timately connected with the thoughts and feelings of the most important classes of society, than any clerical body in Europe ever was; and therefore, it may be presumed, more likely to exert a continued and effectual influence upon the public mind of their country. In the law, where the encouragement for talent alone is such, that no man of high talents can be suspected of easily sacrificing his judgment for the hopes of favour, the superiority is almost as apparent as in the church, and Shepherd stands as much alone among the younger, as our excellent Chancellor does among the elder part of the profession. In literature, they have no lack of splendid names. They have an equal proportion of those who carry on the immediate and more noisy conflict; and a far over-balancing array of such as are likely to be remembered hereafter for the stable and enduring triumphs of their genius. They have Canning and Frere among the wits-they have Wordsworth and Coleridge in poetry-and they have the unwearied inexhaustible Southey in every thing. They have no reason either to be ashamed of their front, or apprehensive of their success; and therefore they can have no excuse for carrying further than is absolutely necessary, the measure of their hosti

lity towards those who do not muster beneath their banner. I before suspected in part, and I now have seen enough thoroughly to convince me, that in each and all of these points, this quarter of the island presents unhappily a contrast as striking as possible to the condition of our own.

I shall not at present enter upon any thing like a review of the past history of political feeling in Scotland, because I expect ere long to find myself better enabled than I now am to attempt something of this kind; and, at the same time, by laying before you the results of my enquiries into the nature both of the religion and the education of Scotland, to afford you somewhat of a key to its interpretation. In the meantime, however, nothing can be more certain than the superiority of the Whigs in the Scottish literature of the present day; nor is their superiority a whit less decisive in the law, the only profession which, in Scotland, exerts any great or general authority over the opinions of the higher classes of society. As for the church, of which I propose to give you a full account hereafter, and of which, in regard to its influence among the mass of the people, I am inclined to entertain a very high

respect, the truth is, the clergy of Scotland are, at the present day, possessed of comparatively little power over the opinions of the best educated classes of their countrymen. One very efficient cause of this want of influence is, without doubt, the insignificant part they have of late taken in general literature; their neglect, in other words, their strange and unprecedented neglect of an engine, which, among a people whose habits at all resemble those of the present Scots, must ever be, of all others, the most extensive in its sway. Such as the influence of the churchmen is, they are all Presbyterians and Calvinists, and so, in spite of themselves, they are, and must be Whigs. A few, indeed, may endeavour to persuade themselves and others they are Tories; but they wear the cloak of Geneva, and they are the descendants of John Knox-and that is sufficient. They may, if they choose, attempt to depart from the views of their predecessors, but the whole history of their sect is against them; and the shrewd sagacity of those to whom they address themselves, will at all times find a pleasing exercise in drawing invidious comparisons at their expence. But my business now is with the literati, and I am wandering from my text.

There never was any man more fitted, by the general structure of his genius, for seizing and possessing an extensive dominion over Scottish intellect, than David Hume. He was very nearly the beau ideal of the national understanding, and had he stood in any thing like the same relation to some other parts of the national character, without all question he might have produced works which would have been recognized by them as complete pictures of their mode of thinking and feeling, and which would, therefore, have obtained a measure of influence exactly coincident with the extent of their national existence. The defect of feeling in his composition, which has prevented his books from attaining the power which their genius might otherwise have commanded, was by no means hostile to the early diffusion of his celebrity; but it has acted with the force of a terrible lever, in pulling him down from that height of authority to which the spring of his originality at first elevated him. The empire which he at once framed to himself in the region of the speculative understanding of his countrymen, has not, indeed, been taken away; but the tyrannous interference, by which this empire at first contrived almost to swallow up every authority in

its vicinity, has now received many checks, and, I should hope, bids fair to be ere long entirely discontinued. The only points on which David's character seems to have found any room for ardent feeling, were the ideas of ancient loyalty and attachment to the blood of his native princes. This was a strange anomaly in the composition of so frigid an observer of human affairs. We hear it usually said, that it could have arisen only from the influence of early education; but even so, the wonder remains undiminished, how he, who threw off all other youthful prejudices with so much facility, should have continued to embalm this alone in the very recesses of his heart. I am rather inclined to be of opinion, that David had really persuaded himself, by the exercise of his speculative understanding, that the greatest danger, to which his country was likely to be exposed, would be nothing else than a too great dereliction of those ideas, on which the national character and constitution had been formed, and determined, in his capacity of philosopher, to make use of his powers as a historian to controvert, and, if possible, counterbalance this perilous tendency of his times. In the mysteries of Revealed Religion, there was something so very offensive to the unsatiable inquisitive