and pilfer and break windows ad libitum. And this would have been because your London Magistrates are a parcel of sots and simpletons. Nothing of the kind was done here, not a window was broken, not an individual hustled,--not even a cry heard. And this, because the Edinburgh Magistrates are gentlemen, and men of sense and honesty,-who know their duty, and will do it. Bills were posted up in time, stating the change, and adding, for the occupation of the crowd, that fire-works would be exhibited in one of the Squares. The law was threatened against all offences of riot, compulsory lighting, &c. The riotously-disposed, if such there were, felt that it would be enforced; and this great city, crowded with strangers, was as tranquil by eleven o'clock, as if its multitude were stretched on the heather, or lodged in the watchhouse.

The fire-works were in CharlotteSquare, where the Lord Provost lives. These exhibitions are, of course, all of the same kind; and Vauxhall is certainly still unrivalled by the squibs and crackers of Edinburgh. But I am not ashamed to say, that I have a great fondness for fireworks, and was satisfied to look upon them even in their diminished glory, so much nearer the pole. Even a common squib has some interest for me in its bright and sparkling brevity. But the rocket, with its fierce rush upwards, and when the sound has gone beyond us, the powerful and lonely majesty with which it

climbs the heights of Heaven, has sometimes given me impressions, which ninety-nine gazers might think extravagant, but which the hundredth would with me know to be true, absorbing, and incommunicable.

The streets leading to the Square were crowded, yet without pressure or inconvenience to those who were ambitious of a close survey. I was not among the ambitious, and took my stand at some distance, probably with no loss of spectacle. The whole opulence of northern pyrotechny was displayed. Roman candles, catherine wheels, fiery fountains, shot, and burst, and played, in great profusion and perfection, for an hour together; and in the pauses a rocket rose from the darkness, like a released spirit shooting up in purer splendour, till it was lost in the clouds.

The nights here are subject to rapid changes. From a twilight sky and a genial air, it suddenly grew dark and cold, and I left the show still in its glory.

In the distance the fireworks burned low, the populace were unseen, and unheard, except when some new explosion roused them into a general shout. The tall, unlighted houses on either side, and the sky dark as pitch, and solid as a bolt of marble, bore the strongest resemblance to a boundless cavern ; and at the end of the vista, glared the cupola of St George's, a lowering giant, sometimes flickered with pale light, and sometimes ruddy with fierce flame. I thought of an idol-worship in a colossal Elephanta.

This was a day of royal rest. The King, weary of the sea, and not improbably weary of the lingering pomps that had beset him by land, remained at Dalkeith. But the city and its tribes were not the less busy. The Levee for the introduction of all the proud blood and unpronounceable names of the north, is at hand, and every chamber in Edinburgh rings with note of preparation for the morrow. Israel has not been careless of this vineyard, and has sent up a deputation of her dingiest and most accommodating labourers. The coaches for a week past have borne a mingled freight of band-boxes and Jews. Toupees and embroidered coats, the ancient denizens of Duke's Place, have been relieved from their habitual hooks,

for the honour of northern loyalty; and Mr Solomon has been liberal in the loan of his glory. The rival name of Levi has set up a booth as stately, as thickly furnished, and as dear, but his costumes are observed to be of a more sober quality. Solomon dazzles the public eye with crimson and gold, and is most affected by the brilliant and the young. Levi seldom ventures beyond blue and silver, and is the favourite of the milder order of professional men, and citizens ripening into money and the mellowness of life. But all will be displayed to-morrow; and the display, it is already predicted, "credat Judæus," will be among the most captivating developments of Scotland and the age.

But the grand exhibition is to be

the King's march from Holyrood to the Castle. This will occur next week, and ought to be a very striking ceremony. The High-Street, with its towering fabric, long ascent, and various and wild antiquity, is the finest path for a pageant in Europe. Ranges of seats are already being raised against the houses; and the civic authorities are holding many a weary council on their distribution. Portions are set off for the different public bodies, the clergy, the magistrates, the officers of the army and navy, &c. The fall of one of these hasty erections a few days since, attended with some unfortunate casualties, has produced a city advertisement, declaring that the chief fabricator of those perilous prominences shall be responsible for any future accidents. Is it not singular to find Swift's "wonderful wonder of wonders," revived after the sleep of a century. "A red-hot poker shall be thrust into a barrel of gunpowder in the presence of any number of persons of quality, not one of whom, the proprietor pledges himself, shall be so much as singed by the explosion. The child of any person of quality shall be allowed to jump down twelve feet upon a board full of spikes, not one of which shall enter the said child.-Any person shall be allowed to drive a twelvepenny nail up to the head in his own flesh, the proprietor being responsible for any pain," &c.

The illumination in the evening was peculiarly striking, from the local advantages of the town. The devices were innumerable, and, according to the means and taste of the devisers, were some handsome, and some immeasureably grotesque. The King, his much-loved and ill-treated Majesty, was exhibited in a hundred different attitudes and associations; but he was generally in the act of being grappled by two monstrous women, Scotland and Ireland struggling for him, like the mothers in the Judgment of Solomon, or fondly sharing his smiles, like Macheath's wives, and stifling him between them. A butcher had the royal shepherd, with a pipe at his lips, and a crook in his hands, controlling the frolics of a large and licentious flock of sheep; and a writer to the signet displayed him pouring out of his mouth endless rolls of parchment, inscribed with fragments of loyalty and law, I went up to the

Castle-hill, and had the most unbounded view. All round and below me looked like a city in a conflagration. Here a sullen glow, there a broad burst of fire; dark and ridgy roofs edged with light; steeples and pillars, that, as the flame flashed partially upon them, seemed yielding and wavering to their fall; the sky a lurid, smoky arch, that brightened and darkened with every change below, and, above roof and tower, Arthur's Seat, a mighty beacon throwing up a column of flame to the very heavens.

These things are, with me, matters of reluctant description. No power of language can tell the feelings stirred by some of them at the time. And how often, during my stand, I allowed myself to be wrapped up in wandering imaginations, what glimpses of battle, of superb kingly festivity, of lands suddenly deluged by eruption of the fiery universal storm that is yet to lay waste the earth,-what whole cloud of dazzling and confused fantasies filled up the hour, and made it like a busy and not undelighted dream, passed before me, I will leave to your own conception.

The Whigs were the most brilliant incendiaries of the evening. Their mansions, and they have them many and large, were in a blaze of lamps and loyalty. They went through the purgatory of fire, and with me half their stains are henceforth burnt away.

This and other matters have thrown me into considerable doubts of the sincerity of Scottish partizanship. Whiggism, like all other disorders of the flesh or spirit, must be greatly influenced by externals. I can conceive it deepened into melancholy mania on the howling shores of Northumberland, or exalted into absolute furor under the fiery atmosphere of Newcastle. Among salt-water marches, wildernesses of sea-weed, and the eternal cry of cormorants, the blood naturally becomes serous and saline, and the man, left behind in the general flight of humanity, may, like Lot's wife, be rapidly hardened into salt or stone. In the Stygian realm of Newcastle, with the fume of steam-engines for the air, the smoke of a thousand fiery mouths of sulphur, vaulting the Heavens with impenetrable dusk for sky, and the grim and coal-heaving population for man, what conception can be formed of air, sky, or man?

What bitter ignorance of the actual state of the human race may not be naturally blackened upon the sensorium of the Cyclops, the sojourner of this cavern? What igneous and carbonic irritation may not urge the Brontes or Steropes of this subterranean midnight forge, to fabricate the arms of revolutionary plunder?

I can feel for those inevitable impressions.

Ancient Whig as I am, and therefore the antipode of modern Whiggism, I began to suffer the endemic discontent, as I permeated the clouds of Newcastle: and it was not till I reached Berwick, that, with the sight of the sky, and the respiration of unpoisoned air, I revived to confidence in the constitution, and a respect for hu

the Malaria should stray beyond its natural niduses, and encroach upon the polished pavements of the New Town, is to me too strong a defiance of nature, not to be a contradiction of fact. That men in the vision of hearth-rugs, and pier-glasses, with pure air to inhale, and productive parchment on their tables, should feel honest in their rabble politics, is altogether out of the question. The Res durae may have first impelled them; the Regni novitas may have subsequently held them for a while to the branch from which a too sudden flight might have left them on the ground; but since their wings have grown, and they can beat the air without imminent peril, the adherence is insincere, useless, hypocritical, impossible. I will stake my reputation to come, that in their Cabinet dinners, with the doors shut, and the menials of faction excluded, I shall find excellent fellows among them, pleasant and liberal discussers of venison and vintages,—high-flavoured contemners of Reviews, North and South, and the choicest hands at cutting up, and bedevilling the speech-making geese, Ducal or otherwise, of their party.

The Levee was held to-day. The King dispatched it in two hours. This was cleverly done, for he had no less than fifteen hundred visitors. I counted Lords of various kinds up to fifty, and then grew weary of the tale. The King received this Northern invasion with great fortitude, said something civil to every one speakable, wore his tartans with address, and, tired as he must have been, exerted himself to please and be pleased. In the palace, the presentees were crowded into a mob. In the street they made the same motley and lingering line that has so often impeded the honester traffic of Piccadilly; the same succession of yawning noblesse, and military fierce with feather and frill; adipose members of the corporations, stuffed three on a seat,-judges furred up and party coloured into the look of huge tiger-moths; and black Barristers, with their lean and inky physiognomies, fearfully darted out of their cages from time to time into the light and air. One or two of the carriages were escorted by Highlanders. This was novel, and if the lounger within had led them on foot, would have been cha

racteristic. But a Highlander in a carriage is an actual offence in my eyes. When I see this, or a parapluie under a clansman's arm, as it has been my misfortune frequently to see here, I feel an inclination to strip him of his kilt, and wrap him in the effeminacy of our Southern investitures for the rest of his days. What! a fellow palpably built for all weathers, with an impenetrable hide and physiognomy which throws off rain like a penthouse, an iron-ribbed, rock-visaged, winter-proof loon, that might say to the mist, thou art my mother, and to the frost, thou art my brother and sister, in snow was I shapen, and in storm has my father begot me!

In my old reveries of Highland life, I had formed ideas upon those points suitable to civilized ignorance. Time has strangely diminished my credulity; and henceforth I will believe nothing that has not passed before my own eyes, and perhaps not trust even their witness with too fond a confidence. My speculation was filled with mountains and cataracts, solemn showers, and thunders keeping up perennial battle through those verdure

less upper deserts of the world; and among them a race of men fearless of torrent and tempest, that sickened in sunshine, and solicited the storm from the shade of the most embowering thistles, the hunters of the red deer, the scorners of the Sassenach, an unfatigueable, unteachable, undrownable people, the legitimate, kilted aborigines of the land of Desolation, the yet undried survivors of the general deluge.

Instead of this, I see fellows as cautious of a wetting as I am myself, with umbrellas, spectacles, and other paltry English affectations. I speak of the better orders; or, in the language of truth, the worse. I have seen faces and figures among the clansmen as much nobler than those of their masters, as the face and figure of man is superior to those of a Cheapside clerk, or a promenader of Bond Street; fine, bold, erect rovers, with a sinewy stride, and a haughty, deep-eyed countenance, that tells the very hero of the hills.

If I were the laird of a few hundreds of such beings, I would not afflict my soul or theirs with living five miles out of their presence, until the grave should strip me of my sovereignty. The tartan should not be off my limbs till it was off for the shroud. I would walk on their hills and sleep on their heather. My songs should be of the Wallace, the Bruce, and the Montrose. I would bring civilization among them, in its sober dignity, the harbinger of peace, knowledge, and manly allegiance. I would teach them to be true to their love, their faith, and their King; and after this, when in the hope of having, in some degree, done the duty for which I was sent into the world, I should give way to the great summons, I solemnly believe that my last hour would be as tranquil, and all that remained of me be borne to the resting-place of my fathers with as true laments, and that for many a year to come, my greyhaired companions would bring their sons and daughters to the spot, and point to their old friend and master's grave, with as glistening eyes, and as fond a remembrance, as if I had been the most crushing, opulent, rack-rent scoundrel in the whole court calendar of sheep-feeding and absenteeism. If I would have abandoned, or expelled, or broken the hearts of those noble beings, for any profit or possession on VOL. XII.

this side of Paradise, may my right hand forget its cunning; no, not for the sublime of Southern beatitudes; not to be eminent among the picture-dealers of the West, or the carcase-dealers of the East; to be familiar with every waiter at White's, and plundered by every blackleg at Newmarket; not to make the twelfth baboon in the hebdomadal foolery of the quadrille at Almack's; not to live in a hotel, and lounge six hours a-day in the window of the Thatched-house; not to devote my sleep and soul to maudlin harangues and contemptible partizanship in St Stephen's; not to go from home with a pursuing whirlwind of curses, both loud and deep, linger in idleness and contempt, and return in beggary and remorse. May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I would be tempted by those things! no, not to see my peopled hills and valleys made desolate with the most pursy sheep, and the most pleuritic black cattle that ever extinguished the human race. Lo! is not the heart of man better than ram's fat, and the living soul nobler than the blood of beeves?

But let us do justice to the Staffords. I believe that their proceedings have been, on the whole, conducted with a view to the future benefit of their tenantry. But their example has been followed, where their principle was forgotten. What they have done in mercy, was done by others in rapine. All forced wisdom belongs to pain. To take the gun from a mountaineer's hand, and replace it by a shuttle, may be wise, yet repulsive enough to long-nurtured feelings of personal dignity to drive the tiller of his hereditary patch of whins down to the sea-side, and bid him thenceforth plough the sea, and live on kelp, may be better for all parties in the end; but if I had been one of the Countess's tail, I should have turned short, and insisted on not being dragged across the land, after her sweeping and relentless inhumanity. I should have felt myself justified in sending the fiery cross through every bladeless valley and trackless swamp of her kingdom. The thistle should have spoken its parable against her, and flame should have come out the brambles of Sutherland. How could I have borne to leave the bones of my fathers, and the place made memorable to me by all the sweetnesses and 2 M

sorrowings of my life? With what eyes should I have looked for the last time on the spot where every tree and rivulet was impressed with some recollection made almost sacred by love and time? All this may be idle to dames and dukes five hundred miles off, and five hundred times farther off in feeling; sailing up and down life in the bustle of levees and loo-tables;

Monday,

Yesterday the world was quiet, and all Edinburgh went to church. The aspect of the people, both within and without their chapels, was decorous. And I can vouch for the falsehood of the report, that shaving on Sunday is contrary to law. In the rigour of prelate-hunting times there was some popular connexion between infidelity and a brushed coat, high treason to the majesty of Knox, and the riddance of a week's beard; it has altogether perished here. In Glasgow, I will allow, and other places remote from civilized life, the barber still performs at his peril, and is accountable to the Stocks for every smooth chin in his district. A saintly and antisaponaceous magistracy hold the terrors of the law over every believing professor suspected of the heresy of a clean chin; and the licentious Sunday shaving, which has taken place in the general joy and dissolution of manners on his Majesty's arrival, has been already visited on the purses of the more daring barbers at the rate of five shillings a piece.

The congregation in the chapel to which I went were well-dressed, orderly, and attentive. But, in place of the one sermon that sometimes exhausts English patience, the Scotch must provide patience for three.

The prayers before and after what is expressly called the Sermon, are actual discourses, long expositions of the pastor's opinions upon disputed points, meanderings through mazy theology, different in nothing from the address between them, but in the facts of the people's standing up and the preacher's shutting his eyes. Far be it from me to speak with levity of these forms. I know how closely things unimportant and obsolete sometimes cling to our nature. But I also know that the congregation find it utterly impossible to follow the deviousness of the prayer; thus, after the few first cus

but before I should submit to be dragged from all this, and squeezed into a fish-smelling cabin, or compelled to petrify my substratum by the eternal sitting of the loom, I should have tried a bold defiance, have barricadoed my door, and, with the flints of the mountain, and the clods of the valley, have made a remarkable example of the factor.

August 19.

tomary sentences, they limit themselves to gazing, and when he at length returns from the chase of his own conceptions, feel not less relieved than the exhausted declaimer. I rejoice that the soberness of English reform did not pound either the Cathedrals or the Liturgy in pieces.

To-day the King received deputations from the public bodies. The Church of Scotland, an establishment curiously combined of lay and clerical powers, probably surprised him by its mixture of military and civic costumes with the dresses of the clergy. His reception of this diversity of strange faces and stranger tongues, was graceful and dignified. Some of the addresses affected him, and his marked attention to the venerable head of the university, may be presumed to have laid a long claim to learned gratitude.

The leaders of the Bar here figure in so many public capacities, that the majority have had frequent opportunities of standing in the sunshine of the Royal Presence; and party is said to be rapidly melting down. The King must have been appalled at the sight of this formidable and voluminous array of litigation. The Bar of Edinburgh supplies enough of advocacy to drain the population of an empire. A few Leviathans are undisputed Lords of the Brine, but the multitude who live upon what escapes those capacious devourers, is altogether astonishing and unsuspected among the causes of the fall of farms and the general sapping and suction of the provinciality. Yet, but for its Bar, Edinburgh would have been half unknown, a cypher in the sum of cities. Even now, in the midst of all her buttresses and fulcra of literature, many and curious as they are, let man grow honest and the Bar perish, Edinburgh, before the lapse of fifty years, would resemble an English borough town in its look, as much as it now