Galleries of Literary Portraits,2; Complete in Two Vols (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 Excerpt: ...against the front rank of the southern foemen on the woful plain of Drummossie To supplant such associations, we know only one magic which could prevail; and that were the power of genius, native to the region, and capable cf eclipsing the old by a new glory, and supplanting the superstitions of the past by the poetic miracles of the present. Such genius has not yet, strange to tell, arisen from the most poetical tract in Britain. Switzerland and the Highlands have not yet produced a really great poet, nor perhaps a really great thinker in any direction. The six first names in Scottish literature are all Lowland--Buchanan, Adam Smith, Hume, Burns, Scott, and Wilson. Macpherson, even after Mrs Grant, is still tho real poet of the Highlands--and, in spite of Macaulay, a poet he was, although a forger; but his poetry, even at its best estate, does not rank with the loftiest song. Campbell was born and brought up in the Lowlands. The two Maclaurins, Colin and John, were both men of genius; Colin being a great mathematician, and John the author of one of the noblest sermons in the English language, that on "Glorying in the Cross of Christ;" but their names are now little known, and their works little read. The man who, a century after death, requires to be introduced to the general public, is not, in the highest sense, a great man. Mackintosh is the highest name the Highlands have hitherto-produced. We do not mean to detract from his well-earned renown as an acute metaphysician, a profound politician, an accomplished scholar, a brilliant converser, and the most candid and courteous of men; but few will now pretend that he has made any enduring or massive contribution to either the philosophy, or the jurisprudence, or the history, or the literature of ...