Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOHN STRACHAN ONE need not be a violent partisan of the respective claims of either heredity or environment, in order to fully appreciate the manifold influences of both. I think one might even go farther, and take up the position, that personal character, personal temperament, and personal intellectual force are to a great extent the resultant of the spirit of the time, and the movements that spring from it. The last twenty years of the eighteenth century are an excellent example of this theory, for they gave to the world a class of intellectual and political giants, whose whole outlook upon life was coloured by the spirit of the age in which the formative period of their lives was cast. Great Britain, who for centuries had ruled herself, both at home and abroad, on conservative and conventional lines, was beginning to awaken to the fact that democracy was raising its head, boldly and defiantly, all over the civilized world. The War of Independence, in British North America, which began in 1774, had brought about the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but the complete victory of American democracy did not come for many years after that. The climax of the French Revolution, attained only after years of bloodshed, was reached in 1790. The effects of the Evangelical Movement, under the Wesleys and Whitefield, were making themselves felt, even in the moribund Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, as well as in her more dignified sister in England. The times were critical times, and there were figures who stood out in bold relief, and gave colour and tone to the period. John Skinner, of Linshart, whose song, "Tul- lochgorum," was called, by Burns, "the best Scotch song Scotland ever saw," was leading an active, industrious and scholarly life, among the moorlands of Buc...