distinguish it from perseverance. Scotchmen are said to be persevering, but the saying is not universally true; Scotchmen are or are not morally persevering, but all Scotchmen are intellectually emphatic. Emphasis, we repeat, intellectual emphasis, the habit of laying stress on certain things rather than co-ordinating all, in this consists what is essential in the Scotticism of Scotchmen. And, as this observation is empirically verified by the very manner in which Scotchmen enunciate their words in ordinary talk, so it might be deduced scientifically from what we have already said regarding the nature and effects of the feeling of nationality. The habit of thinking emphatically is a necessary result of thinking much in the presence of, and in resistance to, a negative; it is the habit of a people that has been accustomed to act on the defensive, rather than of a people peacefully self-evolved and accustomed to act positively; it is the habit of Protestantism rather than of Catholicism, of Presbyterianism rather than of Episcopacy, of Dissent rather than of Conformity.

The greatest effects which the Scottish mind has yet produced on the world-and these effects, by the confession of Englishmen themselves, have not been small-have been the results, in part at least, of this national habit of emphasis. Until towards the close of last century, the special department of labour in which Scotchmen had, to any great extent, exerted themselves so as to make a figure in the general intellectual world, was the department of Philosophy—Metaphysical and Dialectic. Their triumphs in this department are historical. What is called the Scottish Philosophy constitutes, in the eyes of all who know anything of history, a most important stage in the intellectual evolution of modern times. From the time of those old Duncans, and Balfours, and Dalgarnos, mentioned by Sir William Hamilton, who discoursed on philosophy, and wrote dialectical treatises in Latin in all the cities of the Continent, down to our own days, we can point to a succession of Scottish thinkers in whom the interest in metaphysical studies was kept alive, and by whose labours new contributions to mental science were continually being made. It was by the Scottish mind,

in fact, that the modern philosophy was conducted to that point where Kant and the Germans took it up. The qualifications of the Scottish mind for this task, were, doubtless, various. Perhaps there was something in that special combination of the Celtic and the Scandinavian out of which the Scottish nation, for the most part, took its rise, to produce an aptitude for dialectical exercises. Nay, farther, it would not be altogether fanciful to suppose that those very national struggles of the Scotch in the course of which they acquired so strong a sense of their national individuality—that is, of the distinction between all that was Scotch and all that was not Scotch-served, in a rough way, to facilitate to all Scotchmen that fundamental idea of the distinction between the Ego and the Non-Ego, the clear and rigorous apprehension of which is the first step in philosophy, and the one test of the philosopher. But, in a still more important degree, we hold the success of the Scottish mind in philosophy to have been the result of the national habit of intellectual emphasis. A Scotchman, when he thinks, cannot, so easily and comfortably as the Englishman, repose on an upper level of propositions co-ordinated for him by tradition, sweet feeling, and pleasant circumstance; that necessity of his nature which leads him to emphasise certain things rather than to take all things together in their established co-ordination, drives him down and still down in search of certain generalities whereon he may see that all can be built. It was this habit of emphasis, this inability to rest on the level of sweetlycomposed experience, that led Hume to scepticism; it was the same habit, the same inability, conjoined however with more of faith and reverence, that led Reid to lay down in the chasm of Hume's scepticism certain blocks of ultimate propositions or principles, capable of being individually enumerated, and yet, as he thought, forming a sufficient basement for all that men think or believe. And the same tendency is visible among Scotchmen now. It amazes Scotchmen at the present day to see on what proximate propositions even Englishmen who are celebrated as thinkers can rest in their speculations. The truth is that, if Scotch

men have, so far, a source of superiority over Englishmen in their habit of dwelling only on the emphatic, they have also in this same habit a source of inferiority. Quietism; mysticism; that soft, meditative disposition which takes things for granted in the co-ordination established by mere life and usage, pouring into the confusion thus externally given the rich oil of an abounding inner joy, interpenetrating all and harmonizing all-these are, for the most part, alien to the Scotchman. No, his walk, as a thinker, is not by the meadows and the wheat-fields, and the green lanes, and the ivy-clad parish churches, where all is gentle, and antique, and fertile, but by the bleak sea-shore which parts the certain from the limitless, where there is doubt in the seamew's shriek, and where it is well if, in the advancing tide, he can find footing on a rock among the tangle! But this very tendency of his towards what is intellectually extreme, injures his sense of proportion in what is concrete and actual; and hence it is that when he leaves the field of abstract thought, and betakes himself to creative literature, he so seldom produces anything comparable in fulness, wealth, and harmoniousness to the imaginations of a Chaucer or a Shakespeare. The highest genius, indeed, involves also the capability of the intellectually extreme; and accordingly, in the writings of those great Englishmen, as well as in those of the living English poet Tennyson, there are strokes in abundance of that pure intellectual emphasis in which the Scotchman delights; but then there is also with them such a genial acceptance of all things, great or small, in their established co-ordination, that the flashes of emphasis are as if they came not from a battle done on an open moor, but from a battle transacting itself in the depths of a forest. Among Scottish thinkers, Mackintosh is the one that approaches nearest to the English model—a circumstance which may be accounted for by the fact that much of what he did consisted, from the necessities of the object-matter of his speculations, in judicious compromise.

But even in the field of literature we will not abandon the Scotchman. His habit of emphasis has here enabled him to

do good service too. His entry on this field, however, was later than his entry on the field of philosophy. True, there had been, contemporary with the Scottish philosophers, or even anterior to them, Scottish poets and general prose-writers of note-Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, King James, Buchanan, Sir David Lindsay, Henderson, Sir George Mackenzie, Allan Ramsay, and the like. True, also, in those snatches of popular ballad and song which came down from generation to generation in Scotland-many of them written by no one knows who, and almost all of them overflowing with either humour or melancholy-there was at once a fountain and a promise of an exquisite national literature. We could think of old Nicol Burn, the "violer," till our eyes filled with

tears.

"But minstrel Burn cannot assuage

His woes while time endureth,

To see the changes of this age
Which fleeting time procureth.

Full many a place stands in hard case

Where joy was wont beforrow,

With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,

And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow."

There was literature in the times when such old strains were sung. But the true avatar of the Scottish mind in modern literature, came later than the manifestation of the same mind in philosophy. Were we to fix a precise date for it, we should name the period of Burns's first visit to Edinburgh and familiar meetings with the men of literary talent and distinction then assembled there. Edinburgh was, indeed, even then a literary capital, boasting of its Monboddos, and Stewarts, and Robertsons, and Blairs, and Mackenzies, and Gregorys-men who had already begun the race of literary rivalry with their contemporaries south of the Tweed. But, so far as the literary excellence of these men did not depend on their participation in that tendency to abstract thinking which had already produced its special fruit in the Scottish Philosophy, it consisted in little more than a reflection or imitation of what was already common and acknowledged in the prior or contemporary literature of South Britain. To write essays such as those of the

Spectator; to be master of a style which Englishmen should pronounce pure, and to produce compositions in that style worthy of being ranked with the compositions of English authors such was the aim and aspiration of Edinburgh literati, between whom and their London cousins there was all the difference that there is between the latitude of Edinburgh and the latitude of London, between the daily use of the broad Scotch dialect and the daily use of the classic English. For Scotland this mere imitation of English models was but a poor and unsatisfactory vein of literary enterprise. What was necessary was the appearance of some man of genius who should flash through all that, and who, by the application to literature, or the art of universal expression, of that same Scottish habit of emphasis which had already produced such striking and original results in philosophy, should teach the Scottish nation its true power in literature, and show a first example of it. Such a man was Burns. He it was who, uniting emotional fervour with intellectual emphasis, and drawing his inspiration from all those depths of sentiment in the Scottish people which his predecessors, the philosophers, had hardly so much as touched, struck for the first time a new chord, and revealed for the first time what a Scottish writer could do by trusting to the whole wealth of Scottish resources. And from the time of Burns, accordingly, there has been a series of eminent literary Scotchmen quite different from that series of hard logical Scotchmen who had till then been the most conspicuous representatives of their country in the eyes of the reading public of Great Britain--a series of Scotchmen displaying to the world the power of emphatic sentiment and emphatic expression as strikingly as their predecessors had displayed the power of emphatic reasoning. While the old philosophic energy of Scotland still remained unexhausted the honours of Reid, and Hume, and Smith, and Stewart passing on to such men as Brown, and Mill, and Mackintosh, and Hamilton (in favour of the last of whom even Germany has resigned her philosophic interregnum) the specially literary energy which had been awakened in the country descended along another line in the