of only the dead. All the men whose names it records have made themselves known in the worlds of thought or of action. There are no doubt omissions of names that ought to have found a place in it, and some of the names which it records might well have been omitted; but it is an English, not a Scottish publication; it does not seem to have been got up for any party purpose, certainly not for any party purpose of the Free Church; and its evidence, positive and negative, on a question like the present, may, we think, be safely received. And while we find in this volume at least three names of Edinburgh ministers who were brought into the place previous to the Disruption through the exercise of the old privilege, but who quitted the Establishment on the Disruption, we do not find in it the name of a single minister who now occupies any of the city churches.

In that altered state of things to which we refer, Edinburgh must of course acquiesce with the best grace it can. It seems greatly less to be wondered at that such a fate should overtake it now, than that it should not have overtaken it earlier. There are two circumstances on which the great interest of Lord Cockburn's "Memorials" seems to depend, independently of the very pleasing manner in which the work is written. The recollection of two such groups of men as for a whole century gave celebrity to a nation, could scarce fail to secure perusal, from the interest which ever attaches to the slightest personal traits or peculiarities of men of fine genius or high talents. We read the lives of poets and philosophers, not for the striking points of the stories which they embody-for striking points there may be none-but simply

* No longer true of the local daily press in 1876, one leading newspaper alone having a daily circulation of 15,000 copies.

was

for the sake of the men themselves. We also feel a natural interest in acquainting ourselves with the strongly-marked manners and broadlydefined characters of comparatively rude and simple ages, and seek to derive our amusement rather from the well-drawn portraits of men who bear all the natural lineaments, than from the masked and muffled men of a more polished time. No small portion of the amusement we derive from the glowing fictions of Scott results from the well-drawn manners of ages a century or two in advance of our own. And in Lord Cockburn's "Memorials" we have both elements of interest united. In Scotland as in several other countries of northern Europe, the intellectual development of the leading minds preceded the general development of even the upper classes in the politenesses and amenities. Macaulay, in describing the mental standing of Scotland at the time when the accession of James VI. to the throne of Elizabeth virtually united it to England, remarks, that though it "the poorest kingdom in Christendom, it already vied in every branch of learning with the most favoured countries. Scotsmen," he adds, "whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched as those of the Icelanders of our time, wrote Latin verses with more than the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science which would have added to the renown of Galileo." High intellectual cultivation and great simplicity, nay, rudeness, of manners, with an entire unacquaintance with what are now the common arts of life, existed in the same race, and, though the conventionalisms gained ground as the years passed by, continued to do so till at least the commencement of the present century. Not a few of the best writers and most vigorous thinkers Britain ever produced bore about them all the sharp-edged angularity of that early state of society in which every individual, instead of being smoothed down to a common mediocre standard, carries about him, like an unworn medal, the original impress stamped upon him by nature; and they were thus not only interesting as men of large calibre, but also as the curious characters of a primitive age. We have not only no such writers or thinkers now as Hume, Robertson, Kames, and Adam Smith, but no such characters. In some respects, however, society seems to have improved in wellnigh the degree in which it has become less picturesque. Lockhart remarks, in his "Life of Burns," that there was at least one class with which the poet came in contact in Edinburgh, that, unlike its clerical literati, were "shocked by his rudeness or alarmed by his wit." He adds, that among the lawyers of that age, "winebibbing and the principle of jollity was indeed in its high and palmy state; and that the poet partook largely in these tavern scenes of audacious hilarity, which then soothed, as a matter of course, the arid labours of the northern noblesse

not admirable in the ages in which our capital excited admiration most; and we must just console ourselves by the reflection that, though we live in a more mediocre time, it is in the main a more quietly respectable one.

AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH.

We enjoyed the honour on Wednesday last of being present as a guest at the annual soiree of the Scottish Young Men's Society, and derived much pleasure from the general appearance of the meeting, and the addresses of the members and their friends. The body of the great Waterloo Room was crowded on the occasion with a respectable, intellectual-looking audience, including from about a hundred and fifty to two hundred members of the Society, all of them young men banded together for mutual improvement, and most of them in that important decade of life-by far the most important of the appointed seven-which intervenes between the fifteenth and the five-and-twentieth year. The platform was equally well filled, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh occupied the chair. We felt a particular interest in the objects of the society, and a deep sympathy with its members; for, as we listened to the various speakers, and our eyes glanced over the intelligent countenances that thronged the area of the apartment, we thought of past difficulties encountered in a cause similar to that which formed the uniting bond of the society, and of not a few wrecks which we had witnessed of men who had set out in life from the humbler levels, with the determination of pressing their way upwards. And feeling somewhat after the manner that an old sailor would feel who saw a crew of young ones setting out to thread their ways through some dangerous strait, the perils of which he had already encountered, or to sail round some formidable cape, which, after many an unsuccessful attempt, he had doubled, we fancied ourselves in the position of one qualified to give them some little advice regarding the navigation of the seas on which they were just entering. But, be the fact of qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men whose words come slowly and painfully when among their fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary assemblage for their audience; and so our short address went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious precedents on record for the printing of unspoken speeches. Rejecting, however, all the higher ones, we shall be quite content to take our precedent from the famous speech which the "indigent philosopher" addresses, in one of Goldsmith's

essays, to Mr Bellowsmender and the Cateaton Club. The philosopher begins, it will be remembered, by telling his imaginary audience, that though Nathan Ben Funk, the rich Jew, might feel a natural interest in the state of the stocks, it was nothing to them, who had no money; and concludes by quoting the "famous author called Lilly's Grammar."

"Members of the Scottish Young Men's Society," we said, "it is rather late in life for the individual who now addresses you to attempt acquiring the art of the public speaker. Those who have been most in the habit of noticing the effect of the several mechanical professions on character and intellect, divide them into two classes-the sedentary and the laborious; and they remark, that while in the sedentary, such as the printing, weaving, tailoring, and shoemaking trades, there are usually a considerable proportion of fluent speakers, in the laborious trades, on the other hand, such as those of the mason, ship-carpenter, ploughman, and blacksmith, one generally meets with but taciturn, slow-speaking men. We need scarce say in which of these schools we have been trained. You will at once see-to borrow from one of the best and most ancient of writers-that we are not eloquent,' but a man of slow speech, and of a slow tongue.' And yet we think we may venture addressing ourselves, in a few plain words, to an association of young men united for the purpose of mutual improvement. We ought and we do sympathise with you in your object; and we congratulate you on the facilities which your numbers, and your library, and your residence in one of the most intellectual cities in the world, cannot fail to afford you in its pursuit. We ourselves have known what it is to prosecute in solitude, with but few books, and encompassed by many difficulties, the search after knowledge; and we have seen year after year pass by, and the obstacles in our way remaining apparently as great as at first. And were we to sum up the condensed result of our experience in two brief words of advice, it would amount simply to this, 'Never despair.' We are told of Commodore Anson-a man whose sense and courage ultimately triumphed over a series of perhaps the most appalling disasters man ever encountered, and who won for himself, by his magnanimity, sagacity, and cool resolution, the applauses of even his enemies, so that Rousseau and Voltaire eulogised him, the one in history, the other in romance-we are told, we say, of this Anson, that when raised to the British peerage, he was permitted to select his own motto, and that he chose an eminently characteristic one- Nil Desperandum.' By all means let it be your motto also-not as a thing to be paraded on some heraldic label, but to be engraved upon your hearts. We wish that, amid the elegancies of this hall, we could bring up before you some of the scenes of our