trait forms no part of the moral physiognomy of any of the family I am describing. That sensitive modesty, which blushes with embarrassment when drawn into a sphere of higher attainments and great urbanity, or when surprised, in its own, by the unexpected intrusion of those more conversant with the customs and etiquette of the world-that war between consciousness of worth, and diffidence in presuming upon it-that warm and unvitiated sensibility of soul, which, like a well-tuned instrument, is ever in harmony with Nature, are ingredients at best but sparingly mixed with mortal composition, and which here, in particular, have been entirely withheld. Philosophers inform us, that the first step man takes in the progress of civilization is from savage to pastoral life; but the family of which I am speaking have convinced me that mankind do not rush at once from one extreme to the other, but that there are some intermediate stages, at which they halt for a little occasionally, to habituate themselves, as it were, to the new sphere they have attained, and establish their footing there before they reach forward to another. The transition is not immediate, as we are apt to suppose, while theorising upon the state of early society; the sun does not spring from the midst of darkness in the east, and shoot to its culminate position in a moment; it scales, by slow degress, the steep of heaven; and in this respect furnishes a very apposite picture of the progress of the human intellect. Were Kaimes himself to revisit the world he has enlightened by his labours, and be placed among the inmates of Glenhowan, I am certain he would find it no easy task, with all his discrimination and logical inductions, to determine in what particular stage to place them. He would find so much of savage and pastoral manners huddled and blended together, as to baffle all his efforts at drawing a line of distinction between them; and he would at last be obliged to set his mind at rest, by coming to such a conclusion as many of our naturalists sagely do, when a different colour of the skin, a joint or two more in the vertebræ, or any other slight anomaly among some members of a species of animals be

tween which the great and general outlines of Nature are the samenamely, that they are an intermediate class, and fill up the gap between the two to which they bear the nearest resemblance.

But let us now close with our subject; and, in order to proceed methodically, let us take a peep at the scenery amid which Glenhowan is situated.

The reader may fancy to himself two collateral ridges of lofty hills, running in a westerly direction for several miles, till terminated by other masses more stupendous, that distract the eye with their wild irregularity, while striving in vain, at a distance, to explore an egress towards the setting sun, and a little stream leaping from among them, as if descended from the sky, that seems there to have dropt the edge of its curtain, and realized the fable of Atlas. The valley between these two ridges is so narrow, that in most places the stream may be said to wash the bases of both, as it winds round their vast angles, to fall into the C, a short way beneath the village of M- ; and upon its banks, which, for a considerable way towards its source, are beautifully shaded with the birch, the alder, the oak, and the hazel, may be seen gradually peering at intervals, as if reposing beneath the shadows of the incumbent mountains, the onsteadings of the laird and the farmer, or the smoke curling in spiral wreaths from the chimnies of their workmen's cottages, and emulating the altitude of the hills, whose summits, to the eye of the spectator, seem almost to lose themselves amid the deep cerulean of heaven. Farther on, the houses become more unfrequent; the woods at last terminate, and a landscape opens upon you, composed of, here and there, a small piece of meadow, and hills of the most vivid green, where naked Nature sits enthroned amid rocks, and cataracts, and storms, and casts her eye over the aspect of a country unchanged, in all its leading features, since the birth of creation. Almost at the extremity of the glen, (for here may be assigned its partial termination,) and nearly the last farmer's residence within it, stands the house of Glenhowan, in the midst of a small clump of

straggling trees; and, from the ravages of time, and the neglect of its owner, almost an utter ruin. A huge mountain here runs almost across the glen, and intercepts the prospect to the westward, and nearly a inile to the eastward; the acute angle of the above-mentioned ridges bound almost the view in that direction, so that you are inclosed within a spacious amphitheatre; where, unlike the narrowing effect produced by the mimickry of man, the soul expands itself to embrace the vastness of Nature, and becomes elevated, and imbued with a portion of her sublimity. The area, to continue the metaphor, is here considerably extended. Several large flats of meadow, very fruitful in hay, run along the margin of the rivulet; and in many places are drier and more genial spots, adapted to the purposes of tillage, that bear good crops of oats and barley; but hay is their principal crop, and exercises their industry a considerable part of the summer; for, though the spots capable of cultivation are by no means neglected, yet agriculture and its produce, in the moorlands, form but a secondary concern. The cutting and winning of their hay, the stacking of it, which is always the most important work, and, except smearing, the most merry in the year, the looking of the hill, a delightful task in summer,-and the tending of their sheep and other cattle, are the chief avocations of the moorland farmer.

The reader will perceive, from the description I have given of the site of Glenhowan, how little intercourse its family can have with society, and, consequently, how little of the world's present knowledge or habits they can be possessed of. They seem like a rock in the middle of a stream;-the fashions, the language, and the manners of mankind, are for ever changing and gliding past them, while they remain unalterably the same, and still, to the imagination, appear coloured with the same romantic tinge of antiquity. The customs and peculiarities of their forefathers appear to have been no less an heritable property than their land. They have descended unadulterated, through many generations, and bid fair to make the tour of many still. Even

their dress is still imitated with scrupulous exactness; and the house, the furniture, and the few implements of husbandry that are seen on the farm, all wear the aspect of the beginning of last century.

I have often had the drum of my ears almost beat in pieces by the noisy garrulity of grandfathers and grandmothers, while enlarging upon the superior merits of the age in which they were full of sap, and unfurrowed with a wrinkle, and have been obliged to bow with humble deference, for the sake of quiet, to the dogmatic asseveration, that our flippant period could bear no comparison with their's; and the family of Glenhowan have not escaped this passion for reminiscence, and pride in the antique, which seems to be the rust of old age, and the common lot of humanity. They fail not to expatiate upon the excellence of the times that are past, and the dege neracy of the present; and, to the pride of belonging to a nobler era, they add the genealogy of a long line of dignified ancestors, in recounting the names and history of whom they might teach a Jew correctness and particularity. A great number of lairds are reckoned on the paternal side; and, on the maternal, they have no less pompous a list, tracing their descent, if I remember aright, even so high as knighthood. That they value themselves upon these "fullblown" family honours is a very obvious inference. To strangers who visit them, they affect a politeness and consequential dignity of deportment, which form one of the most eccentric and laughable of all their peculiarities; for either of these sit upon them with just as good a grace as the large black coat of the great lexicographer Dr Johnson would have done on the little dwarf kept by the king of Prussia, that could have danced in one of its pockets. This heterogeneous mixture of pride and politeness leads them to be extremely punctual in rendering "honour to whom honour is due." On going among them, you are instantly beset by the whole troop of fair ladies, ducking, and curtseying, and Sir-ing, and how-do-you-do-ing you, at such a rate, and with so much oddity of gesture, that it would require all the

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ill-nature of the learned Doctor I mentioned above to maintain your gravity, for to be grave in the midst of such exceeds all power of face." Then the laird coming forward, with his narrow and weather-beaten visage, reminding you of the sharp features of a squirrel,—a tall, meagre form, his bones kept together merely by sinews, and almost rattling like a castanet within his skin,-making his obeisance so low that you see into the hole of his neck, and elevating his back-bone to such a height as exactly to represent the figure of a camel! he is there, with the whole troop of fair ladies at his heels, with their "nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles," as when I at first beheld them; and were I on the point of death, I could not refrain from laughter.

The younger members of the household stand at a distance, in the back-ground of the picture, and gaze upon you with a mixed expression of inquisitive curiosity and stupid astonishment, among whom I must not pass over in silence the elder of the laird's two sons, a lad of about sixteen years of age, and "heir apparent" to the estate of Glenhowan. He is already as tall, and wants only the age, the withered visage, and the ungraceful projection of the hams, to be the perfect transcript of his father; for in every other particular, his auldwarldness, as the neighbours significantly call it, fully comes up to the family standard. This is the inevitable consequence of the way in which he has been brought up from his infancy, amid the same wild and sequestered scenery, and enjoying no opportunities of associating with any beyond the limits of his own domestic circle, or of imbibing ideas, or of acquiring habits, different from those which were thought ancient in the days of his great-grandfather.

The village of M- is scarcely five miles distant, yet he has been there only twice in his lifetime. His first visit happened to be on the evening of an illumination, during the rejoicings after the battle of Waterloo; and however poor such an attempt at splendour might in reality be, it may safely be affirmed, that never had his fancy, even in her sublimest flights, imaged to herself a

fairyland so replete with novel and wonderful objects, as the entirely new world that now burst upon his bewildered senses. The number of houses crowded together, with a regularity of which he had never entertained the most distant conception,-the brilliancy of the windows, with a candle in every pane,-the vast assemblage of people parading the streets to the sound of the fife and drum, and almost rending the welkin with their shouts and merriment,-the rattling vollies of shot, discharged at intervals, and the flashes that preceded their report, striking fiercely against the canopy of impenetrable darkness that hung over the shining village, which seemed like a star gleaming through the midst of a pitchy cloud,-were subjects of amazement and wonder on which Lee Boo himself could not have gazed with a greater intensity of surprise and admiration. He had heard the thunder booming along the summits of the mountains that tower above his isolated dwelling, and listened to it with the soul-subduing impression of its being the voice of the Almighty, he had witnessed the sublime warrings of the angry elements, in a scene whose every feature accorded with their savage wildness, and had raised his eyes by moonlight to the lofty horizon that walled him, as it were, from the world, and seen the stars apparently resting on its edge like diadems; but all these phenomena had been familiar to him from his childhood,—their frequency of recurrence had ceased to create surprise,-and his mind, like the sun of Ossian, sleeping in its clouds, had yet to awaken in the world of novelty, and experience here the first innovation on the sameness of its former existence.

We can scarcely conceive a more interesting subject for the speculations of a philosophic than the thoughts which must have occupied his mind concerning the multitude of objects that from every quarter solicited his attention in this singular situation. It was like a blind man opening his eyes for the first time upon the face of Nature; every thing he beheld was yet free from those associations which become connected with whatever we have once contem

stopt the execution of his "big revenge." The joy of his enemies may well be imagined, when they saw themselves thus rescued from impending destruction; and yet, so short-lived a sentiment is gratitude, that no sooner were they sure of being out of danger, than their former impertinence returned; and both their deliverer and his second-self were escorted by them to the precincts of the village, deafened with huzzas and laughter, and their persons, together with the garments in which they were scabbarded, made the butt of the most insufferable ridicule.

This specimen of polished manners and knowledge of the world, which I have given in the person of the young laird, may be taken as a general index to the character of the whole family, except, indeed, the oldest generation of the ladies, who, to the improvement resulting from a very few more visits to the village of M-, add the experience of several scores of years, with all the prying inquisitiveness, cunning, and waspish irritability to which almost every old maid, at their time of life, is liable. But the old laird forms the greatest exception of all, having been several times at Dumfries, about twenty miles distant; and sometimes, too, upon urgent occasions, such as that of his courtship, he has been seen a number of miles from home

in other directions.

At these times he appears mounted on a large draught-horse, the tail and mane of which have never been trimmed except by the hand of Nature, and whose long, heavy, and sluggish pace (for it is in no case whatever put to greater speed than a walk) give it an appearance no less singular than its rider. The dress he thus comes abroad in consists of a coat, vest, and breeches, all of black, and made in the very oldest fashion, a three-and-sixpence hat, and a huge pair of old boots, reaching to his knee-lids, so hard, dried, and wrinkled, as to be entirely destitute of even the slightest elasticity, and so wide, that he might jump out of them with the greatest ease. No spur graces his heel to goad the sides of his favourite animal, which seems to be quite familiar with its master,

and to trudge along under him more from choice than from compulsion. At times, however, he carries a staff, but apparently more for ornament than use at least one would imagine the horse thought so, as it uniformly, when he gives a tug with the bridle, a flap with his legs, and a back-stroke with the staff, all at the same moment, continues at its usual pace, without in the least mending it, or shewing the slightest consciousness of having received such an admonition.

I have sometimes had the pleasure of thus meeting him in his journeyings; and having been informed how much he was gratified by a little homage, I did not fail to uncover my head to him on passing, and to make a very low bow, in my most approved fashion, for which I was always amply repaid by his ludicrous manner of returning it. The expression of self-importance, blended with the deepest and most fawning gratitude for the honour paid him, which his countenance assumed,the low bow, till his nose almost came in contact with the pommel of the saddle, and the air with which he raised his hand to his hat, and again lowered it till it fell upon his horse's side,-were subjects of merriment for which I would even willingly have bowed the knee to him, and made every sacrifice of self-consequence which perverted pride ever taught one man to claim from another.

In this way does the Laird of Glenhowan hold on his course, attracting the notice of almost every one he meets, but never failing to attribute the eagerness with which he is gazed at to other causes than the appearance he exhibits. The representative of a long line of (according to him) illustrious ancestors, with the light of their memory concentrated in himself as its common focus, and being still arrayed in their venerable costume, and adhering to their maxims and habits,-in fact, the mirror of his whole genealogy,— he fancies (perhaps with as much reason as all who urge the same plea) that public notice is the unavoidable result of that deference his presence must naturally inspire.

In all these excursions, he takes