Our kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”
He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an eager interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the “chiels of London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—had recently done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the great literary traditions of England. How strong was his interest in those “chiels of London,” how much he admired them, appears not only from their influence upon him in his own special art of a resuscitated Scottish poetry in an eclectic modification of the old vernacular, but also in the dedication of so much of his later life to the commercial enterprise of an Edinburgh circulating library for the supply of his fellow-citizens with all recent or current English books, and in his less successful enterprise for the introduction of the English drama by the establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre. In short, before Allan Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own example and exertions, what from the stimulus upon his countrymen independently of the new sense, more and more consciously felt since the Union, of an acquired partnership with England in all that great inheritance in the English speech which had till then belonged especially to England, and in the common responsibilities of such partnership thenceforward, Scotland was visibly holding up her head again. Before that date there had appeared, in Ramsay’s wake, some of the other forerunners of that famous race of eighteenth-century Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for any continuance of the imputation of the literary inferiority of Scotland to England, were to command the respect of Europe by the vigour of their co-operation and rivalry with their English coevals.
Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose noble poetic fragment of Hardyknute was made public by Ramsay, and whose influence on the subsequent course of specially Scottish literature by that fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged things of the same kind, remains yet to be adequately estimated, one notes that among those juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the career of literature after him and under his observation, but who had died before him, were Robert Blair, James Thomson, and William Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch, once an Edinburgh protégé of Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner since 1723, and Anglicised into Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s Scottish literary survivors, and does not count for much. But, when Ramsay died, there were already in existence, at ages varying from full maturity to mere infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable now, on one ground or another, in the British Literary History of the eighteenth century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle, and Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and Mallet had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are associated locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of Scotland; but by far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay himself, had their homes in Edinburgh, or were essentially of Edinburgh celebrity by all their belongings. Kames, David Hume, Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Dr. Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor Robison, James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton: these, with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern lights of the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in which Dr. Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and he and Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon, were seen in the London streets. Greater and smaller together, were they not a sufficient northern constellation? Do not we of modern Edinburgh still remember them now with a peculiar pride, and visit, out of curiosity, the houses in the Old Town squares or closes where some of them had their dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of their physiognomies and habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate, the Parliament House, and the site of our University? Was it not the fact that in their days there were two recognised and distinct centres or foci of literary production in Great Britain: the great London on the banks of the Thames being one; but the other 400 miles farther north, in the smaller city of heights and hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur Seat on the banks of the Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring radiance yet, vanishes from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age of the Literary History of Edinburgh.
A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It was in July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that same year that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to Edinburgh. On one particular day in the course of that visit, as all know, Burns encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a lame fair-haired youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the midst of other company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix themselves for a moment or two with some special interest. This was young Walter Scott. In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that another Edinburgh boy, two years younger than Scott, standing somewhere in the High Street, and staring at a man whose unusual appearance had struck him, was told by a bystander that he might well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This was young Francis Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming lives of those two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the wondrous man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year appeared the first number of the Edinburgh Review, projected in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the year of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty years to all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history of Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of Scott’s creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other, all Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to the juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind, however, criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze of the completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that the present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the Edinburgh of those thirty following years.
II.
It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive, even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of the Essays on Taste; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs. Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the starting of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817, and the outflashing in that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in connection with Blackwood and other periodicals, of the strange English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, who so fit to succeed him in the presidency, who called to it with such acclamation, as the long-known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson, was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the great Sir Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had vanished there were various intellectual developments, various manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were even alien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example. There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the Scotticism of Scott,—that special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself, and also in Hugh Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the character of many of those writings which marked the advance of Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of which by the starting of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the very year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then, unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—