ambers. In a very limited sphere it
takes a portion of the same field of illustration. I should consider
myself to have done well if I shall direct any of my readers to his able
volumes. Whosoever wishes to know what this country really was in times
past, and to learn, with a precision beyond what is supplied by the
narratives of history, the details of the ordinary current of our
social, civil, and national life, must carefully study the _Domestic
Annals of Scotland_. Never before were a nation's domestic features so
thoroughly portrayed. Of those features the specimens of quaint Scottish
humour still remembered are unlike anything else, but they are fast
becoming obsolete, and my motive for this publication has been an
endeavour to preserve marks of the past which would of themselves soon
become obliterated, and to supply the rising generation with pictures of
social life, faded and indistinct to their eyes, but the strong lines of
which an older race still remember. By thus coming forward at a
favourable moment, no doubt many beautiful specimens of SCOTTISH
MINSTRELSY have in this manner been preserved from oblivion by the
timely exertions of Bishop Percy, Ritson, Walter Scott, and others. Lord
Macaulay, in his preface to _The Lays of Ancient Rome_, shows very
powerfully the tendency in all that lingers in the memory to become
obsolete, and he does not hesitate to say that "Sir Walter Scott was but
_just in time_ to save the precious relics of the minstrelsy of
the Border."

It is quite evident that those who have in Scotland come to an advanced
age, must have found some things to have been really changed about them,
and that on them great alterations have already taken place. There are
some, however, which yet may be in a transition state; and others in
which, although changes are threatened, still it cannot be said that the
changes are begum I have been led to a consideration of impending
alterations as likely to take place, by the recent appearance of two
very remarkable and very interesting papers on subjects closely
connected with great social Scottish questions, where a revolution of
opinion may be expected. These are two articles in _Recess Studies_
(1870), a volume edited by our distinguished Principal, Sir Alexander
Grant. One essay is by Sir Alexander himself, upon the "Endowed
Hospitals of Scotland;" the other by the Rev. Dr. Wallace of the
Greyfriars, upon "Church Tendencies in Scotland." It would be quit