The “Edinburgh Review” and “Blackwood’s Magazine,” then, to a great extent, represented Scottish men, and Scottish modes of thought.  Looking now on the same field of action, it is difficult, from this distance, to discover more than two Scottish authors, Alison and Sir William Hamilton, the latter all “the more conspicuous and remarkable, as he now,” says the “North British Review” (Feb. 1853), “stands so nearly alone in the ebb of literary activity in Scotland, which has been so apparent during this generation.”  McCulloch and Macaulay were both, I believe, born in Scotland, but in all else they are English.  Glasgow has recently presented the world with a new poet, in the person of Alexander Smith, but, unlike Ramsay and Burns, there is nothing Scottish about him beyond his place of birth.  “It is not,” says one of his reviewers, “Scottish scenery, Scottish history, Scottish character, and Scottish social humor, that he represents or depicts.  Nor is there,” it continues, “any trace in him of that feeling of intense nationality so common in Scottish writers.  London,” as it adds, “a green lane in Kent, an English forest, an English manorhouse, these are the scenes where the real business of the drama is transacted."[1]

   [Footnote 1:  North British Review, Aug. 1863.]

The “Edinburgh Review” has become to all intents and purposes an English journal, and “Blackwood” has lost all those characteristics by which it was in former times distinguished from the magazines published south of the Tweed.

Seeing these facts, we can scarcely fail to agree with the Review already quoted, in the admission that there are “probably fewer leading individual thinkers and literary guides in Scotland at present than at any other period of its history since the early part of the last century,” since the day when Scotland itself lost its individuality.  The same journal informs us that “there is now scarcely an instance of a Scotchman holding a learned position in any other country,” and farther says that “the small number of names of literary Scotchmen known throughout Europe for eminence in literature and science is of itself sufficient to show to how great an extent the present race of Scotchmen have lost the position which their ancestors held in the world of letters.” [1]

   [Footnote 1:  North British Review, May, 1853.]

How, indeed, could it be otherwise?  Centralization tends to carry to London all the wealth and all the expenditure of the kingdom, and thus to destroy everywhere the local demand for books or newspapers, or for men capable of producing either.  Centralization taxes the poor people of the north of Scotland, and their complaints of distress are answered by an order for their expulsion, that place may be made for sheep and shepherds, neither of whom make much demand for books.  Centralization appropriates millions for the improvement of London and the creation of royal palaces and pleasure-grounds