side the ditcher brandishing his hedge-sheers like a very Polish Scyther. Out sallies Sally of our alley from the dairy, whirling her churnstaff and meets the cook of the "Hottle" with her spit, full in the face red as her own fire. Weans that had been fechting and rugging one another's hair, now amicably unite in still farther emptying sacks already full of emptiness-now and then licking up a mouthful" of the finest," till their faces are "like roses in cranreuch," and auld wives, instead of "gi'en them their licks," encourage the imps in their deeds of whiteness, and grossly abuse the barns, and vituperate the garnels. Tost to and fro is that multitudinous motion, as when cross currents, cross winds, and cross tides meet in some strange-shaped sound between inexplicable capes, and list! in the centre of the mid-passage a whirlpool,learnedly called a vortex,-roaring through the spray-mist for ever, with the noise of innumerable chariots. The contest is carried on here exclusively between animate and inanimate matter. The drivers have all fled, and are seen high up on hillsides, and darting, like deer, into woods. Nevertheless, nothing very violent can be done in a religious country like Scotland without cursing and swearing; but here we have not, as in the sister kingdom, much variety of oaths-the few simple natural ones being, however, most blasphemous and brutal. Blood is flowing; so there must have been blows-but one really sees no cause of quarrel; for, like a bull in a chinashop, the mob has it all his own way, nor can an empty sack offer much resistance; though in a fall a full one is formidable, as you may learn from those feet sprawling under a load that leaves you in doubt if they have any intermediate connexion with that "grey discrowned head," face downwards in the gutter. And where, pray, may now be the primum mobile of all this hubbub-the meal? Vanished from all mortal eyesight into thin air like a ghost! A mournful shew-there lie the empty sacks, like sheet and shroud left by resurrection-men unshovelled into the grave! There stand-as they have all along been standing-small, snug, and not unsocial parties of horses, still in their respective carts, with staff-supported trams, affording to each dobbin's back pleasant reliefand a woollen or canvass bag of oats dangling daintily (as Barry Cornwall would say for the thousand-andoneth time) at his fine Roman nose, which ever and anon he caveth suddenly (see Dr Jamieson) in the sun, to shake off the teasing flies, or on a sudden smites it against his fat flank, in anger with the clegs (see, again, the Doctor); while you cannot but admire the nobleness of his clustering forelock, nor less the unshorn strength that roughens at his fetlocks, and shags the very iron that glances-as he kicks or stamps-on his inaccessible" heels. Quiet has been the rational animal, and all his compeers, amidst the irrational creation; in a meal-mob on Saturday feeding away as gratefully as in a grass meadow on Sabbath. And now the canine have ceased barking-and cur, colley, terrier, bull-dog, mastiff, setter, greyhound, and lurcher, (ah! the poach ers,) are snuffing their way in search, each of his own master, through the broken fragments of the disparting and disparted crowd. What a change of scenery and figures, both on fore ground, and background, and in the middle distance! Curls have been all drenched out of matrons' and maidens' hair (why so many of them carroty?) by streams of sweat,-or, as the very village dames have learned now to call it-perspiration. What a picking-up, and a putting-on, and an adjustment, without looking-glass, of kerchiefs of spot or stripe, Belcher or Bandana! Sad the loss, and joyful the recovery of much mutch; the order of the garter goes a-begging in various lengths of tape-honi soit qui mal y pense; Mysie, ma woman, is this your bauchle ?"; and, by all that is most fashionable, yonder scours a spanker-boom-an Amazonian virgin with legs fearful to look on-sans huggers, sans shoes, sans mutch, sans petticoat, sans every thing-jinking round carts and corners, amidst the unextinguishable laughter of the now roistering rioters, almost skuddy such has been her tear and wear of duds in the rippet, and laudable her not uncandid exhibition of the naked truth in the eyes of the whole world!-Afraid she too-all the while as she scuds-that some mischief has ing loosely together, and soon untying themselves into strings of lazy loiterers, who again drop away, one by one, into their own houses, or by twos and threes into publics; you hear the smith re-blowing up his forge; from his skylight Snip pops out his pericranium, curious he knows not of what, ere he sit down to serious stitching; laddies, mutually cuffing the few remaining meal-marks out of each other's jackets, pursue their path pensively to school, almost with the looks of evil-doers; douce folk (why not douce before?) are shaking their heads in a style at once mysterious and alarming; and who may those men be, preceded by a few who seem to march with a military step, with staves, alias batons, in their hands? Heavens and earth! has it come to this-and are they, groans an antique crone, the Lord High Constables? Something of that sort they certainly are-followed by the farmers and the farmers' men-to identify and seize the ringleaders. Violence is evanescent, but law eternal. The village is in a funk-death-pale as she would swarf. "Where," asks the King of the Lord High Constables, "where, folk, is the CORPUS DelicTI?" Not a soul in the village can tell befallen her lover-now nowhere visible-distractedly, and with a face of many colours-as she ranges round her own kail-yard, far aloof from these ribald reformers-shrieks she on her Bill! her whole Bill! and nothing but her Bill! whom she fears the wretches have curtailed of his fair proportions. But long since her dear Bill had withdrawn to the Hanging-shaws, from the clutch of some ancient beldams who began the mob, and at nightfall she may depend on him at the gable end of yonder barn-like building by itself on the wood edge, true to the hour of assignation as buck to doe when the quiet hour brings out the conies, whole and sound both in his principles and his details. Boys are jumping sack-races now for halfpenny prizes given by the drunken gauger; and the chief baker stands smilingly at his door, with bare arms a-kimbo, prophetic of the rise of his bread-even of the batch now in the oven. Slow and stately from the manse on the brae, in its green-palisadoed garden, down comes, at what may be safely called the eleventh hour, though yet it be but breakfasttime, the minister-yet pompously redolent of last year's moderatorship -and attempts explaining to his parishioners, out of M'Culloch, how the price of meal and flour is enhan--for not a soul in the village knows ced alike in town and village, by scattering it, in immense quantities, along the stony streets, which, whether paved or Macadamized, are barren and thus sown can yield no return. From this doctrine there are many dissenters; and one of the old school predicts, with all the confidence of assured experience, that next market-day they will see meal down twopence the peck; at least, so it always has been with the spilling of sour-milk-and, though he is willing to grant that sour-milk is not meal, yet they are both commodities; and what is more vivers; and what always happens with the wet, must often happen with the dry. To which reasoning, the ex-moderator, having got the stot by rote, stutters out an ineffectual and unsatisfactory reply, leaving the victory, by acclamation, in the mouth of the sagacious old annuitant, once supervisor in the Excise. And now there are in the market-place but here and there some small knots of people, hang the import of that dreadful question. But there lies the poor lost corpus delicti, faintly whitening the streets as if there had passed along them a hundred chinky lime-carts. 'Tis a critical moment-but lo, lightning! and hark, Jove thunders on the left -a happy omen! Well-such another plump of rain, each drop as big as a blae-berry, we cannot charge our memory with since last Lammas flood. The ducks are already in the gutters and that dead cat, which every body complained of, but nobody would remove, will be floated away at last into the Leithen. The corpus delicti is providentially done into daigh, and he would be a fineeyed farmer who could swear now to his own meal. But the sacks! Why the sacks are to seek-and are lying with truth at the bottom of a well. But what say you to the carts and horses? Not a word. They had better be driven home by their owners-lest they should catch cold. Meanwhile the fifty pound lease a holders, and the Lord High Con- gow college. A child's hand had been stables, retire, at certain masonic judiciously hung up to dry-like a signs, with some of the chief heads haddy "while it was being rizzer'd" of L.10 a-year houses-retire into the -on the cheek of a window open to "hottle," to fix among themselves the public eye-and in a minute the who ought to be apprehended as ring- stones of the street leapt up into life leaders. Not considering ourselves and became raging people. No betsafe in the councils of such an unre- ter subject indeed for a mob than a formed parliament, we drop down corpse, real or imaginary, doubled from the roof on which we had chosen and bundled up with its knees to its our station of survey-the roof of an chin in a sack-or supposed to be edifice somewhat dilapidated, which stretched at even more than its full had of old been a Catholic chapel, length on a table, "gashed with many but is now a cow-house-one day or gory wound." So much the better if other, perhaps, with its sacristy yet discovered by a schoolboy-"fancy's to be restored and whistling care- painted devil"-by a peculiar crook lessly along the front windows of in the big toe of the left foot, to have the Horns, as if just entering a fine, once been his grandmother. That horopen, airy, one-streeted town, we rid aggravation makes the mob-as never look back till we have reached our dear Shepherd would say—“ just a road-side grove, commanding a perfectly-right-even-down-red-wudclear view of the church tower above stark-staring-mad-a'thegither;" and the dim houses, and there sitting down on a milestone-we forget the number-moralize on mankind in general, and the inhabitants of that pretty place in particular-wondering, among a thousand other speculations, whether or no it would be greatly benefited by Burgh Reform. Were we to paint in this style (for what we meant to make but a slight sketch has grown into an unfinished picture) all the mobs that have met our eye, there would be no computing the longitude of this article. Lord George Gordon's mob of London we never saw-nor were we at the destruction of the Bastile-but we have" counted the chimes at midnight" with those who of that "disport took largely," and who were always ready at the slightest hint, though during their later years it must be confessed somewhat prosily, to describe the pastime with true religious and patriotic enthusiasm. The Newcastle keelmen get up a mob well-nor much amiss do the Whitehaven colliers. The Tranent mob about the militia, some thirty years ago, was about the best, that is the bloodiest, we have had in Scotland in our time, and the people fell under the fire of musketry from the tops of their old red houses in no inconsiderable numbers. The mob of the Bloody Hand-so we named it who were students there that session-looked so well at its acme, that there seemed small reason for doubting that it would effect the demolition of Glas nothing will satisfy them but to pull down a university. Since the exploits of Knox, Burke, and Hare, however, regular resurrectionists have grown into favour, and may be said to be even comparatively popular.- But the mob which at first was the most rational, and at last the maddest of all imaginable mobs we ever witnessed, was a mob that mistook a private madhouse for a bagnio, into which it was rumoured young children had often been enticed or entrapped for violation or prostitution. How the windows and doors flew into shivers and of slates in five minutes how bare were the wretched rafters! Out were haled by the hair of the head the old crones, who, in a woeful but no wicked sense, were keepers-but no procuresses they-and you would have thought that the very curses of eyes would have blasted them ere claws had time to tear them into pieces. Well might you pity the poor visiting physician-skipping out in a full suit of black, with laced ruffles, and silver buckles, and gold-headed cane, and his "wee three-cockit!" But lo! glaring ghastly, like wildcats from a wood on fire, rush out of their cells several shrieking maniacs, and leap, though arm-locked in strait-waistcoats, and two or three of them in chains, all females, in among the frightened crowd that recoil in horror-while others stalk forth unconscious of the tumult, blind and deaf in their insanity to all we call the world, yet wailing in a worse world of their own-a world worse than "any hell which priests or beldams feign" -as all now see from their wan and haggard faces, ever and anon dreadfully convulsed into leering wickedness, and then suddenly wrenched back, as if by the demon within them, into tortured misery-just the same, seemingly, as if one had pulled a string whereby to keep incessantly shifting the features of some movable mask into all possible faces of the ludicrousness, the loathsomeness, or the dreadfulness of mania, frenzy, and delirium. What a revulsion when, all at once, the truth broke upon the mob! Monster no more-the multitude was but as one man. It sighed-it groaned-it wept -it bowed down its head-it held up its hands-it prayed. There pity and compassion, and remorse and penitence, were even rifer far than, a few minutes before, had been wrath and the lust of blood. "The mob"said we, as we beheld the gentle bear ings along in arms of them whom some one has dared to call the "Goddeserted"-"the mob is a Christian." But our memory forsakes us, and fades away glimmeringly into oblivion and the black extinguishment of night. Masters as we are, then, of mobs, you will easily believe that we are not easily pleased with such exhibitions of humanity-that we are entitled to be fastidious-and that, unless got up spiritedly, and on a considerable scale, neither author nor actors can expect any applause from such an old critic as Christopher North. We either yawn at the stale and stupid representation, or hiss the piece off the stage. Now the mob, on the day of the Edinburgh Election, was a mean and miserable affair, and most deservedly damned. The piece prepared for him, in which he was to act the principal part, possessed not one glimpse of genius-one trait of originalityand was borrowed, or rather stolen, from the Westminster Election and the Westminster Review. The only endurable characters were "the walking gentlemen;" but they were so few as to be lost in the general blackguardism of the scene. Yet was there an attempt to give a classical air to this farce of the Modern Athenians. It was constructed on the principles of the Greek drama, and scrupulous regard paid to the unities of time and place. The scene shifted but from the Old to the New Town-an allowable license-and the time occupied in the representation did not exceed twelve hours, the period, we believe, prescribed, as the utmost limit, by Aristotle or his commentators. The Lord Advocate delivered a feeble prologue with forcible applause-and by about three o'clock was concluded the First Act, which though hot, heavy, and hissing, as a tailor's goosenay, even as the Glasgow Gander himself-waddled its way off and on the stage, the exit being equal to the entrance, the débouché to the début. Contrary to all rules of nature and of art, in the Second Act we were favoured with the catastrophe. But it proved a complete failure. The actor who was to throw the Lord Provost over the bridge, having neglected to attend the rehearsals, did not know how to lay hold, forgot his part, struck his own forehead instead of Glen's, and not having activity to leap into the orchestra among the fiddlers, as a horse did one night not very long ago, the ass retreated tail foremost in among the scene-shifters, and ill fared the cuddie in his own crowd. The opening of the Third Act shewed us some spirit-stirring scenery, in which there was no still life-the High and Low Terrace, and head of Leith Walk, from the Register House to Ambrose's hotel, the opposite and extreme points of vision being Prince's Street and Picardy. There was a good deal of bustle in this act-but the actors were absolute stones, and many of them had faces like brickbats. The interest hung on a battle, and on a city distracted with civil war. But such fighting! Never beheld our young or old eyes so abortive a bick er. There were far too many blackguards on the stage at one time-and we might have said, "Enter the mob solus." Conscious of miserably enacting the parts that had been set them by the managers, they anticipated or rather turned the tables on the audience or spectatory, and not only hissed, but battered the dress boxes, in one of which was sitting the Lord Provost with some of his friends; while two persons, one pragmatical and one pedantic, who thought they enjoyed the confidence of the mob, and deserved their friendship by having curried their favour, began spouting advice to them from the pit, with gesticulations of face and hand that only aggravated their fury. Meanwhile the head of a column of constables-high and special-appeared first in the back and then on the foreground-and then ensued a general mêlée. This was the only part of the performance in this dull and noisy Third Act worth looking_at, and 'twas really not ill got up; but after all, though intended to be a tragedy, 'twas but a melodrame. The act closed with a processionpartly peaceful, and partly warlike of dragoons; but blows from the flats of sabres are not impressive, and horses ought to charge with their shoulders, not their hips, in serious composition. In the Fourth Act the scene shifted to the High Street, with a fine full front-view of those noble buildings, the Exchange. The Dramatic Censor must have been astonished; for, now and here, in place of performing their own parts of first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, &c. &c. &c. and so on blackguard, as they had been set down for them, why the mob with one voice called out for "The Right Honourable Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate!" And, to the utter and eternal confusion of Romance and Reality, (let the fair and ingenious L. E. L. look to it,) leaning over a balcony, like Juliet to her Romeo," alike, but oh! how different," that distinguished performer "beseeched and implored" his dear mob, the " loving, lovely, and beloved," not to stay-as did that love-sick bride her "imparadised form of such sweet flesh;" but with the most lacka-daisical want of gallantry," as Mob valued his good opinion, and wished well to their common cause," entreated her "to go home!" But home, sweet home, at that hour had no charms for Mobby; and the waving of greasy caps, and the roaring of greasier gullets," hailed and wished him long," out of the ghost of a perfect gentleman, that apparition of the most imperfect of all possible demagogues. You may guess what confusion now tumulted the stage. But the actwhich had but barely begun-terminated with an unexpected coup d'œil et coup d'etat. His lordship was suddenly clapped into a hackney coach -for the property-man could not be expected to have ready his triumphal car-and a tremendous team of animals that shall be nameless having been yoked into the vehicle, less splendid, surely, than that on which Sardanapalus used to issue forth to battle from the gates of Nineveh, as painted in the immortal epics of an Atherstone, with no needless Jarvey on the throne, away rattled the imitation-thunder along the Mound, nor ceased till, like Jupiter descending from a cloud, Mr Jeffrey got out at No. 24, Moray Place, "While all Olympus trembled at his nod." The Fifth Act was long and tiresome -in absence of the only performer worth either looking or listening to, the Lord Advocate. Never felt we before the force of that well-known passage, "As when some well-graced actor quits the stage," &c. ; so, "thinking his prattle to be tedious," we left the mob in disgust, and forgot it, and our ennui, and all our mortal miseries, in the Blue Parlour over a board of oysters. Seeing the haste, if not the hurry, in which we now, and indeed always write, the gentle reader will excuse any confusion of metaphor or figure of speech that may appear to run through the above unpremeditated passage, which is as extemporaneous as any thing well can be, flowing from the point of time and pen. But suppose for a short season we try to be serious-not solemn-but sim ply and earnestly serious-and then Finis. For eight or ten hours, then, after the Election-during it there was but senseless shouting and brainless bluster-before it but savage scowls, slanderous insinuations, warning threats, and all the systematic enginery of tyrannical intimidation;— but for eight or ten hours after the Election, there was what might truly be called the Reign of Terror-if that expression did not convey an erroneous notion that there was Fear as well as Danger. The mob were up-and had been put up to the pitch of any, the uttermost wickedness; but they laboured under two wants that made them impotent |