SCOTT ***




Produced by Al Haines.





                              *EDINBURGH*

                         UNDER SIR WALTER SCOTT


                                   BY

                               W. T. FYFE

                        WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

                               R. S. RAIT



                                 LONDON
                          ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
                           AND COMPANY, LTD.
                                  1906




        Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty




                             *INTRODUCTION*


In the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth--from, approximately, the death of Samuel Johnson in 1784 to
that of Walter Scott in 1832--Edinburgh, rather than London, was the
intellectual centre of the kingdom.  It would, of course, be easy to
show that London has never lacked illustrious men of letters among her
citizens, and, in this very period, the names of Sheridan, Bentham,
Blake, Lamb, and Keats at once occur to memory as evidence against our
thesis. It must also be admitted that Edinburgh shares some of her great
names with London, and that many of the writers of the time are
associated with neither capital. The name of William Cowper recalls the
village of Olney; the English Lakes claim their great poets; and Byron
and Shelley call to mind Greece and Italy, as, in the earlier part of
our period, Gibbon is identified with Lausanne.  But the Edinburgh
society which Scott remembered in his youth or met in his prime included
a long series of remarkable men.  Some of them, like Robertson the
historian; Hugh Blair; John Home, the author of _Douglas_; Henry
Mackenzie, 'The Man of Feeling'; John Leyden; Dugald Stewart; and John
Wilson, 'Christopher North,' were more or less permanent residents.
Others, like Adam Smith, Thomas Campbell, Lady Nairne, Thomas De
Quincey, Sir James Mackintosh, and Sydney Smith, spent a smaller portion
of their lives in Edinburgh.  Not only was the city full of great
writers; it produced also a series of great publishers--the Constables
and the Blackwoods.  The influence of the _Edinburgh Review_ can
scarcely be realised in these days of numberless periodicals, and it was
from Edinburgh that its great rival, the _Quarterly_, drew much of its
early support, and one of its great editors, John Gibson Lockhart.
Edinburgh, moreover, was still a national metropolis, for the railway
systems had not yet brought about the real union of England and
Scotland, and it possessed a society not less distinctively Scots than
the Established Church or the code of law.  The judges who administered
that law add still further to the interest of the scene.  Some were men
of great intellectual force, whose names still live in the history of
English thought. Lord Hailes, the antagonist of Gibbon, and Lord
Monboddo, who, in some sense, anticipated a discovery of Mr. Darwin,
lived on to the close of the eighteenth century, and, in the early
nineteenth, their reputation was sustained by Lord Woodhouselee, Lord
Jeffrey, and Lord Cockburn.  Others of the judges were notable for force
of character, like Lord Braxfield, now familiar as 'Weir of Hermiston,'
or for mere eccentricity, like Lord Eskgrove, one of the strangest
beings who ever added to the gaiety of mankind.

The natural centre of this remarkable society is the great figure of Sir
Walter Scott, who dominated Edinburgh during a large portion of the
period, and the story of whose life has made so many Edinburgh names
household words for all time.  Lockhart's _Life of Scott_ gives an
interesting, though by no means a complete, picture of this society.
There are many other sources of information: the _Scots Magazine_, the
_Annual Register_, and so forth.  Most important of all are the
autobiographies of Alexander Carlyle and Lord Cockburn, two books which
it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain.  'Jupiter' Carlyle of
Inveresk was born in 1722, and lived until 1805.  He could thus
recollect the Porteous Mob; he had seen Prince Charlie in Edinburgh,
and, from the garden of his father's manse at Prestonpans, he had
watched the flight of General Cope's defeated troops.  He had been the
friend of David Hume, who died just before our period begins, of
Smollett, and of Robertson and Adam Smith. Such a man had much to tell,
and, fortunately for posterity, he chose to tell it.  Not less
interesting or important is the volume known as _Memorials of his Time_,
by Henry Cockburn, who, from 1834 to his death in 1854, was a Scottish
judge.  He was born in 1779, and had been a member of a famous Edinburgh
debating society--the 'Spec'--along with Henry Brougham, Francis Horner,
Walter Scott, and Francis Jeffrey. He shared Jeffrey's politics, aided
him in defending Radicals