"To be sure it is not; and what then?" he rejoined.

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"Why then," said I, "it follows that the dissolution of the body has nothing to do with the soul. The soul does not consist of materials that can be dissolved. Therefore death, while it passes over the body, does not, you see, as we define it-does not touch the soul."

He seemed something at a stand with this; but like many others in the same circumstances, he only began to repeat what he had already said with more vehement assertions and a louder tone. Meanwhile, there was a little by-play, in which he endeavoured to reassure the Scotch girl, with whom he had evidently ingratiated himself by very marked attention, telling her as she rather drew off from him, that it was all nothing; and that whatever he said, it was no matter; and that he was just like the rest of us. I was determined that the warning which had been given in that quarter, should not want what aid I could give it; and as I saw that the metaphysical argument was thrown away, I had recourse to a more practical one.

Resuming the conversation, therefore, I said, "You believe that there is a God: I think you have admitted this?"

"And you believe that God made the world, do

"To be sure-I do."

"And you believe that he made man?"

"Certainly-of course."

you not?"

"And you believe that he made man a social being, do you not?that he constituted man, and made and meant him to dwell in families and in societies?"

It would seem so; he was willing to admit it."

"Now, then," said I, "answer me one question. Do you believe that men could live either safely or happily in society, without any expectation of a future life? If this life were all, do you not think that you, and most men around you, would give yourselves up to all the pleasures that you could find here-to pleasures that it would cost you the least of effort and self-denial to obtain? Is it not evident and inevitable, taking men as they are, that all virtue, all self-discipline and restraint, all domestic purity, and all correct and temperate living, would fall with the doctrine of a future life?"

Somewhat to my surprise, he frankly confessed that he thought it would.

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Well, then," I said, "here is a very plain case; and I am willing to trust this boy with the argument. He can decide, and every one here can decide, between a belief that would confessedly destroy the happiness and improvement of the world, and the only belief that can sustain it. If God made society, he established the principles that are necessary to its welfare. And to assail these principles, is hostility at once to heaven and earth. It is as if a man would spread blight and mildew over these harvest fields, and starve the world to death!"

EDINBURGH, July 14.-I was never aware till I came to England, of the pre-eminence which Edinburgh is allowed to hold as a beautiful and imposing city. But on my route hither, I have been continually hearing of the glories of Edinburgh; and now, instead of being disappointed, I am ready to say that the half was not told me. You enter it from the west, through a suburb which, it is much to say, has nothing disa

B

greeable in it-none of the usual accompaniments of dirty streets, vile, miserable houses, and squalid and suffering poverty. The coup d'oeil, at your entrance, is on every side the most striking imaginable. Before you stretches Princes-street, wider than Broadway in New York, more than a mile long, lined on the left with noble ranges of buildings, bordered on the right, throughout its whole extent, with gardens, and terminated by Calton Hill, crowned with monuments. On the left, again, spreads the New Town, built in stone, and thrown into every graceful variety of forms-square, circle, and crescent. On the right is the Old Town, which is itself, in contrast to the other, one grand piece of antiquity. On this side of it towers the lofty crag on which the castle is built, and a little beyond it rise the heights of Salisbury Crag and Arthur's Seat.

July 15.-Edinburgh (Old Town) has a most singular and touching air of antiquity. It is to other cities what old ruins are to other dwellings. As you traverse some of those streets-the High-street, and Canongate, and the Cowgate-whose houses rise like towers, six or seven stories high, on either side, and reflect that the stream of existence has flowed through them for centuries, the same as now-with the same elements of human weal and wo mingled in it as now-with the same sounds-the din of business, the words of anger, or the tones of laughter, the cries of childhood, and the deep hum of stern and intent occupation—the same sounds reverberated from those weather-beaten walls as now: ay, and as you reflect that infuriated mobs have passed here, and the trampling footsteps of armies, and the sad funeral trains of successive generations and that through these streets Queen Mary was brought after her defeat at Carberry Hill, in degradation, and disgrace, and tears—yes, and that here, upon these very pavements, Robertson, and Hume, and Mackenzie, and Burns, and Scott have walked ; a holy air of antiquity seems to breathe from every wynd and close, and touching memories are inscribed upon every stone: it is difficult to preserve the decorum that belongs to a public walk, or to have patience with the indifference that familiarity has written upon the faces around you. Yet all multitudes of men are themselves touching spectacles. And when I have stood on Calton Hill, and looked, as you may do, right down upon the sea of human dwellings in the New Town, I have felt an indescribable, painful, awful emotion-as if I laid my hand upon the very heart of the mighty city, and felt its heavings and throbbings -felt that life was there, and as if it were my own life, multiplied an hundred thousand times, in magnitude, intensity, and importance.

If I were asked what is the great charm about this Old World, and if I wished to generalize the answer, I should say, it is antiquity-antiquity in its castles, its towns, its cathedrals, its cities. The sublimity of ages is about you at every step, and you feel your connexion with past races of men, in a way that you are not naturally led to do in a country where there are no monuments of the past.

To-day, however, I saw a relic of the past in a very grotesque attitude; a Highlander in full dress-yes, the wild, fierce, haughty Highlander-playing on a fiddle! a street beggar, asking a few pence to keep him from starving. He was dressed in the philabeg, or kilts, and hose; and I am surprised to find that there are some Highland regiments, in the English service, who are dressed in this manner. I have seen some

EDINBURGH.-ROMANCE AND REALITY. - HOLYROOD.

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of these soldiers, both here and in Glasgow, parading about in this dress -which, to describe it, is very like a petticoat hanging from the waist halfway down the leg, a hose coming up halfway on the calf-so that the person is naked from above the knee down to the middle of the calf. It appeared very uncomfortable, and scarcely decent. When George the Fourth visited Scotland, and held levee at Holyrood, he appeared in this costume. A picture of him is shown in the audience

room.

July 17.-I went to-day to as many spots mentioned in Scott's stories as I could find, and afterward to Holyrood Palace. I was struck with the different effects produced upon the feelings by scenes of romance and scenes of real history. Around the former, indeed, there is a hallowing charm-the halo of genius rests there; but the history of actual events is, comparatively, as if genius itself were embodied in it. You feel that reality is there. Where Mary really suffered, shuddered, and wept-is one thing; where Effie Deans is supposed to have laid, albeit upon the cold stone, her broken heart, is quite another thing. We admire genius, but genius itself is only the interpreter of all-powerful nature. Or if it be said, that genius is a part of nature, and its noblest part, then take us where genius itself has wrought out its noblest achievement, or manifested its most sublime endurance, and we shall feel, indeed, that there is reality in its full sovereignty. The spot so consecrated may be the battle field; it may be the council chamber; it may be the martyr's stake; yes, and it may be the student's cell at Abbotsford, or on the Avon.

Yet as I strolled one day up Salisbury Crag, and down from Arthur's Seat, amid which are laid several of the scenes of the Heart of MidLothian, I felt illusion, at some moments, to be almost as powerful as reality. I felt as if the light-hearted Effie, and the true-hearted Jeanie, and the stern-hearted old man, must have lived there; and that upon that hillside poor Madge must have sung her wild song, and Sharpitlaw and Ratton must have rushed down there towards Muschat's Cairn. The Cairn was situated immediately below St. Anthony's Chapel, some ruins of which still remain. I passed them as I came down from Arthur's Seat; a little spring of fresh and sweet water still bubbling up at the base of the old hermitage.

In the High-street is shown the house of John Knox-looking dark and stern as himself. On the corner, and under a sort of canopy, is a rudely sculptured bust of the old reformer, with the hand raised, and the finger pointed at the words-thus inscribed on the wall:

Θεος
Deus
God.

On the opposite side of the street, on the front wall of the house, are two figures in stone, supposed to be of very ancient date, and to repre sent Adam and Eve. The Latin inscription is (trans.), "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."

HOLYROOD.-Queen Mary's state-room, with the bed of Charles I. now standing in it; her bedroom, with her own bed in it; her dressingroom; the small apartment in which she, Rizzio, and some others, were supping, when Darnley, and Ruthven, with other lords, entered, dragged

1

Rizzio out, and murdered him before her face; the dark passage by which they came up; the blood at the head of the principal staircase, where they dragged him down; the partition by which that spot is cut off from the state-room, and apparently cut off for no other reason— thus giving colour to the tradition which alleges that this is the blood of Rizzio; the dressing-table of Mary, with raised work on it done by herself, and the wicker basket, raised on a sort of tripod, which held the infant wardrobe of her son;-these objects bring the unfortunate Mary before one, with a vividness that almost makes him feel as if he had now heard her story for the first time. It is a striking instance of the power of adventitious circumstances, to carry down a name, and almost to embalm it in the memory of ages. Had Mary been homely and happy, we should probably never have heard of her!

Edinburgh (Old Town) is very curious in one respect. There is a town under a town. The valleys are so deep, and the hills so high on which it is built, that bridges or causeways of stone are thrown across; and when you pass over them, you see houses and a street, and crowds passing all directly beneath you.

Before breakfast, the morning on which I came away, I went to find St. Leonards-not having heard till the morning before that there was a spot so designated. I found it—a small crag; just beneath which and west of it is a cottage, sweetly situated, called St. Leonard's cottage. It is just on the borders of the city, on the side towards Salisbury Crag.

I took leave of Edinburgh; I gazed upon its glories and glorious objects for the last time, with a feeling that it seems to me I scarce shall feel again in leaving any foreign city.

GLASGOW, July 20.-From Edinburgh, I have come round through the Highlands to this place. Every step of the way has been on classic ground: the beautiful windings of the Forth with the Grampian Hills on the north; Stirling Castle; the wild grandeur of the Trossacks; Ben Nevis and Ben Venue, and the haunted waters of Loch Katrine, every rock and headland garlanded with romance; the bold and majestic shores of Loch Lomond; the haunts of Rob Roy, the Lennox country, and the soft scenery of the Leven.

I passed the night at Cullender, twelve miles from Loch Katrine, and spent the evening in reading through the Lady of the Lake. About a mile and a half before reaching the lake, you enter the celebrated Trossacks, or the Bristled Territory. Conceive of two or three hundred hills, wild and precipitous, some higher, some lower, all covered with shrubbery, ivy, and heather, with often a bold "thunder-splintered pinnacle" shooting up from among them; conceive yourself walking through this region on a winding and almost level road, at the foot of these hills, with some new view opening, some striking object arresting you at every step as you proceed, and you may have some idea of that grand panorama of the picturesque-the Trossacks.

As you emerge from this valley of hills and mountains, Loch Katrine presents itself a narrow strip of water at the first, and never, at any point, more than two miles wide. You are rowed, ten miles, through the length of the lake, and may spend some of your time, if you please, in fancying where the fair lady moored her bark, or where, under her magic guidance, it shot across the silver waters.

THE TROSSACKS.-INVERSNAID.-GLASGOW.

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A walk of five miles, through a wild country, with some genuine Highland moors on the way, brings you to Inversnaid Mill, on the shore of Loch Lomond. The pass down to Inversnaid is so steep, and dark, and deep, that it seemed to me an hundred men might have been murdered there without being heard-Rob Roy must have held it as a favourite spot. There is a single cottage on the shore; and I entered it with a curiosity inspired by a thousand tales of romance. A Highland cottage, at the bottom of one of the wildest Highland passes!-what would it be, and what its inmates? I found a woman and her daughter, who told me that they had no neighbours, and exchanged no visits with anybody. There was no chimney. The smoke found its way out at a hole in the roof, but not till it had circulated in many eddies and wreaths around the beams and rafters, which were black and shining with soot. Along the wall adjoining that against which the fire was built for there was properly no fireplace-were to be dimly seen the apartments or stories, one above another, of a sort of crib, such as Walter Scott has described, as answering the purpose of a bedstead. I asked the woman for food. She had nothing but oatmeal cake, which she produced, and I was glad to try a specimen of Highland bread. But, in good truth, I should never desire to have anything to do with it, save as a specimen; for of all stuff that ever I tasted, it was the most inedible, impracticable, insufferable,-dry, hard, coarse, rasping, gritty, chaffy: I could not eat it, and it seemed to me that if I could, it would be no more nourishing than gravel kneaded into mud and baked in a limekiln. As to drink, whiskey-whiskey, the boatmen said, was the only thing, and the thing indispensable. I tasted of it; and truly it had not the usual odious taste of our American whiskey. It is said that the peat, by which it is distilled, gives it a peculiar flavour.

As to the estimate of this article, or something like it-something "wet and toothsome,' as the wretch Peter Peebles says I should suppose that Highlands and Lowlands agree, nay, and all England for that matter for I have never seen anything like the numbers of persons that I have observed here, after dinner, or in the evening, sipping their brandy and water or whiskey punch. It would seem strange to some of our American reformers; but I have been at supper, where the meal was introduced by the host with a grace;" and the brandy and hot water were brought on at the close of the entertainment, evidently as a matter of course, and I was very much urged to take some, as a very excellent thing; and, indeed, as the conscientious Peebles says, they had like to ha' guided me very ill."

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From Inversnaid Mill a steamboat takes you up and down the entire length of Loch Lomond, thirty miles. A rainy day did not hide altogether the bold and majestic features of this shore and mountain scenery, though it prevented me from seeing it to the best advantage. Around the lower part of Loch Lomond is the country of the Lennox; from whence a ride through the vale of the Leven brings you to Dumbarton, where a steamboat again, at almost any hour, will take you up to Glasgow.

The cathedral here is a grand old pile; the only one that Knox spared, and which he still frowns upon from his monument in the cemetery on the opposite hill. And this last spot suggests the subject of funerals, which are celebrated with much pomp, as it appears to an