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,