ABSTRACT
The cultural instability of a small country that is tacked on in any way to a big one had been tragically manifested in Scotland during the seventeenth century. The causes had been ecclesiastical obsessions, withdrawal of Court influence, and disintegration of the national system. The heart, in short, was being gradually eaten out of the Scottish nation. The old tradition of the capital was carried on for some time by magazines like Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review, but they became less and less Scots and international—more British and Imperialist—as Edinburgh itself was becoming; and the removal of the great Whig review to London was symbolic. Young Scots writers to-day who, perhaps quite unconsciously, perhaps even unwillingly, are making the Scottish nation the base of their achievement must find it hard to imagine what things were like when the Scottish nation was represented only by an efficiently educated but rather unprogressive and curiously un-Scottish Presbyterian Kirk.
