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 “Rosenbloom crafted a compelling narrative . . . Students SECOND

ROSENBLOOM
like Administrative Law for Public Managers because it is EDITION
straightforward and easy to understand. I teach a wide range
of students—mid-level managers to students with no work
experience—both are relieved that the content and examples
are easily digestible. It’s an excellent book!”
—Lorenda Ann Naylor, University of Baltimore
“This book presents a profound, as well as comprehensive,
knowledge base of administrative law.”

ADMINISTRATIVE LAW FOR PUBLIC MANAGERS

—Public Administration Review

Administrative Law for Public Managers is an accessible and comprehensive guide to

the fundamentals of administrative law—why we have administrative law, the constitutional
constraints on public administration, and administrative law’s frameworks for rulemaking,
adjudication, enforcement, transparency, and judicial and legislative review. Rosenbloom
explains administrative law from the perspective of administrative practice, emphasizing
how various administrative law provisions promote their underlying goal of improving the fit
between public administration and US democratic-constitutionalism.

The second edition includes more coverage of state administrative law, as well as an
expanded discussion of judicial review. It has also been updated to include the major
statutes, court cases, executive orders, and other major executive initiatives since 2003.
The addition of discussion questions makes this an even more valuable resource for public
administration classrooms and students.

Administrative Law
David H. Rosenbloom is Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at American
University. A major contributor to the field and a Fellow in the National Academy of Public
Administration, he has received numerous awards, including the Gaus Award for exemplary
scholarship in political science and public administration, the Waldo Award for outstanding
contributions to the literature and leadership of public administration, the Levine Award

for Public Managers

for excellence in public administration, and the Brownlow Award for his book, Building
a Legislative-Centered Public Administration. He edited Public Administration Review,
coedited the Policy Studies Journal, and is now on the editorial boards of about twenty
academic journals.
SECOND
EDITION

Cover Image © Shutterstock

Cover Design: Miguel Santana & Wendy Halitzer

DAVID H. ROSENBLOOM
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.westviewpress.com
 Administrative Law for Public Managers

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9780813348810-text.indd 2 5/14/14 4:09 PM
 Administrative Law for
Public Managers

second edition

David H. Rosenbloom
American University

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

9780813348810-text.indd 3 5/20/14 1:25 PM

 Westview Press was founded in 1975 in Boulder, Colorado, by notable publisher
and intellectual Fred Praeger. Westview Press continues to publish scholarly titles
and high-quality undergraduate- and graduate-level textbooks in core social science
disciplines. With books developed, written, and edited with the needs of serious
nonfiction readers, professors, and students in mind, Westview Press honors its long
history of publishing books that matter.

Copyright © 2015 by Westview Press

Published by Westview Press,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information,
address Westview Press, 2465 Central Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301.

Find us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com.

Every effort has been made to secure required permissions for all text, images, maps,
and other art reprinted in this volume.

Westview Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the
United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more
information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books
Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145,
ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenbloom, David H., author.

Administrative law for public managers / David H Rosenbloom. -- Second edition.
  pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8133-4881-0 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-0-8133-4882-7 (e-book) 1.
Administrative law--United States. 2. Public administration--United States. I. Title.

KF5402.R669 2014
342.73'06--dc23
2014015458
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

9780813348810-text.indd 4 5/14/14 4:09 PM

 Contents

Preface to the Second Edition xiii

1 What Is Administrative Law? 1

2 The Constitutional Context of US Public Administration 19
3 Administrative Rulemaking 63
4 Evidentiary Adjudication and Enforcement 89
5 Transparency 123
6 Judicial and Legislative Review of Administrative Action 151
7 Staying Current 185
References 195
Index 209

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9780813348810-text.indd 6 5/14/14 4:09 PM
 Detailed Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition xiii

1 What Is Administrative Law? 1

Introduction: What Is Administrative Law? 1
Why We Have Administrative Law Statutes: Delegation and
Discretion, 4
Delegation, 4
Discretion, 7
Administrative Decisionmaking, 8
Procedural and Substantive Review of Administrative
Decisions, 10
The Development of US Administrative Law, 12
Conclusion, 16
Additional Reading, 16
Discussion Questions, 16

2 The Constitutional Context of US Public Administration 19

The Separation of Powers, 22
Congress, 22
The President, 23
The Judiciary, 32
Federalism, 35
The Commerce Clause, 36
The Tenth Amendment, 40
The Spending Clause, 41
The Eleventh Amendment, 41
Individuals’ Constitutional Rights in Administrative
Encounters, 43

vii

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 viii Detailed Table of Contents

Relationships with Clients and Customers, 43

Equal Protection, 43
New Property and Procedural Due Process, 46
Unconstitutional Conditions, 47
Public Personnel Management, 48
First Amendment Rights, 49
Fourth Amendment Privacy, 51
Procedural Due Process, 51
Equal Protection, 52
Substantive Due Process Rights, 52
Relationships with Contractors, 53
Public Mental Health Patients, 54
Prisoners’ Constitutional Rights, 55
Street-Level Regulatory Encounters, 56
Fourth Amendment Constraints, 56
Equal Protection Constraints, 57
Public Administrators’ Liability for Constitutional Torts, 58
Conclusion, 60
Additional Reading, 60
Discussion Questions, 61

3 Administrative Rulemaking 63
Introduction: Smoking Whitefish, 63
Rulemaking: Definitions and General Concerns, 64
Rulemaking Processes, 71
Limited or No Procedural Requirements, 71
Informal Rulemaking, 72
Formal Rulemaking, 74
Hybrid and Negotiated Rulemaking Processes, 75
Hybrid Rulemaking, 75
Negotiated Rulemaking, 76
Additional Features of the Idealized Legislative Model for
Rulemaking, 78
Representation: Advisory Committees, 78
Protecting Specific Interests and Values, 79
Executive Efforts to Influence Federal Agency Rulemaking, 82
Conclusion: The Philosopher’s Stone Versus the Bubble Effect,
85
Additional Reading, 86
Discussion Questions, 86

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 Detailed Table of Contents ix

4 Evidentiary Adjudication and Enforcement 89

Adjudicating Cinderella: A Case of Deceit, Abuse, and Due
Process, 89
What Is Evidentiary Administrative Adjudication? 91
Criticisms of Adjudication, 93
Legal Perspectives, 94
Administrative Perspectives, 95
Why Adjudicate? 99
Agency Convenience, 99
Advantages Presented by Incrementalism, 100
Conduct and Application Cases, 101
Equity and Compassion, 102
Procedural Due Process, 106
Caveat Estoppel, 107
Adjudicatory Hearings, 108
Presiding Officers, 110
Administrative Law Judges, 110
Other Presiding Officers, 113
Decisions and Appeals, 113
Alternative Dispute Resolution, 115
Enforcement, 117
Conclusion: Should Adjudication Be Reformed? 120
Additional Reading, 121
Discussion Questions, 121

5 Transparency 123
Introduction: The Central Intelligence Agency’s Budget? What
Budget? 123
The Administrative Law Framework for Transparent
Government, 125
Public Reporting, 126
Freedom of Information, 128
The Freedom of Information Act, 128
The Presidential Records Act, 138
Privacy, 139
Open Meetings, 142
Whistle-Blower Protection, 145
Qui Tam, 148
Conclusion: An Opaque Fishbowl? 148

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 x Detailed Table of Contents

Additional Reading, 149

Discussion Questions, 150

6 Judicial and Legislative Review of Administrative Action 151

Introduction: The Drug Companies’ Acetaminophen, Salicylic
Acid, and Caffeine Headache, 151
Judicial Review of Administrative Action, 153
The Court System, 154
Reviewability, 159
Standing to Sue, 160
Mootness, 162
Ripeness, 163
Political Questions, 165
Timing, 165
Primary Jurisdiction, 165
Exhaustion of Administrative Remedies, 166
Finality, 167
Deference to State Courts, 167
The Scope of Judicial Review, 168
Agency Rules, 169
FOIA Requests, 172
Rulemaking Procedures, 172
Agencies’ Statutory Interpretations, 173
Agency Nonenforcement, 175
Discretionary Actions, 177
Adjudication, 178
Legislative Review of Administration, 178
Oversight by Committees and Subcommittees, 179
Reporting Requirements, 179
Research, Evaluation, Audit, and Investigation, 180
Sunset Legislation, 181
Casework, 181
Strategic Planning and Performance Reports, 182
Congressional Review Act, 182
Conclusion: Checks, Balances, and Federal Administration, 183
Additional Reading, 184
Discussion Questions, 184

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 Detailed Table of Contents xi

7 Staying Current 185

The Primary Function of US Administrative Law, 186
Constitutional Contractarianism, 186
Public Administrative Instrumentalism, 187
Periodicals and Websites, 190
Talk Administrative Law Talk, 191
Administrative Law Audits, 192
The Next Level, 192
Discussion Questions, 193

References 195
Index 209

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9780813348810-text.indd 12 5/14/14 4:09 PM
 Preface to the Second Edition

It may come as a surprise that the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems,

which is sponsored by United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cul-
tural Organization (UNESCO), contains an entry on administrative law. I
was certainly surprised when asked to write it.1 I immediately had a sci-
ence fiction inspired vision of earthlings boarding a spacecraft clutching
the Encyclopedia in hand as they went to off to colonize a distant planet.
Administrative law? Life support? At first, the connection seemed dubious
at best. On reflection, however, I realized that the inclusion of administra-
tive law is, in fact, necessary for life as we know it in modern, complex
political systems. All governments in developed countries have mature
administrative components. Public administration is the institutional
means through which contemporary governments deliver public services
and regulate aspects of economic, social, and political life. Administrative
law is the regulatory law of public administration. It regulates public ad-
ministrative activity. Without administrative law, public agencies could go
about their business as they saw fit, perhaps routinely emphasizing ad-
ministrative convenience and self-interest over other values and the public
interest. In the United States, administrative law infuses public adminis-
tration with democratic-constitutional values, including stakeholder repre-
sentation, participation, transparency, fairness, accountability, and limited
government intrusion on private activity. Life was once, and still could be,
supported without it. However, other than perhaps some administrators
themselves, few, if any, who know the history of US public administration
would want to return to the days before the federal Administrative Proce-
dure Act of 1946 went into effect.

1. See David H. Rosenbloom, “Administrative Law,” UNESCO-EOLSS, http://www.eolss

.net/sample-chapters/c14/e1-34-05-07.pdf.

xiii

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 xiv Preface to the Second Edition

To appreciate the importance of administrative law, one has to bear in

mind that although students and scholars in the field of public administra-
tion tend to view administration as providing valuable public services, the
rest of the world doesn’t necessarily see it this way. Many in legislatures,
small businesses, the health, medicine, industrial, and research sectors, and
myriad other walks of life think of administration as bureaucracy impos-
ing red tape and unwanted, often unnecessary, and even seemingly bizarre
regulations. This is why administrative law books may contain chapters
on “getting into court” and “staying in court” (W. Fox 2000). Looking from
the outside in, administrative law constrains public administration, guards
against abuses, and enables chief executives, legislatures, and courts to
keep administrators in check. From the inside looking out, administrative
law seeks to guide administrators and agencies in achieving their objec-
tives within the framework of the nation’s democratic-constitutional val-
ues and practices.
A solid grounding in administrative law is a prerequisite for under-
standing a substantial amount about the internal administrative processes
used on a daily basis by public agencies in the United States. As with other
aspects of public administrative practice, it is better to learn administra-
tive law in the classroom than to be bewildered by its pervasiveness upon
entering a public-sector job. Students already working in the public sector
will need no reminder of the importance of administrative law. Neverthe-
less, they will benefit from gaining a systematic understanding of how and
why it developed as it did.
Administrative law has such a major impact on what administrators and
agencies do on a daily basis that it cannot be treated as tangential or as a
specialization best left to lawyers. It needs to be integrated into day-to-day
practice. For some administrators, such as those engaged in rulemaking,
adjudication, and processing freedom-of-information requests, administra-
tive law defines the fundamental structure and activity of their jobs.
This book aims to make administrative law accessible to public admin-
istration students, both those new to the subject and those already in prac-
tice. The book focuses on the essentials that public managers should know
about administrative law—why we have administrative law; the broad
constitutional constraints on public administration; administrative law’s
frameworks for rulemaking, adjudication, enforcement, and transparency;
and the parameters of internal executive and external judicial and legisla-
tive review of administrative action. The book views public administration
from the perspectives of managing, organizing, and doing administration
rather than lawyering. It is far more concerned with staying out of court
than getting into it.

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 Preface to the Second Edition xv

The discussion is organized around federal administrative law. Where

appropriate, state approaches are noted as alternatives or parallels to fed-
eral designs and requirements. After reading this book and grappling with
the discussion questions at the end of each chapter, readers should have
a firm grasp of federal administrative law and no difficulty learning the
administrative law of any state.
Unlike most administrative law texts, the book neither contains legal
cases nor devotes much attention to the development of case law. Federal
court decisions are readily available on the Internet, and instructors can se-
lect them flexibly to augment the text. Books dealing comprehensively with
case law tend toward dysfunctional excess in general public administrative
education, sometimes exceeding 1,000 pages of material that is apt to go
largely unused and soon be forgotten. This book also differs from others
by including a chapter on the constitutional context of US public adminis-
tration, which explains the constitutional constructs and doctrines within
which today’s public administration and administrative law operate.
The book is intended for classroom use in three ways. First, as a supple-
ment, it will efficiently cover the main dimensions of administrative law
in introductory public administration classes and courses on bureaucratic
politics or the political context of public management. Second, it can serve
as a core text in public administration courses dealing with administrative
law or the legal basis or environment of public administration. As a core
text, it can be coupled with selected legal cases of the instructor’s choice.
Third, in constitutional law courses, it can serve as a supplement to explain
how abstract constitutional concerns such as delegations of legislative au-
thority and procedural due process are transformed in concrete action by
administrative agencies. It is unlikely that the book will be used in law
school classes, though law students may find it refreshingly concise and
helpful in explaining the political and administrative contexts in which ad-
ministrative law is applied and the larger purposes it serves.
The challenge in writing the first edition was to explain the essentials
of administrative law clearly and accurately, in nontechnical terms, with
sufficient depth to provide readers with a sophisticated, lasting under-
standing of the subject matter. That there is now a second edition is testa-
ment to the success of that effort. The new edition thoroughly updates the
previous one, adding discussion of new statutes and law cases, as well as
developments during the first five years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
It also fine-tunes the earlier discussion for clarity. I hope those familiar
with the first edition will view this one as fresh and refreshing and those
new to the text will find in it a welcome alternative to other treatments of
administrative law.

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 xvi Preface to the Second Edition

This edition continues to benefit from those acknowledged in the earlier

one. I continue to extend my thanks to them. I would also like to thank the
reviewers who gave such thoughtful feedback on the first edition for this
revision, including Bradley Bjelke (California Lutheran University), Lo-
renda Ann Naylor (University of Baltimore), Stephanie Newbold (Ameri-
can University), Cindy Pressley (Stephen F. Austin State University), Susan
E. Zinner (Indiana University Northwest), and others who wished to re-
main anonymous. Special mention should go to my American University
colleague Jeffrey Lubbers, who is always generous with his time and pa-
tient in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge to explain the finer points of
US federal administrative law to me.

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 1
What Is Administrative Law?

Introduction: What Is Administrative Law?

Administrative law can be defined as the body of constitutional provisions,
statutes, court decisions, executive orders, and other official directives that,
first, (a) regulate the procedures agencies use in adjudicating, rulemaking,
and adopting policies, (b) control the exercise of their authority to enforce
laws and regulations, and (c) govern the extent to which administration is
open to public scrutiny (i.e., transparent); and, second, provide for review
of agency decisions, rules, orders, policies, actions, and other aspects of
their operations. In short, administrative law is the regulatory law of pub-
lic administration. It regulates how public administrative agencies do what
they do and why, as well as their authority to do it. As such, it is among
the most important aspects of modern government. We are all affected by
administrative law in myriad ways in our daily lives.
Food may present the best example of why administrative law is so
important. What did you eat today? Is that all? Well, probably not. The
US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the “maximum lev-
els of natural or unavoidable defects in food for human use that present
no health hazard.” Known as the FDA “Rat Hair List,” these regulations
specify the amount of rodent hair that can be in one hundred grams of var-
ious foods such as apple butter, oregano, and peanut butter. The list also
regulates the number of insect fragments and eggs, milligrams of mamma-
lian excreta, maggots, and other unappetizing impurities in the foods that
Americans consume every day (FDA, periodic). Chocolate can have up to

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 2 1. What Is Administrative Law?

sixty insect fragments per hundred grams (about two bars) and one rodent
hair. On average, Americans eat 1.2 pounds of spider eggs and 2.5 pounds
of insect parts annually.1
The FDA is empowered to set such standards by law. It would have
no power to do so without statutory authorization. However, it does have
considerable discretion in deciding what levels are unavoidable and do not
pose health hazards and what to do about products that exceed the speci-
fied limits. An initial question is whether “unavoidable” should be deter-
mined based on technology or economics. Although the agency maintains
that some defects cannot be completely screened out, removing from pizza
sauce more fly eggs and maggots than are allowed is probably technolog-
ically feasible. Some producers may already do so. But is it economically
feasible for the entire industry of large and small, relatively financially
strong and weak firms to do so? Determining unavoidability also involves
economic feasibility, which is related to the cost of producing products,
their market price, and consumer demand for them. Some balance between
purity and cost must be struck. The FDA seeks a desirable trade-off by
testing products nationwide and determining the levels of defects present
under the best production processes in use. This approach assumes that
requiring investment to make the best practices even better is economically
infeasible, or at least undesirable, and ultimately unnecessary because,
while unappetizing, the acceptable levels are deemed safe to consume.
Safety is a second issue. Clearly, if people are not getting sick from the
allowable defect levels in regulated foods, then these product levels are
probably safe. Yet it is possible that the cumulative effect of the permit-
ted impurities over one’s lifetime takes a toll on health, even though the
harm may not be traceable to them. It is also possible that the defects af-
fect people differently based on age, allergies, and other factors. No doubt,
aside from looking at best production practices, the FDA takes the views
of health experts and research into account in considering where to set and
maintain defect levels.
A third issue is transparency. As a consumer you may wonder if the
FDA’s regulations provide adequate information and protection. We are
all familiar with the nutrition labels on food products sold in the United
States. Peanut butter lists calories, fat calories, total fat, saturated fat, trans
fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, cholesterol, vitamins A
and C, sodium, total carbohydrates, fiber, sugars, protein, calcium, and
iron. The average number of insect fragments and rodent hairs is missing.

1. Data from http://www.spydersden.worldpress.com/2010/page/78; www.chacha.com/

question/does-the-average-american-really-consume-1.2-pounds-of-spider-eggs-a-year-and
-eat-2.5-pounds-of-insect-parts-a-year.

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 Introduction: What Is Administrative Law? 3

Should this be identified? Who should decide—Congress, which is elected

by “We the People”; an administrative agency like the FDA, which is
not; or the food industry itself? If it were decided to require information
about “unavoidable defects,” would it be sufficient to indicate compliance
with FDA allowable levels? Should that level be specified on the product?
Should the average number of various impurities be indicated? If Congress
makes such decisions, it will hold hearings and receive testimony from
representatives of the food industry such as the Snack Food Association,
Pizza Industry Council, US Potato Board, National Confectioners’ Associ-
ation, Whole Grains Council, and other groups. If an agency makes these
decisions, how should its decisionmaking process be structured? Should
it be open to input from the same kinds of stakeholders, and if so, how?
Regardless of where the decision is made, what role, if any, should health
experts, hospitals and other care providers, health insurance companies,
and consumer advocates play?
Finally, how should the FDA’s defect levels be enforced? Should the FDA
test products already in the marketplace, inspect production facilities, or
both? If a firm’s product exceeds the allowable defect levels, what steps
should be taken? What opportunities should the firm have to contest the
FDA’s finding? Such questions are the stuff of administrative law. Although
they focus largely on process, as they suggest, process can affect substance.
Administrative policymaking often involves a wide range of consider-
ations and complex trade-offs like those involved in establishing the FDA’s
Rat Hair List. Administrators make a great number of decisions that di-
rectly affect the health, safety, and welfare of the population or sections
of it. They have to address difficult issues regarding transportation, envi-
ronmental protection, economic practices, labor relations, and much, much
more. Their decisions are of fundamental consequence to the nation’s qual-
ity of life and attract a great deal of political and media attention. Equally
important to our constitutional democracy, though generally less visible
and interesting to the public, is how administrators should make and en-
force their decisions.
The how rather than the what is the essence of administrative law. What
steps should an administrator and an agency take before regulating impuri-
ties in food? What values should be weighed and how heavily? How much
evidence should be adduced to support agencies’ conclusions? How open to
public scrutiny and participation should decisionmaking be? How should
the costs and benefits of agency action be weighed? How can an agency
assess the impact of greater transparency on consumers’ behavior? Would
including the FDA’s allowable defect levels on nutrition labels change
Americans’ diets, and if so, how—toward more or less healthful diets?

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 4 1. What Is Administrative Law?

Additional administrative law questions focus on accountability and re-

view of agency decisionmaking. How should the FDA be held accountable
for whatever levels it sets? Should its standards be subject to review by
Congress and/or a unit within the executive branch, such as the Office
of Management and Budget (OMB)? Presuming that one or more of its
standards is challenged in court, should the FDA have to show statistically
that its maximum levels are safe, that lower levels would not be safer, or
that the defects are unavoidable? Should the data relied on to reach its
decisions be available to the public? Concerns like these are the crux of
administrative law, and they are of recurring importance.
For the most part, administrative law is generic in the sense that one
size fits all. Although there are apt to be exceptions, it more or less applies
across the board to administrative agencies within a government, as op-
posed to being tailored to match each agency’s mission individually. The
phrase “administrative law,” as used in the United States, makes an im-
perfect distinction between the procedures agencies use to make rules, set
standards, and adjudicate and the substantive content produced by those
actions. In other words, how the FDA sets maximum defect levels is a mat-
ter of administrative law, whereas the levels themselves are not. Similarly,
how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) makes rules for clean air
and water is a matter of administrative law; the actual regulations, such as
parts per billion of arsenic allowed in groundwater, are not. The distinc-
tion is imperfect because administrative law provides for judicial review
of agencies’ rules, standards, and adjudicatory decisions, which may be
found unlawful if their content is irrational or their scope is beyond the
law. Moreover, administrative law, with the exception of some forms of
adjudication, is not concerned with agency decisions regarding internal
personnel, organizational, budgetary, outsourcing, and similar administra-
tive matters. All levels of government in the United States rely on some
form of administrative law to regulate their administrative activities. In
the absence of US Supreme Court constitutional law decisions applying to
all jurisdictions, the requirements of federal, state, and local administrative
law need not be uniform. In fact, there is substantial variation.

Why We Have Administrative Law Statutes:

Delegation and Discretion

Delegation
Administrative law statutes regulate administrative procedures and the
review of agency actions. In the United States such statutes were adopted

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 Why We Have Administrative Law Statutes: Delegation and Discretion 5

largely to control agencies’ use of delegated legislative authority and their

exercise of discretion. Although administration is usually associated with
the executive branch of government, administrative activities nowadays
also involve legislative functions. Rulemaking is the preeminent example.
Agencies’ legislative rules (also called “substantive” rules) are the equiv-
alent of statutes and are essentially a substitute for them. Administrative
rulemaking is sometimes called “supplementary lawmaking.” For instance,
legal standards for clean air and water can be imposed by statute as well
as by EPA rules. But at the federal level, where agencies have no indepen-
dent constitutional authority, such rules can be issued only pursuant to a
congressional delegation (i.e., grant) of legislative authority to an agency.
At first thought, it may seem odd that legislatures would relinquish their
own lawmaking authority to public administrators. After all, bureaucrats
are hardly popular among the American public. Legislators and the media
often deride them for usurping power and issuing undesirable rules writ-
ten in impenetrable gobbledygook. However, legislatures find it necessary
or desirable to delegate legislative authority to administrative agencies for
several reasons. First, as the scope and complexity of public policy increase,
legislatures have difficulty keeping abreast of the need to adopt and amend
legislation. Legislative processes are typically cumbersome, especially in bi-
cameral legislatures such as the US Congress and those of forty-nine of the
fifty states (Nebraska being the sole exception with a unicameral legislature).
A bill typically has to work its way independently through each house. It
has to win majority support in both before being submitted to the president
or governor for approval or veto. Legislative procedure is intended to pro-
vide ample checks and balances, but where the workload is heavy, it can
overwhelm a legislature’s capacity to deal with all the demands it faces. By
delegating legislative authority to administrative agencies, legislatures can
shed some of the lawmaking burden onto administrators.
Second, legislatures cannot be expected to have the level of detailed
technical expertise often required in contemporary public policymaking.
Environmental, health, and safety regulation can involve setting standards
based on elaborate scientific analysis. Trade-offs, such as balancing tech-
nology, economics, and health concerns in setting the FDA’s maximum
defect levels, are also complex. Available science and statistical evidence
may be inconclusive. For example, it may take years of technical analysis
to determine how many parts per million or billion of a substance can be
considered safe in drinking water, in the ambient atmosphere at a factory,
or in our bodies, for that matter. In time, new information may require re-
evaluation of that determination. Expert administrators are in a better po-
sition than legislators and their staffs to deal with such matters. Moreover,

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 6 1. What Is Administrative Law?

the range of regulatory standards and related policy concerns is too broad
for legislatures to address. It takes the attention of numerous, specialized,
and frequently large agencies.
Third, legislators may find it politically advantageous to delegate leg-
islative authority to administrative agencies in order to avoid taking firm
stands on controversial issues. It is easier to maintain constituents’ favor
by supporting broad objectives that are widely shared, such as protecting
the environment, than by setting regulatory standards that will raise prices
or cause unemployment in one’s home district. Legislators may even score
points with voters by denouncing decisions made by the very agencies and
administrators that their legislation has empowered (Fiorina 1977, 48–49).
As necessary and convenient as delegations of legislative authority are,
they raise a number of political questions. Constitutionality is one. The
separation of powers at the federal level and in the states is intended to es-
tablish checks and balances as a means of protecting the people against the
aggregation of power in one branch of government. Parliamentary systems
fuse legislative and executive powers, but the framers of the US Constitu-
tion thought such a combination could produce tyranny. Following their
lead, Americans have preferred to keep these powers separate, though less
so at the local government level. Consequently, when legislative author-
ity is delegated to administrative agencies, even though voluntarily on the
part of legislatures, this can be seen as a threat to the constitutional order.
As the US Supreme Court once summarized the problem, “The Congress
is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative
functions with which it is . . . vested,” and there must be “limitations of
the authority to delegate, if our constitutional system is to be maintained”
(Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States 1935, 529–530). Yet modern govern-
ment requires at least some delegation. Large-scale administration would
be impossible without it.
At the federal level, the formal constitutional solution to the tension
between the separation of powers and the vesting of legislative author-
ity in administrative agencies requires delegations to be accompanied by
“an intelligible principle to which [an agency] . . . is directed to conform”
(J. W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States 1928, 409). In theory, this intelligible
principle doctrine ensures that Congress will clearly establish the broad
objectives of public policy, relying on the agencies, when necessary, only
to fill in the details. In practice, however, finding an intelligible principle
in some delegations may be impossible. For instance, the federal Occupa-
tional Safety and Health Act of 1970 provides that the secretary of labor, “in
promulgating standards dealing with toxic materials or harmful physical
agents . . . shall set the standard which most adequately assures, to the

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 Why We Have Administrative Law Statutes: Delegation and Discretion 7

extent feasible, on the basis of the best available evidence, that no employee
will suffer material impairment of health or functional capacity even
if such employee has regular exposure to the hazard dealt with by such
standard for the period of his working life” (Industrial Union Department,
AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute 1980, 612 [emphasis added]). With
obvious frustration, Justice William Rehnquist parsed this language in an
unsuccessful quest for an intelligible principle: “I believe that the legisla-
tive history demonstrates that the feasibility requirement . . . is a legislative
mirage, appearing to some Members [of Congress] but not to others, and
assuming any form desired by the beholder” (Industrial Union Department,
AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute 1980, 681).
Rehnquist called the feasibility requirement “precatory,” meaning that
it essentially entreated the secretary of labor to take a balanced approach
(Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute 1980,
682). Such “legislative mirages” are not unusual. Statutes are loaded with
key “standards,” such as “‘adequate,’ ‘advisable,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘beneficial,’
‘convenient,’ ‘detrimental,’ ‘expedient,’ ‘equitable,’ ‘fair,’ ‘fit,’ ‘necessary,’
‘practicable,’ ‘proper,’ ‘reasonable,’ ‘reputable,’ ‘safe,’ ‘sufficient,’ ‘whole-
some,’ or their opposites” (Warren 1996, 370). The Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) is charged with regulating communications by wire
and radio in the “public interest”—a term with no fixed meaning that can
accommodate any reasonable action (Office of the Federal Register 1999,
524). The greatest certainty regarding the meaning of the phrase “stationary
source” in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977 is that such a source of
pollutants is not mobile. The EPA has interpreted these same words very
differently in different programs and at different times (Chevron U.S.A., Inc.
v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. 1984; see Chapter 6).

Discretion
Delegations of legislative authority call on administrators to use discretion
in formulating standards and policies. The weaker the intelligible principle
in the statutory delegation, the greater the potential range of administra-
tive discretion. However, administrative discretion also goes well beyond
the rulemaking function. Agencies may exercise a great deal of it in imple-
menting or enforcing laws, rules, other regulations, and policies. They of-
ten lack the resources to do everything legally required of them. Universal
enforcement may be impossible or impracticable. It is an uncomfortable
fact that selective application of the law is often inevitable. Equally import-
ant, the legal acceptability of many matters is determined by the discretion
of “street-level” administrators, such as safety and health inspectors, or

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 8 1. What Is Administrative Law?

weighed on a case-by-case basis through adjudication within administra-

tive agencies.
The use of discretion by thoroughly trained, professional, expert ad-
ministrators can be highly beneficial—society has come to depend on it.
We have master’s programs in public administration or policy to provide
public managers and policy analysts with the tools and ethical and legal
grounding to exercise discretion soundly. We rely on merit systems and
career civil services to reduce the likelihood that discretion will be abused
for political gain. From a public administrative perspective, discretion is
essential to the implementation of laws and the successful achievement of
a government’s policy objectives.
There is also another view. The motto “Where law ends tyranny begins”
is prominently engraved on the US Department of Justice’s headquarters
building in Washington, DC. From the vantage of US democratic constitu-
tionalism, then, discretion is often at war with the bedrock principle of the
rule of law (Warren 1996, 365). The Supreme Court has even called uncon-
strained discretion in law enforcement an “evil” (Delaware v. Prouse 1979).
Administrative law is a major means of checking the exercise of admin-
istrative discretion to ensure that its use is rational and fair. It does this
primarily in two ways: by structuring administrative decisionmaking pro-
cesses and by providing for procedural and substantive review of admin-
istrators’ decisions.

Administrative Decisionmaking
The federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946 is representative
of US administrative law statutes in trying to promote rationality and law-
fulness in agency decisionmaking without imposing overly encumbering
procedural requirements. It specifically seeks to prevent decisions that are

(A) arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accor-

dance with law; (B) contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or
immunity; (C) in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations,
or short of statutory right; (D) without observance of procedure required
by law; (E) unsupported by substantial evidence . . . ; (F) unwarranted by
the facts. (sec. 706)2

2. Citations to codified statutes in the text are to their section number in the United States Code
(U.S.C.). Rather than repeat the title number of the Code in which the statute is found in each
citation, this information is provided in the References section at the end of the book. The full
citation to this section of the APA is 5 U.S.C. 706.

9780813348810-text.indd 8 5/14/14 4:09 PM

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but a fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or
decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting
itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters,
and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all
at once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It
was Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the
Betrayer.
Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very
best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of
what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage,
or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in
workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was
“done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John
Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at
least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous
printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings.
This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which
reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it
were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That
there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s
own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this
description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as
they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as
every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The
author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more
decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his
style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes
nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may
be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they
are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme
praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have
reserved to the last,—Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs. Among the
many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so
happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most
faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since
Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs
used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind,
there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature,
in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he
should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his
life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are
dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all
but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to
describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps
two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very
children of our Board Schools know the story of Rab and his Friends.
How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two
boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago
after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a
sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South
Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if
with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been
baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and
finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we
come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and
his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and
the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the
dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart
over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at
last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself!
Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly
matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little
wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so
commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of Rab and
His Friends.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may
be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all
equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long
years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little
volume will be in circulation, containing Rab and his Friends and
Our Dogs, and also let us say the Letter to Dr. Cairns, and Queen
Mary’s Child-Garden, and Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the paper
called Mystifications, and that called Pet Marjorie or Marjorie
Fleming, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar
touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to
the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr.
John Brown of Edinburgh.
 LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH

A GENERAL REVIEW[51]

The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be

said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV.
(1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal
of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in
manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till
those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital
of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or
two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central
seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of
Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then
compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars”
and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay
the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was
in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the
picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which
connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?
From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the
Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of
Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the
reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to
about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction
in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference
imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation
struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic
triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation
struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and
importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the
conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he
had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his
hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in
her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George
Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to
spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already
acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets,
and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and
scholar, poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps, as his foreign admirers
already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in
Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of
Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still,
while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in
Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life
after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in
Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of him too. It was in Edinburgh
that he published his Baptistes, his De Jure Regni apud Scotos, and
others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh
lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last
proof-sheets of his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, or Latin History of
Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those
two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard
Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George
Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses
of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as
ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though
the Reformation had changed notably the character of the
intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of
Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of
that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the
Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth
century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the
post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely
marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It
was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all.
Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in
literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted
now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of
time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it
was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to
Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted
that it was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative
gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland
was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand.
From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your
Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI.,
while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had
shown his own literary ambition in his Essayes of a Prentise in the
Divine Art of Poesie and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your
Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other
countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all
manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your
Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of
memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to
encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The
augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the
last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the
rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the
interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian
Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and
the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the
greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when
she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan
splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many
contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great
series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and
Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison?
In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and
Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and
both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly
a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition,
it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish
Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as
this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the
apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the
ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual
book of mark, such as Baillie’s Letters or Stair’s Institutes; but, for
the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking any continuation of
the old race of the Scoti extra Scotiam agentes, only such small
mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or a Cleland,
among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a
Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!
What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a
resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to
England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of
Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for
stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to
be found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of
the century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of
Scotland, in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with
the successive phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-
Episcopacy in Church government, and its theological and political
concomitants. It was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it
was with such persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in
Scotland, to strangle all the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the
historical compensation. There are other interests in a nation, other
duties, than those of art and literature; and he would be but a
wretched Scotsman who, while hovering over the history of his
country in the seventeenth century and noting her deficiencies then
in literary respects in comparison with England, should forget that
this very century was the time of the most powerful action ever
exerted by Scotland in the general history of the British Islands, and
that, when the great British Revolution of that century was over, its
accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably successful and
useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was traceable to
Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own peculiar
politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been argued or
done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such men as
Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose,
Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we
are now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been
stated. From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through
the Scottish century and a quarter under view, very few roses or
other flowers, and not much even of happy thistle-bloom!
A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of
Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was
represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian
recruits as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison,
Gay, and Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish
literary stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn,
Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there
stepped forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be
for so many years the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only
supplying the lieges with such songs and poems as they had not had
the like of for many a day, but actually shaking them again into some
sense of the importance of popular books and of a taste for lightsome
reading. Yes, it was Allan Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-
cap that one sees in the white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was
he that was the real reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in
Scotland after their long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:
—
“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.
Hae reared up great poetic stocks
Of Rapes, of Buckets, Sarks, and Locks,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:

Our country then a tale could tell:
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
In verse or prose:
Our kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”

He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and

antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all
but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an
eager interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the
“chiels of London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—
had recently done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the
great literary traditions of England. How strong was his interest in
those “chiels of London,” how much he admired them, appears not
only from their influence upon him in his own special art of a
resuscitated Scottish poetry in an eclectic modification of the old
vernacular, but also in the dedication of so much of his later life to
the commercial enterprise of an Edinburgh circulating library for the
supply of his fellow-citizens with all recent or current English books,
and in his less successful enterprise for the introduction of the
English drama by the establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre.
In short, before Allan Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own
example and exertions, what from the stimulus upon his countrymen
independently of the new sense, more and more consciously felt
since the Union, of an acquired partnership with England in all that
great inheritance in the English speech which had till then belonged
especially to England, and in the common responsibilities of such
partnership thenceforward, Scotland was visibly holding up her head
again. Before that date there had appeared, in Ramsay’s wake, some
of the other forerunners of that famous race of eighteenth-century
Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for any continuance of
the imputation of the literary inferiority of Scotland to England, were
to command the respect of Europe by the vigour of their co-
operation and rivalry with their English coevals.
Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose
noble poetic fragment of Hardyknute was made public by Ramsay,
and whose influence on the subsequent course of specially Scottish
literature by that fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged
things of the same kind, remains yet to be adequately estimated, one
notes that among those juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the
career of literature after him and under his observation, but who had
died before him, were Robert Blair, James Thomson, and William
Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch, once an Edinburgh protégé of
Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner since 1723, and Anglicised into
Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s Scottish literary survivors,
and does not count for much. But, when Ramsay died, there were
already in existence, at ages varying from full maturity to mere
infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable now, on one
ground or another, in the British Literary History of the eighteenth
century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle, and
Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and
Mallet had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are
associated locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of
Scotland; but by far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay
himself, had their homes in Edinburgh, or were essentially of
Edinburgh celebrity by all their belongings. Kames, David Hume,
Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dr. Thomas
Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Dr. Adam
Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor Robison,
James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor
Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton:
these, with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern
lights of the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in
which Dr. Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and
he and Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon,
were seen in the London streets. Greater and smaller together, were
they not a sufficient northern constellation? Do not we of modern
Edinburgh still remember them now with a peculiar pride, and visit,
out of curiosity, the houses in the Old Town squares or closes where
some of them had their dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of
their physiognomies and habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket,
the High Street, the Canongate, the Parliament House, and the site of
our University? Was it not the fact that in their days there were two
recognised and distinct centres or foci of literary production in Great
Britain: the great London on the banks of the Thames being one; but
the other 400 miles farther north, in the smaller city of heights and
hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur Seat on the banks of the
Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring radiance yet, vanishes
from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age of the Literary
History of Edinburgh.
A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It
was in July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock,
edition of the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that
same year that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to
Edinburgh. On one particular day in the course of that visit, as all
know, Burns encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a
lame fair-haired youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the
midst of other company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix
themselves for a moment or two with some special interest. This was
young Walter Scott. In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that
another Edinburgh boy, two years younger than Scott, standing
somewhere in the High Street, and staring at a man whose unusual
appearance had struck him, was told by a bystander that he might
well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This was young Francis
Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming lives of those
two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the wondrous
man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six
years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the
“Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year
appeared the first number of the Edinburgh Review, projected in
Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third
number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the
year of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty
years to all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history
of Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of
Scott’s creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other,
all Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his
associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to
the juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind,
however, criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze
of the completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that
the present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the
Edinburgh of those thirty following years.

II.

It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in
the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir
Walter Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised
anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The
Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever
be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else
that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are
thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the
presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are
counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive,
even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry
Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of the
Essays on Taste; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her
long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James
Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of
the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of
Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in
aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs.
Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief
career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most
active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the
Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the
contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David
Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the
starting of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817, and the outflashing in
that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his
coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes
Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of
such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth
Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the
philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the
Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative
residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in
connection with Blackwood and other periodicals, of the strange
English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial
of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure
Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what
was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious
literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various
kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible
in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s
continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally
continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh
moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into
another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary
activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, who so fit to succeed him in
the presidency, who called to it with such acclamation, as the long-
known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In
many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued
literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson,
was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the
great Sir Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had
vanished there were various intellectual developments, various
manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social
energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were even
alien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example.
There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the
great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the
cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other
teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one
knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing
in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously
when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his
wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but
somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William
Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which
were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since
Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to
multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive
Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism
superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered
with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence
of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the Scotticism of Scott,—that
special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath
and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in
preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish
Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a
restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of
those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or
elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself,
and also in Hugh Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the
long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of
Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive
and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of
labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the
character of many of those writings which marked the advance of
Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott
personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It
appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing
enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of
which by the starting of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the very
year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of
Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary
publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to
individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the
literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William
Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-
point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age
of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of
the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then,
unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of
Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable
representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the
afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as
was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his
serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his
imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—
“Let me feel the breezes blowing
Fresh along the mountain side!
Let me see the purple heather,
Let me hear the thundering tide,
Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan
Spouting when the storm is high!
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.”

In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh

to the point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will
have been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in
what would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are
among us some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty
again, a season of the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream. Ichabod, they
tell us, may be now written on the front of the Register House; and
Edinburgh is living on her past glories! As this complaint was raised
again and again in previous times to which its application is now a
matter of surprise, may we not hope that its recurrence in the
present is only a passing wave of that feeling, common to all times,
and not unbecoming or unuseful, which underestimates, or even
neglects, what is near and round about, in comparison with what is
old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh is now despicable
intellectually in comparison with her former self, like the larger
question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and pressed
along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually poor in
comparison with her former self, is really a question of statistics. As a
certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient basis for a fair
inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one remembers,
however, that among those who would have to be included in the
inventory, inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of
Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been
suggested as a separating point between the defunct past and the still
current, are not only such of the older and already-named ornaments
of Edinburgh as David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert
Chambers, and Hill Burton, but also such individualities of later
conspicuous mark as Alexander Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr.
John Brown, then, perhaps, there might be some confidence that, if
one were to proceed to the more delicate business of comprising in
the list all that suit among the living, together with those of whom
there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the town to come,” the total
would exhibit an average not quite shameful. Perhaps, however, as
has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to count.
Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh
naturally find the cause to some extent in the increasing
centralisation of the commerce of British Literature universally in
London. They point to such facts as that the Edinburgh Review has
long ceased to be an Edinburgh periodical, that some Edinburgh
publishing firms have transferred their head-quarters to London,
and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are understood to be
meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place, is there not
here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its population of
four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that the fair
comparison in this matter should not be between London and
Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it
were found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were
even one-twentieth of that of London, the scores between the two
places would then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly
equal. I cannot pretend to have used all the available means for the
computation; but, in view of some facts before me, I should be
surprised if it turned out that Edinburgh did not come up to her
proportional mark. Edinburgh possesses, at all events, a most
flourishing printing industry. The printing of Edinburgh is
celebrated all the world over; a very large proportion of the books
published in London are printed in Edinburgh. That is something;
but what of publishing business? From the Edinburgh Directory of
this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city there are 62
who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing houses in
Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be about
1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find
that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—i.e. that
London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the
publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers,
however, do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the
proportionally fewer London houses have been doing a much larger
amount of business, and may not the publishing machinery of
Edinburgh have been lying comparatively idle? Well, I do not know;
but the recent publishing lists of our Edinburgh houses show no
signs of declining activity. The completed Ninth Edition of the great
Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, has been wholly an
Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another Edinburgh
Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls most
obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of
her journalism and her apparatus of periodical literature.
Blackwood’s Magazine and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal exist
still; but other literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are
extinct, and one can recollect the time when there were more
newspapers in Edinburgh than there are now. Those, however, were
the days of twice-a-week newspapers or once-a-week newspapers;
and in the present daily journalism of Edinburgh one has to observe
not only the unprecedented amount of energy and writing ability at
work for all the ordinary requirements of newspapers, but also (a
very noteworthy feature of Edinburgh journalism in particular) the
increasing extent to which, by frequent non-political articles and
continual accounts of current books, it is annexing to itself the
functions hitherto performed by magazines, reviews, and other
literary miscellanies. But, suppose that, all these appearances
notwithstanding, it should be made out that the publishing
machinery of Edinburgh is scantier and slacker than it was, there is
another consideration yet in reserve. The real measure of the present
or the future literary capabilities of Edinburgh, or of Scotland
generally, is not the extent of the publishing machinery which either
Edinburgh, or Scotland generally, still retains within herself, but the
amount and worth of the actual or potential authorship, the literary
brain and ability of all kinds, that may be still resident within the
bounds of Edinburgh or of Scotland, wheresoever the products are
published. Those who are so fond of upbraiding the present
Edinburgh more especially with the former literary distinction of
Edinburgh in the latter half of the eighteenth century,—the days of
Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and others,—seem to be ignorant of
a most important fact. The publishing machinery of Edinburgh in
those days was very poor; and the chief books of those Edinburgh
celebrities were published in London. That there came a change in
this respect was owing mainly, or wholly, to one man. His name was
Archibald Constable. Of this man, the Napoleon of the British
publishing trade of his time, and of such particular facts in his
publishing career as his bold association of himself with the
Edinburgh Review from its very outset, and his life-long connection
with Scott, all have some knowledge from tradition. But hear Lord
Cockburn’s succinct account of him in general. “Constable,” says
Lord Cockburn, “began as a lad in Hill’s shop, and had hardly set up
for himself when he reached the summit of his business. He rushed
out, and took possession of the open field, as if he had been aware
from the first of the existence of the latent spirits which a skilful
conjurer might call from the depths of the population to the service
of literature. Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he
stood out as the general patron and payer of all promising
publications, and confounded not merely his rivals in trade, but his
very authors, by his unheard-of prices. Ten, even twenty, guineas a
sheet for a review, £2000 or £3000 for a single poem, and £1000
each for two philosophical dissertations, drew authors from dens
where they would otherwise have starved, and made Edinburgh a
literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its own
citizens.” These words of Lord Cockburn’s are too high-flown, in so
far as they might beget wrong conceptions of what was or is possible.
But, recollecting what Constable did,—recollecting that it was mainly
his example and success that called into being those other Edinburgh
publishing firms, contemporary with his own or subsequent, which
have maintained till now the place won by him for Edinburgh in the
commerce of British literature,—recollecting also how largely he led
the way in that enormous change in the whole system of the British
book trade, now almost consummated, which has liberated
publishers from the good old necessity of waiting for the authors that
might come to them, one by one, with already-prepared manuscripts
under their arm, the fruit of their careful private labours on self-
chosen subjects, and has constituted publishers themselves, to a
great extent, the real generators and regulators of literature,
projecting serials, manuals, sets of schoolbooks, and whatever else
they see to be in demand, and employing literary labour preferably in
the service of these enterprises of their own,—recollecting all this,
may we not speculate on what might be the consequences in the
present Edinburgh of the appearance of another Archibald
Constable? The appurtenances are all ready. One has heard
complaints lately of the dearth in Edinburgh of those materials in the
shape of collections of books which would be requisite for the future
sufficiency of the city as a manufactory of such kinds of literature as
admit of being manufactured. That is a sheer hallucination. Next to
London, and perhaps to Oxford, Edinburgh has the largest provision
of books of any city in the British Empire. There are at this moment
800,000 volumes,—say close on a million,—on the shelves of the
various public or corporate libraries. Much remains to be done
towards making all this wealth of books in Edinburgh as available as
it might be; and there ought to be no rest among us till that
particular advance is made towards an ideal state of things which
shall consist in the conversion of the present noble library of the
Faculty of Advocates into the nucleus of a great National Library for
all Scotland. But, even as things are, why be indolent, why not utilise
our implements? Doubt not that in the present Edinburgh and in the
present Scotland, as in other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions, there
are, as Napier of Merchiston phrased it, “good ingines, versed and
exercised in all manner of honest science,” who, if they were to bestir
themselves, and especially if there were another Archibald Constable
in the midst of them, would find plenty of excellent employment
without needing, unless they chose, to change the territory of their
abode!

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.

1. From The Scotsman of 18th, 19th, and 21st August 1886.

2. Written, and in part delivered, as an Introductory Lecture to the Class of
English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in the Session 1867–8.
3. A scrap from unpublished MSS.
4. From The Scotsman of 29th December 1890.
5. Written in 1883, in the form of a Lecture.
6. Written in 1883, as a lecture for the Class of English Literature in the
Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.
7. Reprinted, with some modifications, from the Westminster Review for
Oct.–Dec. 1856; where it appeared, with the title “Edinburgh Fifty Years Ago,” in
the form of an article on Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of Edinburgh,” then just
published.
8. Opening Address to Session 1890–1 of The Philosophical Institution of
Edinburgh.
9. From Macmillan’s Magazine for November and December 1881 and
January 1882.
10. Another incident which he told me of his first boyish saunterings about
Edinburgh is more trivial in itself, but of some interest as showing his observant
habits and sense of humour at that early age:—For some purpose or other, he was
going down Leith Walk, the long street of houses, stone-yards, and gaps of vacant
space, which leads from Edinburgh to its sea-port of Leith. In front of him, and
also walking towards Leith, was a solid, quiet-looking countryman. They had not
gone far from Edinburgh when there advanced to them from the opposite direction
a sailor, so drunk that he needed the whole breadth of the footpath to himself.
Taking some umbrage at the countryman, the sailor came to a stop, and addressed
him suddenly, “Go to H——,” looking him full in the face. “’Od, man, I’m gaun to
Leith,” said the countryman, as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and
walked on, Carlyle following him and evading the sailor.
11. Quoted by Mr. Froude in his article, “The Early Life of Thomas Carlyle,” in
the Nineteenth Century for July 1881.
 12. Quoted by Mr. Froude, ut supra.
13. Printed in an appendix to Mr. Moncure D. Conway’s Memoir of Carlyle
(1881), with other fragments of letters which had been copied from the originals by
Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and which Mr. Ireland put at Mr. Conway’s
disposal. The date of this fragment is “August 1814”; and, as it is evidently a reply
to Murray’s letter of “July 27,” I have ventured to dissent from Mr. Froude’s
conjectural addition of “1816?” to the dating of that letter.
14. The first secession from the National Presbyterian Church of Scotland, as
established at the Revolution, was in 1733, when differences on account of matters
of administration, rather than any difference of theological doctrine, led to the
foundation by Ebenezer Erskine of the dissenting communion called The Associate
Presbytery or Secession Church. In 1747 this communion split itself, on the
question of the obligation of the members to take a certain civil oath, called The
Burgher’s Oath, into two portions, calling themselves respectively the Associate or
Burgher Synod and the General Associate or Anti-Burgher Synod. The former in
1799 sent off a detachment from itself called the Original Burgher Synod or Old
Light Burghers, the main body remaining as the Associate Burgher Synod; and it
was to the second that Carlyle’s parents belonged, their pastor in Ecclefechan being
that Rev. Mr. Johnston to whose memory Carlyle has paid such a tribute of respect,
and whose grave is now to be seen in Ecclefechan churchyard, near Carlyle’s own.
15. This is not the first passage at arms on record between a Carlyle and an
Irving. As far back as the sixteenth century, when Irvings and Carlyles were even
more numerous in the West Border than they are at present, and are heard of, with
Maxwells, Bells, Johnstons, and other clans, as keeping those parts in continual
turmoil with their feuds, raids, and depredations, it would happen sometimes that
a Carlyle jostled with an Irving. Thus, in the Register of the Privy Council of
Scotland, under date Aug. 28, 1578, we have the statement from an Alexander
Carlyle that there had been a controversy “betwix him and Johnne Irvin, callit the
Windie Duke.” What the controversy was does not appear; but both parties had
been apprehended by Lord Maxwell, then Warden of the West Marches, and
lodged in the “pledge-chalmer,” or prison, of Dumfries; and Carlyle’s complaint is
that, while the said John Irving had been released on bail, no such favour has been
shown to him, but he has been kept in irons for twenty-two weeks. This Alexander
Carlyle seems to be the same person as a “Red Alexander Carlyle of Eglisfechan”
heard of afterwards in the same Record, under date Feb. 22, 1581–2, as concerned
in “some attemptatis and slauchter” committed in the West March, and of which
the Privy Council were taking cognisance. On this occasion he is not in controversy
with an Irving, but has “Edward Irving of Boneschaw,” and his son “Christie Irving
of the Coif,” among his fellow-culprits. Notices of the Dumfriesshire Carlyles and
Irvings, separately or in company, are frequent in the Register through the reign of
James VI.
16. I have been informed, however, that Leslie must have misconceived Carlyle
when he took the solution as absolutely Carlyle’s own. It is to be found, I am told,
in an old Scottish book of geometry.
17. A letter of Carlyle’s among those contributed by Mr. Alexander Ireland to
Mr. Conway’s Memoir proves that the momentous reading of Gibbon was before
Feb. 20, 1818; and in a subsequent letter in the same collection, of date “July
1818,” he informs his correspondent, “I have quitted all thoughts of the Church, for
many reasons, which it would be tedious, perhaps [word not legible], to
enumerate.” This piece of information is bedded, however, in some curious
remarks on the difficulties of those “chosen souls” who take up opinions different
from those of the age they live in, or of the persons with whom they associate. See
the letter in Mr. Conway’s volume, pp. 168–170.
18. Quoted in Mr. Froude’s article, “The Early Life of Carlyle,” in the
Nineteenth Century for July 1881.
19. Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving (1862), i. 90, 91.
20. My impression now is that it was this autumn of 1819 in his father’s house
that Carlyle had in his mind when he talked to me once of the remembered
pleasures of certain early mornings in the Dumfriesshire hill-country. The chief
was when, after a saunter out of doors among the sights and sounds of newly
awakened nature, he would return to the fragrant tea that was ready for him at
home. No cups of tea he had ever tasted in his life seemed so fragrant and so
delicious as those his mother had ready for him after his walks in those old
Dumfriesshire mornings.
21. But for the phrase “Hume’s Lectures once done with, I flung the thing away
for ever,” quoted by Mr. Froude as from “a note somewhere,” I should, on the
evidence of handwriting, etc., have decided unhesitatingly for the second and more
extensive of the two hypotheses.—The attendance on the Chemistry Class, which
would become a fact if that hypothesis were correct, would be of some independent
interest. With Carlyle’s turn for science at that time, it was not unlikely. I may add
that, from talks with him, I have an impression that, some time or other, he must
have attended Professor Jameson’s class of Natural History. He had certainly
heard Jameson lecture pretty frequently; for he described Jameson’s lecturing
humorously and to the life, the favourite topic of his recollection being Jameson’s
discourse on the order Glires in the Linnæan Zoology. Though I have looked over
the Matriculation Lists and also the preserved class-lists pretty carefully from 1809
to 1824, it is just possible that Carlyle’s name in one of Jameson’s class-lists within
that range of time may have escaped me. The only other Professor, not already
mentioned in the text, that I remember to have heard him talk of was Dr. Andrew
Brown, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; but him he knew, I think, only by
occasional dropping in at his lectures.
22. Carlyle to a correspondent, in one of Mr. Ireland’s copies of letters:
Conway, p. 178.
23. Ditto, ibid. p. 180.
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