concert and courage. An Edinburgh mob is cruel, but craven-senseless as savage. There is no more discipline among them than among a herd of swine-nor is their valour at all different; for hit them on the snout as they advance on the grunt, and you may take them by the tail without having any reason to pride yourself on your intrepidity. They shewed this from afternoon till midnight; you saw everywhere the white feather; and, on the whole, they were pretty well, though not sufficiently well, bruised and battered. We do not exactly know how the High Constables behaved; well, we must believe, (for they received thanks,) as a body, when called upon to act with the baton-indifferently well, when of their own accord, many of them, how many we know not, as individuals, joined their shouts to those of the mob during the Election, at each echo of a vote for Mr Jeffrey, and their hisses to those of the mob at each echo of a vote for Mr Dundas. As private individuals they did not stand there; and whatever were their wishes, they were bound then and there to be mute. Many of themselves had given warning of what was likely to happen-disorder and violence; and, from men with the emblems and weapons of civil authority in their hands, such shouts and hisses were incredibly foolish,-and far worse than foolish-being the best, as the only means in their power to adopt, for exciting that turbulence which they were sworn to suppress. The dragoons, it was afterwards said in some of the newspapers, cheered the mob; but this was a lie, which could be swallowed by no one who knows any thing of the discipline of British soldiers. They behaved, as they always do, with heroic forbearance; while showers of worse than hailstones were clattering on their skullcaps, few faces even frowned; and some of the veterans could not but smile at the childish cowards. As for the Special Constables-a band of brothers, though of all parties in politics-young, active, and fearless -they wedged their way through the mob, a hundred times, at its densest and its fiercest, and shoved, or knocked aside the ninnies like nine-pins. But humaner lads-and all gentlemen are humane-never rattled a

rabble. The word, to "Move on," preceded the blow to lie down; and a piteous expression on many a blackguard's face saved many a blackguard's head from the uplifted baton. How many heads they broke cannot well be counted, but it is satisfactory to know, as many at least as would save a borough from being included in schedule Å; while their own heads, though scores were cut, are all now, with a very few exceptions to the general rule-not to last long we trust, for they were among the boldest-as sound as roaches. At two or three places where the Special Constables were very few in number, perhaps not more than 20 in all, and these separated into sixes and sevens, the mob, by mere brute weight, overpowered the gentlemen, and you may guess how they treated them-with the most murderous ferocity! The Police Officers, more especially when the mob were about to attempt, for the second time, to murder the Lord Provost, were neither slow, nor yet particularly civil, and have since been ludicrously accused of generalization, by a few noisy noodles, who maintain the exploded doctrine of the neutral flag, and while putting it into practice near the Terrace, where shouts and stones were flying in the air, cats and curses, and brickbats were backed at long odds against batons, had their heads prepared for casts for the Phrenological Society, with the bumps conspicuously apparent of all the thirty-three faculties. This was as it should be, and the Society look to such specimens for an extension of the science. This small and insignificant sect of Antiburghers, are bitter on the Anti-reformers, and have since striven to support this thesis, affixed to different columns, "That had the electors, and especially the Lord Provost, remained all night-(it originally stood, in the MS., all week)-in the Council Chambers, there would have been no riot at all, and that the mob stood all the time on the defensive against the borough-mongers." This is a new form of the Row Heresy, and therefore will have its converts.

But we are rationalists, and not to be deluded with vain doctrines. It was rash-it was fool-hardy-it was nothing short of braving, nay of bul

lying the people-scribbled some calumniating cravens in the radical newspapers-in the Lord Provost to leave the Council Chambers so soon after the election. A pretty Lord Provost-say we-he would indeed have been, had he remained a moment longer than he did within these buildings, or shewn one seeming symptom of a fear that never found entrance into his breast. Not even to the rabble-rout was he unknown or known but by the proceedings of that day, which with pride he will always remember-but generous, liberal, and charitable in his wealth, the Lord Provost was the Friend of the Poor-the benefactor of the classes who now, contrary to all expectation, appeared to thirst for his blood. At tended by the usual officers, he walked into the street, neither fearing nor braving the brutes; but then indeed he soon found that he had not understood the cowardice and the cruelty of an Edinburgh political reforming mob. His very gentlemanly appearance even was hateful to them; and they would fain have torn to pieces a figure so unlike that of their own best-dressed and genteelest leaders, who, nevertheless, were no inconsiderable dandies. The hatred of bonâ fide beasts to men is nothing like so intense as that of blackguards to gentlemen. Had his lordship worn a mean, low, Whig look, at once sulky and sneaking, we verily believe they would have huzzaed; but he looked every inch, (six feet and upwards,) the Tory, and therefore "over the Bridge!"

The Whigs-who are not in their own conduct, when mobbed, by any means the most magnanimous of men -witness that of the best man among them at Forfar-affect to laugh at this mob as a sorry illustration of the Perils of Man. Certainly the city was not burned to the ground-nay, it was not even set on fire. Neither did the streets run ankle-deep in blood. Heaps of slain did not darken the first-floor windows-Arthur's Seat echoed not the groans of the wounded-nor were surgeons seen amputating on long tables formed of barrel-supported shutters the limbs of one half of the population. The day was not even like any one of the "Three Glorious Days in Paris," for the mob had no military to fight

with, and no pretty patriotic urchin, stealing under the bellies of the horses with a brace of pistols, brought down right and left a brace of troopers. Some soldiers were indeed present -but in civil broils the sabre loses its edge, its point the bayonet, and the brave disdain hostile contact with a base bluster of bullies. Yet of all that breathe, Whigs dislike most shrinkingly the breaking of their own dunderheads; and had this mob, by some strange reversal of the laws of nature, been a Tory one, how the Revolutionists of 1831 would have scampered! Clean heels they might not have made, any more than clean hands; but they would have disappeared into chinks and crannies to the tune of " Off she goes ;" and the military, both horse and foot-would to a dead certainty have been ordered to charge. We speak advisedly; for we think of Forfar. To be sure, there was no charge at Forfar except in the inns; but a squadron was ordered up to " quell the floods below" of old women and weans, and next morning, lo! the Lord Advocate on his way to Perth with a guard of ho

nour!

You must swallow this opinion of ours about Whig intrepidity cum grano salis; for it has been wrung out of us, in much wrath, by their presuming to laugh at the dangers and disasters of us Tories on a day disgraceful to the grinners. That they set a mob upon us they do not, we presume, attempt to deny, nor that it was composed of the lowest Whig and radical materials. It was several thousand weak, and wished to beat, bruise, knock down, and trample on, all Tories. No Tory would suffer such a construction to be put on the treating act" on any account whatsomever;" so suddenly pushing ourselves from our stools, we turned the tables, and (for we are constables) beat, bruised, knocked down,. but did not trample upon, all such reformers as came in our way, whether they had pieces of paling in their paws or not-drunk or sober-frightened or ferocious-provided only they were in the act of breaking the peace of the city and of the sky, by their mouthings, and their movements, and their missiles, and if not absolutely killing-for that depends upon circumstances over

which they had some, but not sufficient control-yet cutting and maiming the lieges, and disfiguring their handsome faces, perhaps, for life. It was no joke, we assure you, or a bad one; such urbanity was far from facetious; and though Shakspeare it is, we believe, who says you may find "sermons in stones," we are not such a melancholy Jaques as not to prefer them-even though heavier still-from a stick in a wooden pulpit. Suppose there had been no surly police-officers-no special constables-no companies of the gallant 79th-no troop of the bold dragoons, (and the Lord Advocate would have indignantly disbanded the military,) where would have been the writer of this article, and other preservers of the peace and guardians of the constitution? We shudder to think where, and beg you will not mention it; but this much we will say, that there had been an end to this magazine.

"Old men," quoth our worthy red-haired friend, the driver par excellence of the Carlisle Mail, between that merry town and blue-roofed Hawick Old men," quoth he, looking at us with the tail of his eye, as we sat trembling at his left hand on the box, on the taking, at a railroad rate of eighteen miles an hour, of that trying right-angle formed by Canonby Bridge perpendicularly touching the royal line of road which there overhangs the magnificent rockscenery of the Esk, at some hundred feet or two above the rocky and roaring channel-" Old men are timorsome." The dangers of that night, therefore, we must not exaggerate in our imagination; and we confess that in a faithful description-in a true picture and we wish ours to be so Edinburgh on that night should not exhibit from the pen or pencil of that great writer and painter, Christopher North, in the 181st Number of Blackwood's Magazine, such gloom or such glare as Troy now does in the second book of the Eneid, a poem attributed to Virgil, with about the same reason as the Iliad is to Homer. The truth is just this, and no more;-That, excited partly by their own evil propensities, -for principles they have none partly by the epidemical fever of this

Bill, which "hangs in the sick air," and poisons poor people-but chiefly by the incendiary arts of the whole Whig party, high and low, who were determined at all risks, and at all sacrifices, to carry their man and their measure, not only would the mob, on that day and that night, but for the firmness and moderation of the civil power and of the military, have wreaked their wicked vengeance on the properties and persons of all such citizens as they thought mainly instrumental in preventing the election of the Lord Advocate, but the whole city, instead of being threatened with many and formidable dangers thus finally crushed, would have been at the mercy of a lawless multitude, who, judging from the enormities which they, even as it was, could not be prevented from perpetrating, would in all probability have stained our streets and dwellings with blood. That such mischiefs might happen, if the Council elected Mr Dundas, many a radical Cassandra with flowing hair, and many a Whig Calchas with bald head, prophesied; that it did not happen, was owing, assuredly, not to "The Right Hon. Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate of Scotland." And this brings us to say a few words about his Lordship's share in these transactions, by way of practical conclusion to, we fear, our somewhat too long discourse.

In the first place, his Lordship knew, that all the memorials, requisitions, and petitions, in favour of his claims upon the Council, however honourable many of them were to himself, shewing, as they did, not only how high he stood in the estimation of his own immediate political party, a fact he knew very well before, but also in that of his fellowcitizens generally, which neither before could he have doubted, though such expressions of it must have been most grateful,-his Lordship, we say, knew well that not one sensible, and honest, and independent man of that political party, to which he had been all lifelong opposed, and never before so vitally as now, could do otherwise than most earnestly desire that all fair means might be adopted, by all concerned, to prevent his being returned Mem

ber for the city. He, at least, whatever others might be, or pretend to believe, could not be deluded into the belief" that Scotland, to a man," was for the Bill. In the Council he knew that the strength of the two great parties would be tried; and that though the personal merits of Mr Dundas were such as to entitle him to come forward, it was on the strength of the Tory party, and of the enemies of the Bill, both in its principle and details, that his opponent stood. He knew that among the Borough mongers," as the parrots chatter them, and as the apes would too, if they could articulate-there are hundreds of thousands of as honourable and patriotic men as himself; and that, to divide a nation of fourteen millions of freemen, which in numbers and character we believe the British to be, into thirteen millions, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three Reformers, all admirers of " the Right Honourable Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate of Scotland," and into seventeen AntiReformers, all favourable to plain Mr Robert Adam Dundas, is a division, that, even in the Moon, could not be told even to the marines.

In the second place, his lordship knew, that, in this contest, he was merely what is called the popular candidate. Prodigious popular excitement he knew there was, and that his opponent and his party, and especially his electors, would be exposed to the brunt of the mob. What an Edinburgh mob was likely to be, at this crisis, nobody could foresee with clearer eyes than his lordship's, which are about the brightest we ever looked in; and having been more than satisfied with a very slight taste of the quality of a Forfar mob, he might have had something more, we think, than a passive sympathy with what were likely to be the feelings of Mr Dundas, on the treat in preparation for him by the mob of the modern Athens. But his passive sympathy seems to have been so deep, that it could not pass into an active one; and we cannot see, that, during the dangers to which that gentleman, and all who supported him, were exposed, and from all of which he himself stood free, his lordship exhibited any desire-most certainly he adopted no

determination-to shelter those respectable fellow-citizens of his from the perils of his own mob.

In the third place, we beg to suggest to the popular and unsuccessful candidate, the consideration of the very striking contrast afforded by the Lord Advocate's passage of the Mound and the Lord Provost's passage of the Bridge. There, was "the Right Honourable Francis Jeffrey, Lord Advocate of Scotland," sitting or lolling in his own carriage, in the midst of his faithful friends, his own Carriage-and-Fourscore, a set-out that would have extorted three rounds of applause from the palms of Jehu. There, was William Allan, and he too is a Right Honourable, and eke a Lord, but the reformers had stripped him of all his titles, trudging on his own pins, in the midst of his faithless enemies, such a set-out as might have reminded a Pyrenean traveller of an encounter with a pack of wolves. We are still partial to soles, and once were celebrated pedestrians. But it is curious to remark how different are the impressions men receive from the same objects, according as they are on foot, on horses, or in chariots. The philosophy of this we are at present pinched for time to explain; but allow us to turn your attention to a single illustration. From the window of his Carriage-and-Fourscore the Lord Advocate of Scotland looked east and looked west, and to the pupils of his eyes the whole city seemed less like the Modern Athens than the metropolis of Paradise. The figures, moving to and fro the ethereal brightness, looked all angelic; including the hierarchies "in linked sweetness long-drawn-out" in front of his own chariot. The sounds that played softly on the drums of his ears," sole or responsive to each other's voice, to him their great creator," were as the music of cleansed and beatified sinners-in simpler words-saints. The Reign of Reform had already begun on earthand Auld Reekie appeared to be the New Jerusalem. But to the eyes and ears of the Lord Provost what reversal of all this more than garden of Eden! What a North Bridge"with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms!" One peep over the parapet, and he felt the force of the

Virgilian demiverse, "facilis descensus Averni." Chaos seemed to have come again—and that Anarch Old to be howling from the Calton to the Acropolis. "Oh! king, live for ever!" was still the cry that saluted the Lord Advocate's ears-those of the Lord Provost were regaled with, "Throw him over the Bridge !"

But as in "the soul are many lesser faculties, reason the chief," false or exaggerated impressions fade or fall away from the sensorium, and the soul sets her reason to see the truth. If for a time, times, or half a time, she has been deluded by her senses, she dismisses those bad and faithless servants to their cells, and leaves the sole management of her house and kingdom to reason, her chamberlain and her prime minister. Now, twice during the course of that day was the Lord Provost assaulted to the danger of his life, and after being driven to shelter, or rather save himself from death, in a shop, he was pursued by the murderous Macadamers to his own door, which was opened and shut hastily, and then barricaded against the gang, while dragoons guarded the porch. Next day his Lordship's indignation was much abated-and he pitied more than blamed the wretches that had forgotten they were men. Now, twice during the course of that day was the Lord Advocate hoisted into his carriage, not to the danger of his life, though to the disarrangement of his habiliments, and after being dragged by a posse of the elite of those "animals that chew the thistle," from the Lesser along the Greater Mound, and so on in his career of glory, he was safely deposited at his own door too, which opened and shut slowly upon the godlike man, who in a few moments afterwards reappeared on a balcony, and on the haunted heads of his idolaters "than honey from the honey-comb, that droppeth sweeter far" distilled the eloquence of his speech. Next day, wethinks, his Lordship's admiration must have somewhat abated, of the man creatures he had changed into cattle; and he too must have pitied more than condemned the wretches who had forgotten that they were men. Both their Lordships, in short and in long, were next day placed nearly in the same predicament

such is the inevitable recoil of natural sentiment in the minds of rational beings, soon as the pressure of some accidental external force has been removed, and the energies within suffered to exert their inherent elasticity.

ving

But, in the fourth place, after ha"looked on this picture and on this," and seeing that both are true to nature and to life-quoad istam diem-of which-had you given you your choice-could, would, or should you wish to have been the originalthe Mob-Victim, or the Mob-King?

In the fifth place, when the Lord Advocate, after his double-deification, condescended to revisit the earthly Exchange, and once more to mingle with mortals, at the written request of Bailie Learmonth, as yet but a mortal citizen, (and a narrow escape did he too make of immortality from immolation by the mob,) ought he not to have remembered that he had once been but human, like the poor blind creatures who were now asking his advice and his aid? There they were, in what may be called durance vile, in the custody of the leaders, if not of his party, of his carriage, nay, of the entire team. But ruth and pity his lordship had left behind him in the mansions of the sky

and "fire-eyed fury was his conduct now." That the magistrates had ordered out the military he heard with visible indignation. It was an absurd and needless step for men to take in their position. There was his own sweet, subservient, servile, lacquey and cattle-mob; and there were two companies of the seventy-ninth Highlanders! How he frowned with his black bent brows, like the Jupiter of Phidias, on the tartan-kilt, plaid, and plume! How he smiled with fairest forehead, like the Venus of Praxiteles, on the fustian-breeches, buff, and beaver-all much the worse for wear-while the evening air would have been aswarm with insects, had niggard nature but gifted them with wings! He sweetenedhe soothed-he promised-he beseeched-he implored-he prayed— and he pledged! And as the last echoes of the measured military tread died away in the distance, mayhap he had a dream of Forfar, and, in the midst of all his triumphs, a shade of sadness did fall upon his