The brief and inglorious administration of the Earl of Bute at once gave openings in the public service to Scots of ability, and excited that English hatred of these northern rivals which glows in Churchill’s ‘Satires,’ while this English jealousy aroused that Scottish hatred of England which is the one passion that disturbs the placid letters of David Hume.

The later alliance of Pitt with Henry Dundas made Dundas far more powerful than any Secretary for Scotland had been since Lauderdale, and confirmed the connection of Scotland with the services in India.  But, politically, Scotland, till the Reform Bill, had scarcely a recognisable existence.  The electorate was tiny, and great landholders controlled the votes, whether genuine or created by legal fiction—­“faggot votes.”  Municipal administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was terribly corrupt, and reform was demanded, but the French Revolution, producing associations of Friends of the People, who were prosecuted and grievously punished in trials for sedition, did not afford a fortunate moment for peaceful reforms.

But early in the nineteenth century Jeffrey, editor of ’The Edinburgh Review,’ made it the organ of Liberalism, and no less potent in England than in Scotland; while Scott, on the Tory side, led a following of Scottish penmen across the Border in the service of ’The Quarterly Review.’  With ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ and Wilson, Hogg, and Lockhart; with Jeffrey and ‘The Edinburgh,’ the Scottish metropolis almost rivalled London as the literary capital.

About 1818 Lockhart recognised the superiority of the Whig wits in literature; but against them all Scott is a more than sufficient set-off.  The years of stress between Waterloo (1815) and the Reform Bill (1832) made Radicalism (fostered by economic causes, the enormous commercial and industrial growth, and the unequal distribution of its rewards) perhaps even more pronounced north than south of the Tweed.  In 1820 “the Radical war” led to actual encounters between the yeomanry and the people.  The ruffianism of the Tory paper ‘The Beacon’ caused one fatal duel, and was within an inch of leading to another, in which a person of the very highest consequence would have “gone on the sod.”  For the Reform Bill the mass of Scottish opinion, so long not really represented at all, was as eager as for the Covenant.  So triumphant was the first Whig or Radical majority under the new system, that Jeffrey, the Whig pontiff, perceived that the real struggle was to be “between property and no property,” between Capital and Socialism.  This circumstance had always been perfectly clear to Scott and the Tories.