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.

The watchword of the eighteenth century in literature, religion, and
politics had been "no enthusiasm." But throughout the century, since
1740, "enthusiasm," "the return to nature," had gradually conquered till
the rise of the Romantic school with Coleridge and Scott. In religion
the enthusiastic movement of the Wesleys had altered the face of the
Church in England, while in Scotland the "Moder