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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 throbbingsfelt that life was there, and as if it were my own life, multiplied a hundred thousand times, in magnitude, intensity, and importance.

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If I were asked what is the great charm about this Old World, and if I wished to generalize the answ 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 connection 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 of these soldiers, both here and in Glasgow, parading about in this dresswhich, to describe it, is very like a petticoat hanging from the waist halfway down the leg, a hose

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coming up halfway on the calf-so that the person is naked from above the knee down to the middle calf of the leg. 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 imbodied 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

VOL. I.--F

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 Mid Lothian, I felt illusion, at some moments, to be almost as powerful as reality. I felt as if the lighthearted Effie, and the truehearted Jeanie, and the sternhearted 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:

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

HOLYROOD. Queen Mary's stateroom, 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 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 stateroom, 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. Leonard's-not having heard till the morning before that there was now 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;

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