and the formation of institutions—­what they should call constitutional history.  There had been a school of historical writers of late who would almost confine history to that record—­nothing else was proper history, and the consequence was that the constitution of history was in the publication of documents and in the changes in the manner of government.  That was an essential and a very important part of history, but by itself it would be a very dreich kind of history.  History was the authentic record of whatever happened in the world, and Scottish history of whatever had happened in the Scottish world.  If he had been told that on a certain date King James V., the Red Fox, rode over Cramond Bridge with five horsemen, one of them on a white horse, they might say what use was it to him to know that, but he did want to know it and have that picture in his mind.  It was a piece of history, and any one who was bereft of interest in that sort of thing—­however little use it might be turned to—­was bereft of the historical faculty.  Then there was a conception of history that it should consist in pictures of the generation, of the people, how they were housed, how they were fed, and so on.  That was a capital notion.  But he was not sure that there were not certain overdoings of that notion.  In the first place, they would observe that they must take a succession of generations in order to accomplish that descriptive history of the state of Scotland at one time, then at another, then at a third, and so on.  A description at one time would not apply to the society of Scotland at another.

    ’Quhan Alysander, oure Kyng, was deid,
    Quhan Scotland led in luve and le,
    Awa’ wes sons of ail and brede,
    Of wyne and wax, of gamyn and glee.’

That was to say, it was a tradition before that time that there was abundance and even luxury in Scotland.  There had been a tendency in history of late to dwell on the poverty and squalor of Scotland in comparison with other countries—­all that should be produced, and made perfectly conceivable—­and then also to dwell on the records of kirk- sessions and presbyteries, showing the state of morality in Scotland.  All that it was desirable should be produced in abundance if they were not wrongly construed—­but they were apt to be.  A notion had arisen what a comical country Scotland must have been with its Shorter Catechism, and its presbytery records, and its miserable food, and so on.  That was a wrong notion, and ought to be dismissed, because if they thought of it the life of a community consisted in how it felt, how it acted.  In those days of poverty and squalor of external surroundings there were as good men, as brave men, and as good women as there were in Scotland now.  And at all events, if there was anything in Scotland now, any power in the world, it had sprung from these progenitors.  They must have some corrective for an exaggeration of that notion, which was very