cture, and the newly-built Register House at the other end one of
the finest buildings of modern times to the admiring chroniclers of
Edinburgh. And the historians and philosophers, the great doctors, the
great lawyers, the elegant critics, for whom it was more and more
necessary that the ways of access between the old town and the new might
be made more easy, presided over and criticised all those wonderful new
buildings of classic style and unbroken regularity, and watched the
progress of the Earthen Mound, a bold and picturesque expedient which
filled up the hollow and made a winding walk between, with interest as
warm as that which they took in the lectures and students, the books and
researches, which were making their city one of the intellectual centres
of the world.

This is a position to which Scotland has always aspired, and the pride
of the ambitious city and country was never more fully satisfied than in
the end of last and the beginning of the present century. Edinburgh had
never been so rich in the literary element, and the band of young men
full of genius and high spirit who were to advance her still one step
farther to the climax of fame in that particular, were growing up to
take the places of their fathers. A place in which Walter Scott was just
emerging from his delightful childhood, in which Jeffrey was a
mischievous boy and Henry Brougham a child, could not but be overflowing
with hope, especially when we remember all the good company there
already--Dugald Stewart, bringing so many fine young gentlemen from
England to wonder at the little Scotch capital, and a crowd of Erskines,
Hunters, Gregories, Monroes, and Dr. Blair and Dr. Blacklock, and the
Man of Feeling--not to speak of those wild and witty old ladies in the
Canongate, and the duchesses who still recognised the claims of
Edinburgh in its season. To all this excellent company, whose fame and
whose talk hung about both the old Edinburgh and the new like the smoke
over their roofs, there arrived one spring day a wonderful visitor, in
appearance like nothing so much as an honest hill farmer, travelling on
foot, his robust shoulders a little bowed with the habit of the plough,
his eyes shining, as no other eyes in Scotland shone, with youth and
genius and hope. He knew nobody in Edinburgh save an Ayrshire lad like
himself, like what everybody up to this time had supposed Robert Burns
to be. The difference was that the stranger a little while befo