The early life of Robert Chambers embracing the period of his connection with Sir Walter Scott has already been described by his brother William in the Memoir of himself. But while Dr William Chambers had acccss to many early papers now in my possession, he made little use of these, and printed no letters of this period. The letters of Sir Walter Scott printed in the Memoir of William and Robert Chambers (1872) were written at a later date, and have no reference to that subject which first awakened in the great man sympathy for a young and struggling literary aspirant. With the exception of the above-mentioned letters, any extracts now printed from Scott manuscripts belonging to me appear for the first time. One of these papers, recently discovered, is the first portion (incomplete) of a History of the Canongate, and may have formed part of that work on the antiquities of Edinburgh which Scott, in collaboration with Mr Skene of Rubislaw, had at one time intended to write. After seeing the first two parts of Robert Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, Scott's original idea-as we are told by the author in his Preface to the last revised edition-was abandoned, and many of his notes handed on to his youthful protege and friend. The same Preface makes it no less clear that, besides Sir Walter Scott, Robert Chambers was equally indebted to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe for much valuable information. The series of letters from Mr Sharpe now printed, while slight and unimportant in themselves, are at the same time curious and original, besides being typical of the man himself, as described by contemporaries. Robert Chambers's account of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is very striking, and gives a better idea of this eccentric genius than is to be found in any biography. It reads as follows: 'Looking back from the year 186S, I feel that C. K. S. has himself become, as it were, a tradition of Edinburgh. His thin, effeminate figure, his voice pitched in alt.-his attire, as he took his daily walks on Princes Street: a long blue frock-coat, black trousers (rather wide below, and sweeping over white stockings and neat shoes), something like a web of white cambric round his neck, and a brown wig coming down to his eyebrows-had long established him as what is called a character. He had recently edited a book containing many stories of diablerie, and another in which the original narrative of ultra-presbyterian Church History had to bear a series of cavalier notes of the most mocking character. He had a quaint, biting wit, which people bore as they would a scratch from a provoked cat Essentially, he was good-natured and fond of merriment. He had considerable gifts of drawing, and one caricature portrait by him, of Queen Elizabeth dancing, " high and disposedly," before the Scotch ambassadors, is the delight of everybody who has seen it.

One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the Revd. Patrick Macdonald to finish and subsequently publish his younger brother's collection. Karen McAulay traces the complex history of Scottish song collecting, and the publication of major Highland and Lowland collections, over the ensuing 130 years. Looking at sources, authenticity, collecting methodology and format, McAulay places these collections in their cultural context and traces links with contemporary attitudes towards such wide-ranging topics as the embryonic tourism and travel industry; cultural nationalism; fakery and forgery; literary and musical creativity; and the move from antiquarianism and dilettantism towards an increasingly scholarly and didactic tone in the mid-to-late Victorian collections. Attention is given to some of the performance issues raised, either in correspondence or in the paratexts of published collections; and the narrative is interlaced with references to contemporary literary, social and even political history as it affected the collectors themselves. Most significantly, this study demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century.

Based on a range of sources - local newspapers and journals, published accounts of travels to Scotland, diaries, letters, and reminiscences - this work covers the social and literary history of Edinburgh from around 1760 until 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died. It presents a picture of how Edinburgh and its inhabitants were seen at the time by visitors, and also shows how notable local figures saw their own city. The opinions of people such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Thomas de Quincey, Walter Scott, David Hume and Percy Bysshe Shelley are all represented.

Beginning with 1953, entries for Motion pictures and filmstrips, Music and phonorecords form separate parts of the Library of Congress catalogue. Entries for Maps and atlases were issued separately 1953-1955.

Up the close and down the stair, Up and down with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the man who buys the beef. —anonymous children's song On Halloween night 1828, in the West Port district of Edinburgh, Scotland, a woman sometimes known as Madgy Docherty was last seen in the company of William Burke and William Hare. Days later, police discovered her remains in the surgery of the prominent anatomist Dr. Robert Knox. Docherty was the final victim of the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper's. Together with their accomplices, Burke and Hare would be accused of killing sixteen people over the course of twelve months in order to sell the corpses as "subjects" for dissection. The ensuing criminal investigation into the "Anatomy Murders" raised troubling questions about the common practices by which medical men obtained cadavers, the lives of the poor in Edinburgh's back alleys, and the ability of the police to protect the public from cold-blooded murder. Famous among true crime aficionados, Burke and Hare were the first serial killers to capture media attention, yet The Anatomy Murders is the first book to situate their story against the social and cultural forces that were bringing early nineteenth-century Britain into modernity. In Lisa Rosner's deft treatment, each of the murder victims, from the beautiful, doomed Mary Paterson to the unfortunate "Daft Jamie," opens a window on a different aspect of this world in transition. Tapping into a wealth of unpublished materials, Rosner meticulously portrays the aspirations of doctors and anatomists, the makeshift existence of the so-called dangerous classes, the rudimentary police apparatus, and the half-fiction, half-journalism of the popular press. The Anatomy Murders resurrects a tale of murder and medicine in a city whose grand Georgian squares and crescents stood beside a maze of slums, a place in which a dead body was far more valuable than a living laborer.