LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 437.-2 OCTOBER, 1852.

Part of an Article from the North British Review.

Life of Lord Jeffrey; with a Selection from his
Correspondence. By LORD COCKBURN, one of the
Judges of the Court of Session in Scotland. 2
Vols. Edinburgh, 1852.

Ir was in the winter of 1786-7 that the poet Burns, a new prospect having been suddenly opened up to him by the kind intervention of Blacklock, and a few other influential men in Edinburgh, abandoned his desperate project of emigrating to the West Indies, and hastened to pay his first and memorable visit to the Scottish metropolis. During that winter, as all who are acquainted with his life know, the Ayrshire ploughman, then in his twenty-ninth year, was the lion of Edinburgh society. Lord Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, Harry Erskine, Dr. Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson-such were the names then most conspicuous in the literary capital of North Britain; and it was in the company of these men, alternated with that of the Creeches, the Smellies, the Willie Nicols, and other contemporary Edinburgh celebrities of a lower grade, that Burns first realized the fact that he was no mere bard of local note, but a new power and magnate in Scottish litera

ture.

Scott by Burns-a scene which we think Sir'
William Allan would have delighted to paint.
The other story, we believe, is now told for the
first time by Lord Cockburn. Somewhere about
the very day on which the foregoing incident hap-
pened, a little black creature" of a boy, we are
told, who was going up the High Street of Edin-
burgh, and staring diligently about him, was
attracted by the appearance of a man whom he
saw standing on the pavement. He was taking a
good and leisurely view of the object of his curios-
ity, when some one standing at a shop-door tapped
him on the shoulder, and said, "Ay, laddie, ye
may weel look at that man! that's Robert Burns."
The "little black creature," thus early addicted to
criticism, was Francis Jeffrey, the junior of Scott
by four years, and exactly four years behind him
in the classes of the High School, where he was
known as a clever, nervous little fellow, who never
lost a place without crying. It is mentioned as a
curious fact by Lord Cockburn, that Jeffrey's first
teacher at the High School, a Mr. Luke Fraser,
had the singular good fortune of sending forth,
from three successive classes of four years each,
three pupils no less distinguished than Walter
Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham.
It is not for the mere purpose of anecdote that
we cite these names and coincidences. We should

To those who are alive to the poetry of coinci-like very much to make out for Scotland in general dences, two anecdotes connected with this residence as suggestive a series of her intellectual represenof Burns in Edinburgh will always be specially tatives as Lord Cockburn has here made out for interesting. What reader of Lockhart's Life of Scott is there who does not remember the account there given of Scott's first and only interview with Burns? As the story is now more minutely told in Mr. Robert Chambers' Life of Burns, Scott, who was then a lad of seventeen, just removed from the High School to a desk in his father's office, was invited by his friend and companion, the son of Dr. Ferguson, to accompany him to his father's house on an evening when Burns was to be there. The two youngsters entered the room, sat down unnoticed by their seniors, and looked on and listened in modest silence. Burns, when he came in, seemed a little out of his element, and, instead of mingling at once with the company, kept going about the room, looking at the pictures on the walls. One print particularly arrested his attention. It represented a soldier lying dead among the snow, his dog on one side, and a woman with a child in her arms on the other. Underneath the print were some lines of verse descriptive of the subject, which Burns read aloud with a voice faltering with emotion. A little while after, turning to the company and pointing to the print, he asked if any one could tell him who was the author of the lines. No one chanced to know, excepting Scott, who remembered that they were from an obscure poem of Langhorne's. The information, whispered by Scott to some one near, was repeated to Burns, who, after asking a little more about the matter, rewarded his young informant with a look of kindly interest, and the words, (Sir Adam Ferguson reports them,) " You 'll be a man yet, sir." Such is the one story, the story of the " literary ordination," as Mr. Chambers well calls it, of

part of the pedagogic era of the worthy and long dead Mr. Luke Fraser. Confining our regards to the eighteenth century, the preceding paragraphs enable us to group together at least three conspicuous Scottish names as belonging, by right of birth, to the third quarter of that century-Burns, born in Ayrshire in 1759; Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1769; and Jeffrey, born in the same place in 1773. Supposing we go a little further back for some other prominent Scottish names of the same century, the readiest to occur to the memory will be those of James Thomson, the poet, born in Roxburgshire in 1700; Thomas Reid, the philosopher, born near Aberdeen in 1710; David Hume, born at Edinburgh in 1711; Robertson, the histo rian, born in Mid-Lothian in 1721; Tobias Smollett, the novelist, born at Cardross in the same year; Adam Smith, born in Kirkaldy in 1723; Robert Fergusson, the Scottish poet, born in Edinburgh in 1750; and Dugald Stewart, born at Edinburgh in 1753. And, if for a similar purpose, we come down to the last quarter of the century, five names at least will be sure to occur to us, in addition to that of Brougham-Thomas Campbell, born at Glasgow in 1777; Thomas Chalmers, born at Anstruther, in Fifeshire, in 1780; John Wilson, born, if we may trust our authorities, at Paisley in 1789; Thomas Carlyle, born at Ecclefechan in Dumfries-shire in 1795; and Sir William Hamilton, born at Edinburgh before the close of the century. In this list we omit the distinguished contemporary Scottish names in physical science; we ought not, however, to omit the names of Sir James Mackintosh, born near Inverness in 1765, and James Mill, born at Montrose in 1773. The

short life of Burns, if we choose him as the central | a large induction of instances, is, in reality,

figure of the group, connects together all these names. The oldest of them was in the prime of life when Burns was born, and the youngest of them had seen the light before Burns died.

nearer to the fact. Without maintaining at pre ent that all Scotchmen are perfervid that Scotc men in general are, as we have seen it ingenious argued, not cool, calculating, and cautious, b On glancing in order along this series of emi- positively rash, fanatical, and tempestuous; it wi nent Scotchmen born in the eighteenth century, it be enough to refer to the instances which prove a will be seen that they may be roughly distributed least that some Scotchmen have this character into two nearly equal classes-men of philosophic The thing may be expressed thus:-On referrin intellect, devoted to the work of general specula- to the actual list of Scotchmen who have attained tion, or thought as such; and men of literary or eminence by their writings or speeches in this of poetic genius, whose works belong more properly the last century, two types may be distinguished, to the category of pure literary or artistic effort. in one or the other of which the Scottish mind In the one class may be ranked Reid, Hume, Adam seems necessarily to cast itself an intellectual Smith, Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, Mill, Chal-type specifically Scottish, but Scottish only in the mers, and Sir William Hamilton; in the other, sense that it is the type which cultured Scottish Thomson, Smollett, Robertson, Fergusson, Burns, minds assume when they devote themselves to the Scott, Jeffrey, Campbell, Wilson, Irving, and Car- work of specific investigation; and a more popular lyle. Do not let us be mistaken. In using the type, characterizing those Scotchmen who, instead phrases "philosophic intellect" and " literary of pursuing the work of specific investigation, genius," to denote the distinction referred to, we follow a career calling forth all the resources of do not imply anything of accurate discrimination Scottish sentiment. Scotchmen of the first or between the phrases themselves. For aught that more recondite and formal type are Reid, Smith, we care, the phrases may be reversed, and the men | Hume, Mill, Mackintosh, and Hamilton, in all of of the one class may be styled men of philosophic whom, notwithstanding their differences, we see genius, and those of the other, men of literary that tendency towards metaphysical speculation habit and intellect. If we prefer to follow the for which the Scottish mind has become celebrated; popular usage in our application of the terms, it is Scotchmen of the other or popular type, partaking not with any intention of making out for the one of the metaphysical tendency or not, but drawing class, by the appropriation to it of the peculiar their essential inspiration from the sentimental term "genius," a certificate of a higher kind of depths of the national character, are Burns, Scott. excellence than belongs to the other. Even ac- Chalmers, Irving, and Carlyle. However we may cording to the popular acceptation of the term, choose to express it, the fact of this two-fold forthseveral of those whom we have included in the going of the Scottish mind, either in the scholasliterary category-as, for example, Robertson, tic and logical direction marked out by one must be denied the title of men of genius; while, series of eminent predecessors, or in the popular according to no endurable definition of the term, and literary direction marked out by another series could the title of men of genius be refused to such of eminent predecessors, cannot be denied. men as Adam Smith, or Chalmers, or Hamilton. After all, however, (for we cannot yet leave this Nor, even when thus explained, will our classifica- topic,) there is, classify and distinguish as we may, tion bear any very rigid scrutiny. By a consider- a remarkable degree of homogeneousness among able portion of what may be called the fundamen- Scotchmen. The people of North Britain are more tal or unapparent half of his genius, Carlyle homogeneous—have decidedly a more visible basis belongs to the class of speculative thinkers; while, of common character-than the people of South on the other hand, the case of Chalmers is one in Britain. A Scotchman may indeed be almost anywhich the thinking or speculative faculty, which thing that is possible in this world; he may be a certainly belonged to him, was surcharged and saint or a debauchee, a Christian or a sceptic, a deluged by such a constant flood from the feelings spendthrift or a usurer, a soldier or a statesman, a that, instead of ranking him with the thinkers as poet or a statistician, a fool or a man of genius, above, we might, with equal or greater propriety, clear-headed or confused-headed, a Thomas Chaitranspose him to the other side, or even name him mers or a Joseph Hume, a dry man of mere secular on both sides. His thinking faculty, which was facts, or a man through whose mind there roll forwhat he himself set most store by, was so beset ever the stars and all mysteries. Still, under and begirt by his other and more active disposi- every possible form of mental combination or tions, that, instead of working on and on through activity, there will be found in every Scotchman any resisting medium with iron continuity, it dis- something distinguishable as his birth-quality or charged itself almost invariably, as soon as it Scotticism. And what is this Scotticism of Scotchtouched a subject, in large proximate generaliza-men-this ineradicable, universally-combinable tions. On the whole, then, instead of the forego- element of peculiarity, breathed into the Scottish ing classification of eminent Scotchmen into men soul by those conditions of nature and of life which of speculation and men of general literature, one inhere in or hover over the area of Scottish earth, might adopt as equally serviceable a less formal and which are repeated in the same precise ensem classification which the common satirical talk re-ble nowhere else? Comes it from the hills, or the specting Scotchmen will suggest. The hard, cool, moors, or the mists, or any of those other features of logical Scotchman-such is the stereotyped phrase scenery and climate which distinguish bleak and in which Englishmen describe the natives of North rugged Scotland from green and fertile England? Britain. There is a sufficient amount of true per- In part, doubtless, from these, as from all else ception in the phrase to justify its use; but the that is Scottish. But there are hills, and moors, appreciation it involves reaches only to the surface. and mists where Scotchmen are not bred; and it The well-known phrase, perfervidum ingenium is rather in the long series of the memorable Scotorum, used, Buchanan tells us, centuries ago on the continent to express the idea of the Scottish character then universally current and founded on

things that have been done on the Scottish hills and moors-the acts which the retrospective eye sees flashing through the old Scottish mists, that

one is to seek the origin and explanation of whatever this pride of being Scotchmen. Penetrate to the Scotticism is. Now, as compared with England heart of any Scotchman, even the most Anglified, at least, that which has come down to the natives or the most philosophic that can be found, and of Scotland as something peculiar, generated by there will certainly be found a remnant in it of the series of past transactions of which their coun-loving regard for the little land that lies north of try has been the scene, is an intense spirit of the Tweed. And what eminent Scotchman can nationality. be named in whose constitution a larger or smaller proportion of the amor Scotia has not been visible? In some of the foremost of such men, as Burns, Scott, and Wilson, this amor Scotia has even been present as a confessed ingredient of their geniusa sentiment determining, to a great extent, the style and matter of all that they have written or attempted.

The rough bur-thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear-

I turned the weeding-heuk aside,
And spared the symbol dear.
No nation, no station

My envy e'er could raise-
A Scott still, but blot still,

I knew nae higher praise.

No nation in the world is more factitious than the Scotch-more composite as regards the materials out of which it has been constructed. If in England there have been Britons, Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, in Scotland there have been Celts, Britons, Romans, Norwegians, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans. The only difference of any consequence in this respect probably is, that whereas in England the Celtic element is derived chiefly from the British or Welsh, and the Teutonic element chiefly from the Continental-German source, in Scotland the Gaels have furnished most of the Celtic, and the Scandinavian Germans most of the Teutonic element. Nor, if we regard the agencies that have acted intellectually on the two nations, shall we find Scotland to In reading the writings of such men, one is perhave been less notably affected from without than petually reminded, in the most direct manner, that England. To mention only one circumstance, the these writings are to be regarded as belonging to Reformation in Scotland was marked by a much more a strictly national literature. But even in those decided importation of new modes of thinking and Scotchmen in the determination of whose intellec new social forms than the Reformation in the tual efforts the amor Scotia has acted no such obvi sister country. But though quite as factitious, ous and ostensible part, the presence of somo therefore, as the English nation, the Scottish, by mental reference to, or intermittent communication reason of its very smallness, for one thing, has of sentiment with, the land of their birth, is almost always possessed a more intense consciousness of sure to be detected. The speculations of Reid and its nationality, and a greater liability to be acted Hume and Adam Smith, and, in some degree, also, upon throughout its whole substance by a common those of Chalmers, were in subjects interesting not thought or common feeling. Even as late as the to Scotchmen alone, but to the human race as year 1707, the entire population of Scotland did such; and yet, precisely as these men enunciated not exceed one million of individuals; and if, their generalities intended for the whole world in going farther back, we fancy this small nation good broad Scotch, so had they all, after their dif placed on the frontier of one so much larger, and ferent ways, a genuine Scottish relish for Scottish obliged continually to defend itself against the humors, jokes, and antiquities. The same thing is attacks of so powerful a neighbor, we can have no true of Carlyle, a power as he is recognized to be difficulty in conceiving how, in the smaller nation, not in Scottish only, but in all British literature. the feeling of a central life would be sooner de- Even James Mill, who, more than most Scotchveloped and kept more continuously active. The men, succeeded in conforming, both in speech and sentiment of nationality is essentially negative; in writing, to English habits and requirements, it is the sentiment of a people which has been relapsed into a Scotchman when he listened to a taught to recognize its own individuality by inces- Scottish song, or told a Scottish anecdote. But santly marking the line of exclusion between itself perhaps the most interesting example of the apand others. Almost all the great movements of pearance of an intense amor Scotia, where, from Scotland, as a nation, have accordingly been of a the nature of the case, it could have been least exnegative character, that is, movements of self-pected, is afforded by the writings of Sir William defence the War of National Independence Hamilton. If there is a man now alive conspicuagainst the Edwards; the Non-Episcopal struggle in the reigns of the Charleses; and even the NonIntrusion controversy of later times. The very motto of Scotland, as a nation, is negative-Nemo me impune lacesset. It is different with England. There have of course been negative movements in England too, but these have been movements of one faction or part of the English people against another; and the activity of the English nation, as a whole, has consisted, not in preserving its own individuality from external attack, but in fully and genially evolving the various elements which it finds within itself, or in powerful positive exertions of its strength upon what lies outside it.

The first and most natural form of what we have called the Scotticism of Scotchmen, that is, of the peculiarity which differences them from people of other countries, and more expressly from Englishmen, is this amor patria, this inordinate intensity of national feeling. There are very few Scotchmen who, whatever they may pretend, are devoid of

ous among his contemporaries for the exercise on the most magnificent scale of an intellect the most pure and abstract, that man is Sir William; and yet, not even when discussing the philosophy of the unconditioned or perfecting the theory of syllogism which is universal, does Sir William forget his Scottish lineage. With what glee, in his notes, or in stray passages in his dissertations themselves, does he seize every opportunity of adding to the proofs that speculation in general has been largely affected by the stream of specific Scottish thought-quoting, for example, the saying of Scaliger, "Les Ecossois sont bons Philosophes;" or dwelling on the fact that at one time almost every continental university had a Scottish professorship of philosophy, specially so named; or reviving the memories of defunct Balfours, and Duncans, and Chalmerses, and Dalgarnos, and other" Scoti extra Scotiam agentes" of other cen turies; or startling his readers with such genea logical facts as that Immanuel Kant and Sir Isano

Newton had Scottish grandfathers, and that the celebrated French metaphysician, Destutt Tracy, was, in reality, but a transmogrified Scotchman of the name of Scott! We know nothing more refreshing than such evidences of strong national feeling in such a man. It is the Scottish Stagirite not ashamed of the bonnet and plaid; it is the philosopher in whose veins flows the blood of a Covenanter.

in their own Scottish accent, sometimes in an accent almost purely English, find the objects of their solicitude and admiration, not in the land lying north of the Tweed, but rather in Englandits rich green parks and fields, its broad ecclesiastical hierarchy, its noble halls of learning, its majestic and varied literature, the full and generous character of its manly people. We know Scotchmen whose sentiment is more deeply stirred Even now, when Scotchmen, their native country by Shakspeare's famous apostrophe to "this Enghaving been so long merged in the higher unity of land," than by Scott's to the land of brown heath Great Britain, labor altogether in the interest of and shaggy wood. And as Scotland and England this higher unity, and forget or set aside the are incorporated, such men are and must be on the smaller, they are still liable to be affected charac- increase. But even they shall not escape. If teristically in all that they do by the consciousness their native quality of Scotticism does not survive that they are Scotchmen. This will be found true in them in the more palpable and open form of whether we regard those Scotchmen who work mere national feeling, mere amor Scotia, it survives, side by side with Englishmen in the conduct of nevertheless, in an intellectual habit, having the British public affairs or British commerce, or same root, and as indestructible. And what is those Scotchmen who vie with Englishmen in the this habit? The popular charges of dogmatism, walks of British authorship and literature. In opinionativeness, pugnacity, and the like, brought either case the Scotchman is distinguished from against Scotchmen by Englishmen, are so many the Englishman by this, that he carries the con- approximations to a definition of it. For our part, sciousness of his nationality about with him. we should say that the special habit or peculiarity Were he, indeed, disposed to forget it, the banter which distinguishes the intellectual manifestations on the subject to which he is perpetually exposed of Scotchmen-that, in short, in which the Scotin the society of his English friends and acquaint- ticism of Scotchmen most intimately consists—is ances, would serve to keep him in mind of it. It the habit of emphasis. All Scotchmen are emis the same now with the individual Scotchman phatic. If a Scotchman is a fool, he gives such cast among Englishmen as it was with the Scottish emphasis to the nonsense he utters as to be innation when it had to defend its frontier against finitely more insufferable than a fool of any other the English armies. He is in the position of a country; if a Scotchman is a man of genius, he smaller body placed in contact with a larger one, gives such emphasis to the good things he has to and rendered more intensely conscious of his indi- communicate, that they have a supremely good viduality by the constant necessity of asserting it. chance of being at once or very soon attended to. But this self-assertion of a Scotchman among Eng-This habit of emphasis, we believe, is exactly that lishmen, this constant feeling "I am a Scotchman," rests, like the feeling of nationality itself, on a prior assertion of what is in fact a negative. For a Scotchman to be always thinking "I am a Scotchman," is, in the circumstances now under view, tantamount to always thinking "I am not an Englishman." The Englishman, on the other hand, has no corresponding feeling. As a member of the large body, whose corporate activity has always, from the very circumstance of its being the larger, been positive rather than negative, the Englishman simply acts out harmoniously his English instincts and tendencies, the feeling of not being a Scotchman, never (except in the case of a stray Englishman located in Scotland) either spontaneously remaining in his mind, or being roused in it by banter. The Scotchman, in short, who works in the general field of British activity, has his thoughts conditioned, to some extent at least, by the negative of not being an Englishman; the Englishman thinks under no such limitation.

perfervidum ingenium Scotorum which used to be remarked some centuries ago, wherever Scotchmen were known. But emphasis is perhaps a better word than fervor. Many Scotchmen are fervid too, but not all; but all, absolutely all, are emphatic. No one will call Joseph Hume a fervid man, but he is certainly emphatic. And so with David Aume, or Reid, or Adam Smith, or any of those colder-natured Scotchmen of whom we have spoken; fervor cannot be predicated of them, but they had plenty of emphasis. In men like Burns, or Chalmers, or Irving, on the other hand, there was both emphasis and fervor; so also with Carlyle; and so, under a still more curious combination, with Sir William Hamilton. And as we distinguish emphasis from fervor, so would we distinguish it from perseverance. Scotchmen are said to be persevering, but the saying is not universally true; Scotchmen are or are not morally persevering, but all Scotchmen are intellectually emphatic. Emphasis, we repeat, intellectual emAnd this leads us to a definition more essential phasis-the habit of laying stress on certain and intimate of the peculiarity of Scottish as com- things rather than coordinating all-in this conpared with English thought. The rudest and most sists what is essential in the Scotticism of Scotchnatural form of what we have called the Scotticism men. And, as this observation is empirically of Scotchmen, consists, we have hitherto been verified by the very manner in which Scotchmen saying, in simple consciousness of nationality, enunciate their words in ordinary talk, so it might simple amor Scotia, or, under mere restricted cir- be deduced scientifically from what we have already cumstances, the simple feeling of not being an said regarding the nature and effects of the feeling Englishman. There are some Scotchmen, how- of nationality. The habit of thinking emphatically ever, in whom this first and most natural form of is a necessary result of thinking much in the Scotticism is not very well pronounced, and who presence of, and in resistance to, a negative; it is are either emancipated from it, or think that they the habit of a people that has been accustomed to are. We know not a few Scottish minds who have act on the defensive, rather than of a people peacereally succeeded in transferring their enthusiastic fully self-evolved and accustomed to act positively regards from Scotland as such to the higher unity it is the habit of Protestantism rather than of of Great Britain-men, who, sometimes speaking Catholicism, of Presbyterianism rather than of

Episcopacy, of Dissent rather than of Conform

ity.

them, such as Whewell, Maurice, Hare, Henry Taylor, and some others, seem to feel the necesThe greatest effects which the Scottish mind has sity of persisting towards first principles. The yet produced on the world-and these effects, by essays of Henry Taylor and of Arthur Helps are, the confession of Englishmen themselves, have in this respect, most characteristically English. not been small-have been the results, in part at As writings, they are most sweet, solid and soothleast, of this national habit of emphasis. Until ing; and yet there is many a Scotchman with towards the close of last century, the special de- not half the intellect of either of the writers, to partment of labor in which Scotchmen had, to any whom, by reason of his native tendency to seek for great extent, exerted themselves so as to make a the emphatic, they would appear almost shallow. figure in the general intellectual world, was the So, also, with that much praised old English book, department of Philosophy-Metaphysical and Di- Browne's Religio Medici, and with many other old alectic. Their triumphs in this department are English prose writings. The truth is that, if Scotchhistorical. What is called the Scottish Philosophy, men have, so far, a source of superiority over Engconstitutes, in the eyes of all who know anything lishmen in their habit of dwelling only on the em of history, a most important stage in the intellectual phatic, they have also in this same habit a source of evolution of modern times. From the time of inferiority. Quietism, mysticism, that soft medithose old Duncans, and Balfours, and Dalgarnos, tative disposition which takes things for granted in mentioned by Sir William Hamilton, who dis- the coordination established by mere life and usage, coursed on philosophy, and wrote dialectical treat- pouring into the confusion thus externally given ises in Latin in all the cities of the continent, the rich oil of an abounding inner joy, interpenedown to our own days, we can point to a succes-trating all and harmonizing all-these are, for the sion of Scottish thinkers in whom the interest in most part, alien to the Scotchman. No, his walk, metaphysical studies was kept alive, and by whose as a thinker, is not by the meadows, and the labors new contributions to mental science were continually being made. It was by the Scottish mind, in fact, that the modern philosophy was conducted to that point where Kant and the Germans took it up. The qualifications of the Scottish mind for this task were, doubtless, various. Perhaps there was something in that special combination of the Celtic and the Scandinavian out of which the Scottish nation, for the most part, took its rise, to produce an aptitude for dialectical exercises. Nay, further, it would not be altogether fanciful to suppose that those very national struggles of the Scotch in the course of which they acquired so strong a sense of their national individuality, that is, of the distinction between all that was Scotch, and all that was not Scotch, served, in a rough way, to facilitate to all Scotchmen that fundamental idea of the distinction between the Ego and the Non-Ego, the clear and rigorous apprehension of which is the first step in philosophy, and the one test of the philosopher. But, in a still more important degree, we hold the success of the Scottish mind in philosophy to have been the result of the national habit of intellectual emphasis. A Scotchman, when he thinks, cannot, so easily and comfortably as the Englishman, repose on an upper level of propositions coördinated for him by tradition, sweet feeling, and pleasant circumstances; that necessity of his nature which leads him to emphasize certain things rather than to take all things together in their established coördination, drives him down and still down in search of certain generalities whereon he may see that all can be built. It was this habit of emphasis, this inability to rest on a level of sweetly-composed experience, that led Hume to scepticism; it was the same habit, the same inability, conjoined, however, with more of faith and reverence, that led Reid to lay down, in the chasm of Hume's scepticism, certain blocks of ultimate propositions or principles, capable of being individually enumerated, and yet, as he thought, forming a sufficient basement for all that men think or believe. And the same tendency is visible among Scotchmen now. It amazes Scotchmen to see on what proximate propositions even Englishmen who are celebrated as thinkers can rest, and how little the best of

wheat-fields, and the green lanes, and the ivy-clad parish churches where all is gentle, and antique, and fertile, but by the bleak sea-shore which parts the certain from the limitless, where there is doubt in the sea-mew's shriek, and where it is well if, in the advancing tide, he can find footing on a rock among the tangle! But this very tendency of his towards what is intellectually extreme, injures his sense of proportion in what is concrete and actual; and hence it is that when he leaves the field of abstract thought, and betakes himself to creative literature, he produces nothing comparable in fulness, wealth, and harmoniousness to the imaginations of a Chaucer or a Shakspeare. The highest genius, indeed, involves also the capability of the intellectual extreme; and, according ly, in the writings of those great Englishmen, as well as in those of the living English poet Tennyson, there are strokes in abundance of that pure intellectual emphasis in which the Scotchman delights; but then there is also with them such a genial acceptance of all things, great or small, in their established coördination, that the flashes of emphasis are as if they came not from a battle done on an open moor, but from a battle transacting itself in the depths of a forest. Among Scottish thinkers, Mackintosh is the one that approaches nearest to the English model--a cireumstance which may be accounted for by the fact that much of what he did consisted, from the necessities of the object-matter of his speculations, in judicious compromise.

But even in the field of literature we will not abandon the Scotchman. His habit of emphasis has here enabled him to do good service too. His entry on this field, however, was later than his entry on the field of philosophy. True, there had been, contemporary with the Scottish philosophers, or even anterior to them, Scottish poets and general prose writers of note-Dunbar, Gawin Douglas, King James, Buchanan, Sir David Lindsay, Henderson, Sir George Mackenzie, Allan Ramsay, and the like. True, also, in those snatches of popular ballad and song which came down from generation to generation in Scotland, many of them written by no one knew who, and almost all of them overflowing with either humor or melancholy, there was at once a fountain and a promise of an ex-