Ille hic qui cecinit pascua, rura, duces."

I shall perish before that consummation, and this hand of panegyric, and this heart overflowing with weariness of absence, and with envy at the sight of every coach and courier that I see speeding south, will he turned into the bulbs and blossoms of the garden. If the extinction were to happen now, I should have to regret some very agreeable acquaintances. I have seen those cleverer persons here, who are usually persecuted by strangers; but of them and theirs the world shall not hear a syllable from me. The treachery of your thorough-bred Tourist shall, in my Utopia, be visited with branding and the galleys.

Confidence and gentleman-like courtesy have already become matters of peril, and a man of any reputation must sit in the presence of one of those filchers of face, and swindlers of sentiment, in a state of continual nervousness. Conversation must either degenerate into the shadowy nonsense, that alone can baffle the grasp of those unsparing marauders of private good things; or it must be conducted with closed doors, and on the solemn oath of every new-comer, that he will not, by ink or inuendo, in any shape whatever, divulge a syllable beyond the Trophonian cave.

For my part, I am determined, the moment I feel that I am grown into a man of celebrity, (a consummation neyer to be doubted,) I will placard my avenue with prohibitions to all poachers of living genius, fix up a board with, "Traveller-man-traps and spring guns set in these grounds." And the first individual, who shall print an iota of the merest trifling that transpires by grot

or grove, tent or tea-table, shall be seized at any expense, and hung up in terrorem, with a bust of Harpocrates round his neck, at the turn from the high road.

But it is no breach of confidence to speak of the Scotch as among the most liberal and hospitable entertainers. The Scotch are hospitable just to the extent that they ought to be, and all rational men will be. If you are known, you will be civilly received; and if you are not, you will be left to regale at your hotel, and contemplate the Calton undisturbed. They do not presume you, as in England, to be necessarily a swindler, nor as in Ireland, a grandee in disguise. They give you a single glance of their grey, acute eyes, and then leave you to your lucubrations, without either setting a Bow-Street officer upon your path, or insinuating a general invitation into your hand. You may do as you please, and as long as you please; and there are, I am told, instances of strangers, who have wandered through the multitudes of Edinburgh for years, without a supper or a smile, until they had imbibed a rigid aspect, forgot their English, and were mistaken for their countrymen.

Yet this let me say for the sister countries, that their torridness or frigidity is the result of circumstances; that John is generous, willing, and stranger-loving, when he has leisure, of which he has but little; while, on the contrary, Patrick has or makes a great deal; and by the help of this arm he is enabled to rout John, horse, foot, and dragoons, out of the field of hospitality. In England, men whose brains are not whirling in the perpetual tumult of business, have a ready access to books, and can satiate themselves with the fall of stocks, and the perplexities of ministers every quarter, and month, and week, and day. But to the generation of the Patricks, those are, for the chief part, costly and forbidden things, exotics of the rarest odour, mangoes and Jamaica ginger, sent in presents from some compassionate and recollecting cousin beyond seas. I will lay my silk gown in futuro, to the band of any Lord of Session extant, that at this hour threefourths of the resident gentlemen of Ireland, out of the confines of Dublin, have but very indistinctively heard of Mr Bennet and of the Bonassus, are dubious in an extreme degree about the existence of Mr Owen and the Op

position, and have not been reached by any rumour whatever of the integrity of that calculator of the human race-Anacharsis Cloots Hume.

Yet those gentlemen are not without curiosity; quite the reverse. They have it of the most open-mouthed, rapacious, gastric kind. "Vasto immanis hiatu." Nothing is too large for their deglutition, nothing too tough and ferreous for their digestion. The orgasm must be supplied with food, or it will seize on the most irregular provender within its reach. I look upon those late excesses, those burnings of barns, those crimped curates, and proctors roasted whole, and the general calcination which has gone through the country, as nothing more than a strong development of that resistless appetite for news, to which those Athenians of

Tuesday,

THIS was the day of the Drawingroom. The ladies were early at their post; and when the King arrived at the palace in a whirlwind of Scots Greys, he found the presence-chamber crowded with the fairest faces and haughtiest blood of Scotland. His Majesty made his way through this dangerous battalia, and did the honours with royal gallantry. A thousand dames of every age and line were to be saluted on the right cheek; and this perplexing, pleasing privilege, was marked by perfect observance. The general appearance was as dazzling as plumes and diamonds could make it. But if the eye luxuriates, the memory grows weary, and I will tell you no more of tissues and blonds, golden lama, and feathers that might have crested the helmet of Arthur or Amadis. The Archers kept the entrance, and they were the very models of courtesy. The casual pressure of the ladies, passionate for a sight of royalty, was kept off by slackened, silken-covered bows, that might have reminded them of the weapons of Cupid him

self.

On the way to Holyrood, I was struck by an object, of all others the most direct contrast to the pride, pomp, and circumstance of the day,-a tomb, the little classical tower that stands over the grave of David Hume. The common jail has now grown up beside it, and the Scotch seem to have wisely forgotten the homage once so fashionably and foolishly paid to the memory of their metaphysician. Franklin degraded the American mind into a love

the West are, above all nations, liable. In Munster, and the neighbouring districts where the human understanding is scarce, the arrival of a stranger excites a general stir through the thicket; the natives come by families and villages from the farthest cover, crowd round him with Otaheitean jubilation, load his integuments with the spontaneous beef and claret of their lovely and teeming soil, and provision him for six months to come. Yet all this is done in the genuine cunning of barter; their benevolence is lavished only to extract from him those precious novelties, the hornspoons and blue beads of English gossipry, the obsolete of the London market, but to them more precious than gold and diamond.

August 20.

of pelf, and his Poor Richard is the twelve tables of shop-keeping. Hume's example turned the brains of the Scotch Literati of the last age into amalgams of arrogant metaphysics and bitter scepticism. The success of a popular name is always dangerous in a province. All rushes along with the current of the hour. The frith is too narrow for the counteracting streams, that make the health, and preserve the level of the English mind. The Scotch are at length beginning to discover that the favourite speculations of their philosophy, "falsely so called," were mysticism and moonshine. Scepticism has been exiled, and, a few meager and decaying casuists excepted, men are not ashamed to acknowledge the common truths that give comfort to mankind.

It has often been among my musings, how the Scotch, a sagacious and solid stepping people, cautious of the waste of time, and loving to lay a substantial grasp on the good things of life, should have ever abandoned an hour to metaphysics. Voltaire's image of the science is at once witty and true,— a minuet, when the parties, after all their turnings and windings, end on the same spot where they began. The science of mind is palpably prohibited to man. It may form a noble and unlimited treasure of discovery for our disembodied powers. But here, after a few rudiments scarcely above truisms, and known to every generation since the flood, we feel the boundary. All the rest is clouds and air, a vast, uncircumscribed region, where nature may

prepare her wonders, but where she keeps them secret at least from us,—an empire of vacancy, where our presumption may attempt to penetrate, but, after all its fantasies and hallooings, must return in profitlessness and fatigue. The experiment can now scarcely amuse even clowns and children. In the progress of the ladies to court, the elite of Scotland passed be fore me. This is one of the advantages of the time. The wonders that I must have otherwise sought through lakes and deserts, through valleys impenetrable with furze, and mountains sullen with storm, are all here together. I have here to wait shivering on no shore till the boatman, the lord of the passage, ceases to be drunk, and conveys me to the hopes of heath and a supper. I have here to crouch at the door of no Western Laird, the autocrat of the surrounding rocks, and supplicate the hospitality of an unknown tongue. The remote curiosities of the realm, richer than all its Staffas and Ionas, are concentrated here. It would be ungenerous and untrue to deny that Scotland has a right to be proud of them.

Some of the females whom I saw today are among the belles of St James's;

Wednesday,

The King was invisible to-day, and all Edinburgh was disturbed, through all its municipality downwards,-Bailies, Deputes, &c.

"In the lowest deep a lower deep," by the rumour that the Procession from Holyroodhouse to the Castle was to be postponed from to-morrow till Saturday. I will not pain you with the shadows of mischief and misfortune conjured up before civic eyes, by this disastrous contingency; and among the chief, the utter ruin of the Saturday's Grand Banquet. The King, weary as he must be of publicity, did on this occasion what he has done from the beginning gave up his own inclination, and cheered the hearts of all the prospective sharers of fete and feast, by finally fixing the Procession for Thursday.

The Banquet will be the closing pomp of Scotland. I went to-day to see the site of this exhibition of loyal appetite, in the Parliament House-the Scotch Westminster Hall. I found it crowded with the curious, scattered over with forms and the preparatives for feasting,

and the Court dress, in itself hostile to grace, and here unwisely, because unnationally worn, gave a general resemblance, but the physiognomy of the land could not be mistaken. I saw from time to time the dark eye, pearly skin, and crimson cheek of English loveliness. These were rare, for beauty is the rarest product of the earth, and, to my eye, is rapidly perishing. The multitude had a strong national similarity. No race so seldom mixes its blood with the stranger.

The Scotch are not a melancholy people, but they look an anxious one; and whether it be from the common knowledge of their history, or from the true writing of their features, I should pronounce them a race of habitual honesty, good sense, and determination, but unconvinced that to enjoy, is, in some measure, to obey; and choosing by instinct to make their little solitary encampment among the thorns and tempest-beaten places of mortality.

As to the men-But what is the importance of a man's face? It has all its uses, if it have the necessary apertures for light and food. I will touch the topic no more. Is thy lover a mineralogist?

August 21.

and darkened with curtains, that in the mid-day sun covered all our visages with a fiery purple. The room looked a very noble cavern, very ill inhabited.

Scotland is contributing its whole edible opulence to this entertainment. Dukes and Lairds are sending daily grouse and venison; the trading towns making donatives of fish; and London, with a surpassing munificence, worthy of the largest and most turtle-loving of cities, has sent up Alderman Curtis in the highest condition, and ready dressed in tartans.

I dined with some agreeable men. I have found no conversation superior to that of the Scotch; clear, intelligent, and original. But it has its peculiarities. I have never found myself on a soil where the ventilation and winnowing of character was so habitual. I, of course, do not speak of the paltry detractions, which can find their way only by chance among men of a certain rank of society. But intellect, acquirement, professional skill, and professional celebrity, are desperately discussed. This is amusing, but formidable to the alien and the sojourn

The High Street is a very singular, and picturesque, and memorable range of building. In the Scottish history it is classic ground; many of the most important events of the monarchy have passed under its roofs. It has been the scene of feudal grandeur, and of feudal crimes; divided as it now is between trade and the lowest orders, it was once the place of palaces; and here the great chieftains of a disturbed and loosely-governed realm-resisted the government, or oppressed it by their aid-held court and festival -indulged in the wild luxury of baronial life, or perished by the axe and the dagger.

In this street, and those shooting from its sides, those fibres projected from the enormous spine, is to be found all the peculiarity of Edinburgh. The New Town is handsome, but the Old Town is unique. The modern improvements may be copied wherever stone can be laid on stone; the High Street has a stately locality to which Europe can find no equal. The Corporation have made some attempts to alter this venerable street, and have pulled down a cross in its centre, and an antique gate which marked one of its divisions. Against this sacrilege, mulct and imprisonment ought to have been denounced, and its aiders and abettors should have been fixed in the loftiest stocks, for all their furs. Cross and Gate ought to be reinstated without loss of time, and a Committee appointed to see that, for the future, not a stone or tile should be changed in this great national memorial. It is in the view of the closes and wynds, from a safe distance, however, that my most amusing speculations have been stirred. In all places the populace, their habits and habitats, are my supreme attraction. Here I stand upon their bridges, and look upon a subterranean people. Curricles and corporations, troops and train bands, are passing round me; and in the midst of a tumult that shakes the ground, I see, at an almost telescopic depth below, another race utterly untouched by the disturbance upon the surface,-a plutonic tribe, a mole-eyed colony, unconscious of the sun, a busy, dim ge neration, vaulted over by the inextricable vapour of the mine, and winding its way through chasms and valleys of stone as black and precipitous as the mountain from which they were torn.

And here I hover, a luxurious and lofty drone, looking down on the obscure hive; an idle and elevated mite gazing on the minute toils and thousands of the huge and curiously-delved cheese.

"Suave mari magno."

But the High Street is bright in the blaze of day, and with its parapets and pinnacles, the height and wildness, and rich, antique confusion of its architecture, winding and sweeping away down the hill, it has sometimes had to me the look of the most beautiful and impressive object that architecture ever gave the eye, an unroofed Cathedral. The Cathedral was now full. The procession commenced at half past two, and moved from Holyrood House under a roar of congratulation. The sky had promised rain, and its promise now began to be amply fulfilled. The glory of the naked galleries was delated in a moment, and never was popular good will more severely drenched. Still the procession ascended through waving handkerchiefs and applauding hands till it reached the Castle-hill. There the entrance of the multitude was forbidden, and the pageant, unpressed by the crowd, expanded in all its beauty. Heralds, squires, and chieftains, the hereditary officers of the throne, bearing badges and batons, followed in glittering succession, and intervening guards of Highlanders and cavalry. Froissart might have dwelt with delight on the stately bearing of these Chevaliers; and some anonymous and well-known novelist to come, when we are beyond tournament or tale, will tell of the crimson coat that flowed down to the golden spurs of my Lord Lyon-the green velvet tunic gold-embroideredthe golden rigol round the cap of crimson--the enamelled staff flowered with golden thistles, and the Arabian caparisoned with gold that he caracoled and caprioled with such knightly dexterity. This brilliant figure was Lord Kinnoul. The Sword of State, an enormous two-handed blade, worthy of the grasp of Arthur or Wallace, was borne by the Earl of Morton, in a modern uniform, that looked humiliated beside the superb barbarism of the old costume. The Honourable Morton Stuart, the son of Lord Moray, carried the Sceptre, a short staff with a large head of crystal. His dress