Andrew Lang (1844–1912) said very little about the Scottish Enlightenment as such, but then again, few of his generation, writing long before W. R. Scott's invention of the term in 1900, considered the efflorescence of scholarship in Scotland in the eighteenth century as a single, coherent phenomenon. In his Short History of Scotland (1911) Lang acknowledged that, according to Voltaire, Scotland ‘led the world in all studies, from metaphysics to gardening’, and he elsewhere recognised the Moderate sceptics of these years as important challengers of stifling Presbyterian conventions.1 But Lang, a man of ‘jovial intelligence’2 and ‘sardonic and bantering manner’3 – a ‘droopy aristocrat’4 – also emphasised Scotland's debt to intellectual influences from other countries and cultures, and traditions of sceptical humanism that predated the period of the Enlightenment.5 His approach to the Enlightenment, as with much else, was ironic; his intellectual frame, cosmopolitan. Yet, this was a cosmopolitanism that was of its times – an age of popular journalism and mass literacy – and, while it bore some resemblance to David Hume's cosmopolitanism, it was not bound to a Whiggish narrative of progress or to an improving agenda.6 It was, however, resolutely Scottish in origin and orientation – a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah – which, given Lang's multidisciplinary

reach, productivity and ubiquity in journals with an international circulation, shaped European and transatlantic visions of the cosmopolitan condition at the fin de siècle.7 This essay addresses Lang's ironic engagement with Scottish Enlightenment perspectives on history, scientific inquiry and literary ‘tastes’, and critically examines his contributions to cosmopolitan networks, his relentless evocation of cosmopolitan nostalgia, and his – Scotland-inflected – engagement with emergent ‘world literatures’. From this, it will become clear that Scotland's contribution to modern globalised aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century meant going well beyond the Enlightenment.

In his histories of Scotland, Andrew Lang demonstrated his indebtedness to Enlightenment authors and the limits of that legacy: they only appear fleetingly in his footnotes. Certainly, when it came to his treatment of the Stewarts, his approach to the Reformation, and his assessment of the Union of 1707, Lang followed in their wake, but (as in most things) he took their scepticism a step further, and was demonstrably influenced by the ways in which antiquarian research and the rise of the historical novel had, by the mid-nineteenth century, mediated approaches to Scotland's past.