become. Seventy years after the date of the Union, Edinburgh was still a
great literary capital, and could then offer to the world the names of
numerous men of whose reputation any country of the world might have been
proud: Burns and McPherson; Robertson and Hume; Blair and Kames; Reid,
Smith, and Stewart; Monboddo, Playfair, and Boswell; and numerous others,
whose reputation has survived to the present day. Thirty-five years later,
its press furnished the world with the works of Jeffrey and Brougham;
Stewart, Brown, and Chalmers; Scott, Wilson, and Joanna Baillie; and with
those of many others whose reputation was less widely spread, among whom
were Galt, Hogg, Lockhart, and Miss Ferrier, the authoress of "Marriage."
The "Edinburgh Review" and "Blackwood's Magazine," then, to a great
extent, represented Scottish men, and Scottish modes of thought. Looking
now on the same field of action, it is difficult, from this distance, to
discover more than two Scottish authors, Alison and Sir William Hamilton,
the latter all "the more conspicuous and remarkable, as he now," says the
"North British Review" (Feb. 1853), "stands so nearly alone in the ebb of
literary activity in Scotland, which has been so apparent during this
generation." McCulloch and Macaulay were both, I believe, born in
Scotland, but in all else they are English. Glasgow has recently presented
the world with a new poet, in the person of Alexander Smith, but, unlike
Ramsay and Burns, there is nothing Scottish about him beyond his place of
birth. "It is not," says one of his reviewers, "Scottish scenery, Scottish
history, Scottish character, and Scottish social humor, that he represents
or depicts. Nor is there," it continues, "any trace in him of that feeling
of intense nationality so common in Scottish writers. London," as it adds,
"a green lane in Kent, an English forest, an English manorhouse, these are
the scenes where the real business of the drama is transacted."[1]

[Footnote 1: _North British Review_, Aug. 1863.]