Since the unitary British Empire became the fissiparous Common- wealth of Nations, the literary and academic worlds have gradually accustomed themselves to the concept of a number of English literatures - that of England itself, Commonwealth, American, Anglo-Irish literatures, to name only the most familiar. Each must be studied in terms of its own social, political and cultural history. Scottish literature is at once the closest to, and the most distant from, the native English tradition; the closest, as the result of geographical continuity and close political assimilation~ the most distant, partly because the Scottish social environment and national history is so distinct from that of England, but even more because

only in Scotland and the south-eastern midlands of England did

the English language develop forms accepted over wide areas and

for long periods as literary standards. The Scottishstandarddominated

the imaginative literature of the fifteenth and much of the sixteenth

centuries: it came close to dominating that of the later eighteenth

and earlier nineteenth centuries. Within that standard, the achieve-

ment of the twentieth century is lesser, perhaps, but impressive

and far-ranging.