If it were not on my part a degree of presumption, I might be inclined to consider myself in this volume a fellow-labourer with the late accomplished and able Mr. Robert Chambers.  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 quite irrelevant for me to enlarge here upon the merits of those articles.  No one could study them attentively without being impressed with the ability and power displayed in them by the authors, their grasp of the subjects, and their fair impartial judgment upon the various questions which come under their notice.