taneously at Dublin, and, being shipped over to Scotland in great quantities, completely threw the author's edition out of the market. A bookseller's second edition, as it is called, appeared after the author's death, being simply the remainder of the former stock, embellished with plates, and enlarged by some additions from the pen of the publisher, Mr Creech. Another edition was published in 8vo, in 1817. Mr Arnot seems to have now lived on terms of literary equality with those distinguished literary and professional characters who were his fellow-townsmen and contemporaries. He did not, however, for some years publish any other considerable or acknowledged work. He devoted his mind chiefly to local subjects, and sent forth numerous pamphlets and newspaper essays, which had a considerable effect in accelerating or promoting the erection of various public works. The exertions of a man of his public spirit and enlarged mind, at a time when the capital of Scotland was undergoing such a thorough renovation and improvement, must have been of material service to the community, both of that and of all succeeding ages. Such they were acknowledged to be by the magistrates, who bestowed upon him the freedom of the city. We are told that Mr Arnot, by means of his influence in local matters, was able to retard the erection of the South Bridge of Edinburgh for ten years—not that he objected to such an obvious improvement on its own account, but only in so far as the magistrates could devise no other method for defraying the expense than by a tax upon carters; a mode of liquidating it, which Mr Arnot thought grossly oppressive, as it fell in the first place upon the poor. He also was the means of preventing for several years the formation of the present splendid road between Edinburgh and Leith, on account of the proposed plan (which was afterwards unhappily carried into effect,) of defraying the expense by a toll; being convinced, from what he knew of local authorities, that, if such an exaction were once established, it would always, on some pretext or other, be kept up. In 1785, Mr Arnot published "A Collection of Celebrated Criminal Trials in Scotland, with Historical and Critical Remarks," 1 vol. 4to.; a work of perhaps even greater research than his history of Edinburgh, and written in the same acutely metaphysical and epigrammatic style. In the front of this volume appears a large list of subscribers, embracing almost all the eminent and considerable persons in Scotland, with many of those in England, and testifying of course to the literary and personal respectability of Mr Arnot. This work appeared without a publisher's name, probably for some reason connected with the following circumstance. Owing perhaps to the unwillingness of the author to allow a sufficient profit to the booksellers, the whole body of that trade in Edinburgh refused to let the subscription papers and prospectuses hang in their shops; for which reason the author announced, by means of an advertisement in the newspapers, that these articles might be seen in the coffee-houses. Mr Arnot received the sum of six hundred pounds for the copies sold of this work, from which he would have to pay the expenses of printing a thin quarto: it thus happened that what was rather the least laborious of his two works, was the most profitable. Mr Arnot only survived the publication of his Criminal Trials about a twelvemonth. The asthma had ever since his fifteenth year been making rapid advances upon him, and his person was now reduced almost to a shadow. While still young, he carried all the marks of age, and accordingly the traditionary recollections of the historian of Edinburgh always point to a man in the extreme of life. Perhaps nothing could indicate more expressively the miserable state to which Mr Arnot was reduced by this disease, than his own half-ludicrous, half-pathetic exclamation, on being annoyed by the bawling of a man selling sand on the streets: "The rascal!" cried the unfortunate invalid, "he spends as much breath in a minute as would serve me for a month!" Among the portraits and
