THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT died with a whimper, it is usually supposed, some time between 1800 and 1830. In 1831 Sir Walter Scott, its last and greatest creative spirit, was dead. Its most brilliant prodigy of the next generation, Thomas Carlyle, was to depart from Edinburgh in 1834, tempted by the more rarified intellectual atmosphere of London and Cheyne Walk. Even earlier, in 1828 and 1816 respectively, Dugald Stewart and Adam Ferguson had followed Smith, Robertson and Blair to the grave. During the same period a revival in the educational life of Cambridge and Oxford was allowing them slowly to replace the ossifying universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow as the premier seats of learning in an expanding British empire. Thereafter in England, too, it was to be Bentham, Dickens, Macaulay, Arnold and Mill - all of course influenced by Scottish thought but essentially English and metropolitan in their preoccupations - who would dominate a new Victorian age. Even in Scotland itself, discussion of its intellectual triumphs sank irretrievably into the past tense, as wistful biographies of the great and late literati began to appear. Elderly men like Lord Cockburn and Robert Chambers now increasingly recalled in their memoirs the anecdotes and achievements of a bygone golden age. Carlyle, the great critic of the times, even reflected in 1829 with deliberate finality on the ‘wisdom, the heroic worth of our forefathers, which we have lost’. The local intelligentsia, meanwhile, from both the Tory and the radical wings, also assailed with fatal effect the once-unchallenged ascendancy of a Whig politics of culture. The signs were sometimes confusing but the ‘Athens of the North’, it gradually became obvious, no longer enjoyed the clear cultural hegemony. The Enlightenment in Scotland was over.

Our long journey through a major strand of Scottish thought since the sixteenth century therefore appears to have a disappointingly tame ending. The extraordinary success of eighteenth-century Scottish culture had truly been that of an age when, as a cock-sure Alexander Carlyle had seen it in 1760, ‘the genius of the Scotch never shone with greater lustre than now’. But this exuberance was to end only seventy years later in what seemed at the time to be Scotland's almost total eclipse.