Although no longer a familiar name, Robert Mudie was one of the most prominent nineteenth-century descendants of the Scottish Enlightenment. However one defines that Enlightenment – whether as a shared interest in human behaviour and social change, or in terms of natural philosophy and natural knowl-edge, or more broadly as the general culture of Scotland's literati – Mudie stands as a representative heir. A polymathic writer, novelist, poet, editor, naturalist and reformer, his very range encapsulated the intellectual daring and untrammelled virtuosity and curiosity of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But he is also a more problematic figure. For, if he is known at all now in Scottish intellectual history, it is as the author of a venomously negative and sourly satirical account of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh's intellectual life, The Modern Athens: a dissection and demonstration of men and things in the Scotch capital (1825). For Mudie, a self-described ‘modern Greek’, the notion that late Enlightenment Edinburgh was the modern Athens, was, as we shall see, not so much a proud boast as something more pejorative, a telling index of the city's empty boastfulness. Confusingly for our purposes, Mudie was both an exemplar of Scotland's post-Enlightenment vigour and a trenchant critic of early nineteenth-century Scotland's supposed intellectual vitality.

This chapter seeks to illustrate how the work of Robert Mudie could be important for debates concerning, what Paul Wood calls, the ‘temporal limits’ and ‘rival chronologies’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. After all, as Alexander Broadie notes, whatexactly the Scottish Enlightenment's philosophical afterlife looked like, has yet to be fully explored by historians. Mudie's wide-ranging writings won him a high profile in nineteenth-century intellectual life. Building on his background as a well-liked teacher in Dundee, Mudie became one of the first great popular educators in print. He wrote diligently and at times eloquently, about the most varied subjects, becoming a popular authority on anything from the bittern, mathematics, China, Australia, India, to astronomy and emigration, and his work seems to have been welcomed by an enthusiastic readership on both sides of the Atlantic, which included Dickens, Darwin, and the American landscape painter Thomas Cole. As such, Mudie might also be viewed, in the present post-Enlightenment context, as one of the last of the polymaths described in the introduction to this volume.