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Rh ‘Quintilian,’ Ben Jonson said to Drummond, ‘will tell you your faults, as if he had lived with you.’ Does not the foregoing description embody the experience of many a young Scot, who knows and admires the virtues of his people, and has suffered from them, and dislikes them sometimes even in himself?

The Life of Samuel Boyse, from which I have quoted, gives, like Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage, a vivid picture of the straits to which professional authors were reduced under the rule of Walpole. It is narrated how, about the year 1740, Boyse was brought to the extremity of distress. Having pawned all his clothes he was confined to bed with no other covering but a blanket. ‘He sat up in bed with the blanket wrapt about him, through which he had cut a hole large enough to admit his arm, and placing the paper upon his knee, scribbled in the best manner he could the verses he was obliged to make. Whatever he got by