cessful. "The conversation of the Scots," wrote Johnson, "grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustic, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation; and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady."[1] The old lady whom he chiefly had in his memory when he wrote this was probably the Duchess of Douglas. He had met her at Boswell's table. "She talks broad Scotch with a paralytick voice," he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, "and is scarce understood by her own countrymen."[2] Boswell himself, by the instruction of a player from Drury Lane, who had brought a company to Edinburgh, succeeded so well in clearing his tongue of his Scotch that Johnson complimented him by saying: "Sir, your pronunciation is not offensive."[3]
In their pursuit of English literature the Scotch proved as successful as in everything else which they took in hand. Whatever ill-will may have existed between the two nations, there was no grudging admiration shown in England for their authors. In popularity few writers of their time surpassed Thomson, Smollett, Hume, Robertson, John Home, Macpherson, Hugh Blair, Beattie, and Boswell; neither had Robert Blair, Mallet, Kames, John Dalrymple, Henry Mackenzie, Monboddo, Adam Ferguson, and Watson, any reason to complain of neglect. If Adam Smith and Reid were not so popular as some of their contemporaries it was because they had written for the small class of thinkers; though the Wealth of Nations, which was published little more than two years after Johnson's visit, was by the end of the century to reach its ninth edition. "This, I believe, is the historical age, and this the historical nation," Hume wrote proudly from Edinburgh.[4] He boasted that "the copy-money" given him for his History "much exceeded anything formerly known in England." It made him "not only independent but opulent." Robertson for his Charles V. received £3,400, and £400 was to be added on the publication of the second edition.[5] Blair for a single volume of his Sermons was paid £600.[6]
Whatever ardour Scotchmen showed for English literature as
