Conclusion

Space does not permit an account of the assimilation of Scotland to England in the years between the Forty-five and our own time: moreover, the history of this age cannot well be written without a dangerously close approach to many "burning questions" of our day. The History of the Highlands, from 1752 to the emigrations witnessed by Dr Johnson (1760-1780), and of the later evictions in the interests of sheep farms and deer forests, has never been studied as it ought to be in the rich manuscript materials which are easily accessible. The great literary Renaissance of Scotland, from 1745 to the death of Sir Walter Scott; the years of Hume, a pioneer in philosophy and in history, and of the Rev. Principal Robertson (with him and Hume, Gibbon professed, very modestly, that he did not rank); the times of Adam Smith, of Burns, and of Sir Walter, not to speak of the Rev. John Home, that foremost tragic poet, may be studied in many a history of literature. According to Voltaire, Scotland led the world in all studies, from metaphysics to gardening. We think of Watt, and add engineering.

The brief and inglorious administration of the Earl of Bute at once gave openings in the public service to Scots of ability, and excited that English hatred of these northern rivals which glows in Churchill's 'Satires,' while this English jealousy aroused that Scottish hatred of England which is the one passion that disturbs the placid letters of David Hume.

The later alliance of Pitt with Henry Dundas made Dundas far more powerful than any Secretary for Scotland had been since Lauderdale, and confirmed the connection of Scotland with the services in India. But, politically, Scotland, till the Reform Bill, had scarcely a recognisable existence. The electorate was tiny, and great landholders controlled the votes, whether genuine or created by legal fiction--"faggot votes." Municipal administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was terribly corrupt, and reform was demanded, but the French Revolution, producing associations of Friends of the People, who were prosecuted and grievously punished in trials for sedition, did not afford a fortunate moment for peaceful reforms.

But early in the nineteenth century Jeffrey, editor of 'The Edinburgh Review,' made it the organ of Liberalism, and no less potent in England than in Scotland; while Scott, on the Tory side, led a following of Scottish penmen across the Border in the service of 'The Quarterly Review.' With 'Blackwood's Magazine' and Wilson, Hogg, and Lockhart; with Jeffrey and 'The Edinburgh,' the Scottish metropolis almost rivalled London as the literary capital.

About 1818 Lockhart recognised the superiority of the Whig wits in literature; but against them all Scott is a more than sufficient set-off. The years of stress between Waterloo (1815) and the Reform Bill (1832) made Radicalism (fostered by economic causes, the enormous