TRAVELLING, like charity, should begin at home. Let no one lament that he is cut off from the delightful foreign tour which "the state of the Continent" has forbidden, if he have still to become acquainted with the beauties and treasures of his own dear land. There is more altogether to be seen in Great Britain, whether of the historical, the romantic, the wonderful, or the picturesque, than in any other country on the surface of the globe. We leave Ireland out of the question, for even tourists have become Repealers now. Let no one especially lament his hard fate who intended this summer to have become acquainted with St. Petersburg, or Constantinople, or Cairo, or Pesth, if he have not seen a city nearer home as singular as any of these, and more beautiful, viz., the fair capital of Scotland. We are not Scotch ourselves, nor, singular to say, could we have been, even had we been born in the very heart of Mid-Lothian. Edinburgh is not "our own romantic town," except in love, gratitude, and adoption, yet we envy every traveller his first impressions of her wondrous beauties; that is, if it be possible to envy another that of which we ourselves with a long and close acquaintance have never lost the freshness. Still it is a pleasure to live these impressions over and over again with any sensible and susceptible companion who will intrust himself to our guidance; and, after a hard day's work, to earn the thanks that are due to a kind and patient ciceroneship, when all the time we have been trotting our companion about quite as much for our own good pleasure as for his.

How we enjoy, for instance, sallying out with him the first morning into Princes street, that our eyes may wander in admiration and astonishment through the whole length of that unrivalled causeway from west to east. Beginning with that pile of Castle rock, and its towers and guérites standing bold against the sky; we pass, in rapid glance, first the classic portico and rich pillared perspective of the Royal Institution, with

sun.

our Queen, in graceful robing, enthroned upon it; then that beautiful gothic structure starting up like a tall sprouting plant, or graceful jet d'eau, all sparkling still with the freshness of newly-hewn stone, with the thoughtful head of Sir Walter Scott seen beneath; and catch between them as we proceed glimpses of towers, and spires, and old houses, and rich foliage, till our vision rests on the Calton Hill, with its airy Parthenon pillars traced against the early eastern Or again, to place ourselves north and south, looking up on one side at that extraordinary pile of gray Old Town, with its giddy houses, eleven stories high; its ragged outline of wall and chimney, with tower, and spire, and coroneted steeple, seen above; and, nearer and lower, those grand arches of the North Bridge, spanning a very city in their length; and, higher and further, the blue line of Salisbury Craigs, with huge Ben Arthur presiding, like a lion couchant, over the scene;-and then down on the other side, on those splendid rows of palatial edifices, terrace below terrace, embosomed in rich gardens, with the blue Forth beyond, and the long sweeping lines of the Fife hills beyond that, till the old song comes into our heads, and we involuntarily exclaim, in a rhapsody of enthusiasm,—

Auld Reekie greet ye well;
And Reekie New beside;
Ye're like a chieftain old and gray,
Wi' a young and bonny bride.

Or how we delight to stand with him at the top of the Lawn Market, looking up at strange old houses with their gables towards the street; their open stairs mounting above our heads; their dark cellars and cavities disappearing beneath our feet; with those dark, dirty, winding passages, like deep rents between the houses, sloping into misty darkness, or giving momentary glimpses of woods, and hills, and turreted mansions, like Paradise, beyond them; and to wonder in

what part of the world we can possibly be, till the dress or physiognomy of the people -not their speech, for that's all Greek to us still-or the names on the many boards, Kenmore, Grocer; Porteous, Tailor; or MacBeth, Flesher; or the buzz of a distant bagpipe, or a whiff of Scotch broth, struggling with less agreeable perfumes, or, most significant of all, a sting of sharp east wind, convince us that we are in no other than the "Land o' Cakes."

Or how we love to loiter with him on the grand road beneath the Calton Hill, looking on the one side at all the crowded forms of both towns, and over and under those bridges and bands of communication which the old chieftain has extended like loving arms to his bride, and on the other at old Holyrood with her massive towers and delicate but ruined chapel; beyond which lies the glorious expanse of land and sea, where the cone of North Berwick Law overtops the coast, and even the Bass on a clear day is distinguishable; and, casting all comparisons to the wind, while it happens just here to blow so hard that we can hardly keep our hats on, to vow before heaven and earth that Edinburgh has not her equal in the whole world. It were strange if it had, for what other city can boast of such a concurrence of natural advantages? Situated on a quasi peninsula, having the sea, with its islands, and the Forth with its hills, as its east and north boundaries; with Salisbury Craigs flanking like a wall of defence the approach to Arthur's Seat on the south-east; and the rugged knolls of the Braed Hills, and the bold lines of the Pentlands stretching round from the south to the west; and, lastly, in the centre of all that splendid mass of rock, inaccessible on three sides, and sloping down on the fourth with a high rocky ridge, inviting a warlike race to perch their nests upon it; Auld Reekie, even when single, must have been the wonder of the world. And then to see that "bonny bride," whom he has taken to his arms rather late in lifefor the old chieftain, like a true cautious Scot, did not encumber himself with a better-half till he could afford it-and whom he has not only placed in a position which would alone give grandeur to the meanest building, but also clothed in a splendor of architecture which would make a better St. Petersburg of her, even if, like that much over-praised city, she lay etched out on a swamp. Truly there is no city like Edinburgh.

Twenty cities might be endowed with the superfluity of her beauties. The only draw

back is, that there is too much in one feast even for the veriest gourmand in scenery to do justice to. One is almost distracted with the variety. You feel that, while you are enjoying some paragon of Art, you are losing some marvel of Nature; that while you are gloating on a Canaletti, you are neglecting a Turner: that you can nowhere place yourself before one grand object without turning your back on another; that, in short, if you are in Edinburgh but a few days, you are gorged with an over-abundance of good things; and that if you live there all your life, you can never be satiated.

We English are especially entitled to a kind of fatherly pride at the sight of the New Town. It was the prosperity resulting to Caledonia by her alliance with England which built this city of palaces. It was the friendly, though at first hated, hand of the Union, which gave away the bride. The same deed, signed, as tradition reports, in a cellar in the High street, which gave Scotland finally to England, gave also some eighty years later the New Town of Edinburgh to Scotland.

One cannot but feel, on looking round, how puzzling it must have been for the first builders to know where to place their houses, for very embarras de belles sites. There were mountain, and sea, and river, and hill, and wooded knolls, and verdant slopes, and sunsets and sunrises, such as are seen nowhere else, all spread out to choose from; for front or back view, or both. Not that we should have doubted long. The centre of Princes street would have been our final choice: for mountain and sea, hill and river, verdant slopes and wooded knolls, may be had in other countries: but where else is there to be found an object so strange, so various, so inexhaustibly fascinating, as that wonderful, gray, lofty, jagged thing, conglomerate of innumerable dwellings, and yet apparently all of one piece, spread out before us from east to west, which is known by the name of "the Old Town?" The wonder is how any mode of life, which requires abstraction of thought and closeness of application, could ever be carried on in rooms commanding this view. Lawyers, clergymen, and especially authors, unless so fortunate as to be blind, must have been ruined here. This accounts for the general passing of these houses in Princes street, originally built for gentlemen's families, into the occupation of shopkeepers, who, it may be remarked, borrow a leaf from out of our book, and are more civil than most others in escorting their customers to the door, just for an excuse to get a peep of that exquisite Old

huge mass is returning to its misty monotony, though not for long. For even before the last gold from without has passed away, the first spark from within has begun to shine; and here and there a ray is seen feebly pierc

How grand is the first morning view of it, as it rises from its high pedestal of rich foliage!-one huge gray mass, all jagged in outline, like an enormous granite ruin; till gradually a thousand windows--some scattered up and down, others in level rows eleven times repeated-glimmer murkily in the early light; and a thousand chimneys send forth their slender pennons of smoke in beautifully waving lines at every stage of altitude; some floating into the clouds above, others wending up their way from the very base as if sent forth by subterranean fires; and then, as the sun mounts higher, (if we have any sun at all,) and light and shadow fall upon this maze of monotonous confusion, to see how those eleven-storied patriarchs stand forward, with smaller structures clustering at their roots, throwing deep shadows into endless entanglements of roof, and wall, and gable, and dark hollows, and strange antiquated forms; till more murky windows glimmer, and more smoking pennons wave, and we feel that this is not only the accumulated erection of many past ages, but the present residence of a crowded people.

We have doubted whether the sun would shine upon the traveller, but we are not sure that we even wish it for him. There is a mysterious affinity between the Old Town and the prevailing skies of Scotland which constitutes one of its greatest charms; there is an exquisite harmony of tint which, like a picture painted in the fewest colors, is always acceptable to the eye. Everything partakes of that beautiful rusty tone-the green gray rocks, the gray green trees, the blue gray sky; and then that pure gray Old Town, which, like a veritable Rembrandt etching, has a coloring all its own, which nothing else can attain.

And now we should advise our traveller to tear himself from the window, if he can, and bestow his enthusiasm elsewhere for a time. It can come nowhere amiss in Edinburgh. But let him return to his post at the gloaming, or just before it, as the last glitter of the evening sun is dying away, and the

sentinel lights upon a huge scattered fortress; while window after window, faint and pink, dawns into view, and little earth-born stars twinkle in the clouds above, and brighter glowworms emerge in the depths below; and the illumination spreads upward and downward, and brightens as it goes. And now may be discovered, more clearly than by any daylight view, the distinction between the different classes of occupants; how the comfort diminishes as the light spreads upward, "small by degrees and dimly less." Those elevenstoried houses especially are regular gauges of social distinctions. Below, the burners of gas, brilliant and glowing, for two or three stories; then very respectable long-sixes; then the modest poverty of the dip; and, lastly, a little twinkle from garret and lucum which savors miserably of the rushlight. Not that any of the lights are very brilliant now, for a cold mist has shrouded the whole scene, and they glimmer mysteriously and ghostily; and the whole mass looks larger and loftier than ever; for, in the general gloom, the lights in the more modern houses which nestle in the hollow seem to be all one portion of the great façade; while, in the darkness which hides every object between us and it, the huge and dimly-illuminated monster seems to start from a bottomless abyss.

And now this is surely enough of the Old Town front. But no, we have one aspect more to show our companion. He has shut the window and left it, for the night is raw, and who cares to look at the beautiful or the picturesque through spectacles? But he returns for one glance between ten and eleven, throws up the sash in hot haste to be sure that the wondrous object he has just caught sight of is not a phantasmagoria of his senses, and then stands transfixed. The night is dark, the fog has all cleared away, and a dense black curtain hangs from heaven to earth. studded with lights innumerable, like the fullest firmament of stars we have seen in the clearest tropical sky. Like the stars, too, in irregularity,-here a "burning row," there a Pleiades cluster; some twinkling like planets; others steady and distant as fixed orbs; some moving slowly across a space, others dancing like Jack-o'-lanterns, a few going out as he gazes: and he could stand and gaze all night.

The longer he looks, the more he wonders. It is a transparency on a scale Vauxhall never dreamt of. It is an enormous grim spectre, with lights innumerable in its hollow eyes. It is a robe blacker than night, spangled with orbs brighter than the stars. It is a wall pierced with countless holes, with a world blazing behind it. What should he liken that to, of which he has never seen or imagined the likeness before?

The Old Town is doing his best to turn night into day. Thousands of candles are there, shining forth on a naughty world. Just about the centre may be seen three lights, framed in crimson, telling of a more luxuriant abode than any other behind that black wall, and leading the eye suddenly down to two red fiery balls, shooting horizontally across the base, which betray the railway-line deep in the hollow.

It is worth arriving at night by that railway, the North British, to be taken by surprise by this radiant phenomenon; and taken by surprise the traveller must be, or he won't look at all. For there is no being so perversely indisposed to see what he has purposely come to see as an Englishman just arrived by a train, and that an hour and a half behind time. Curiosity and love of novelty are strong passions in the human breast; but there is one stronger still, at least in an English one, and that is love of luggage! The traveller has thought of nothing else all day but the first impressions of Edinburgh. Anticipations of Auld Reekie and New Reekie have beguiled a day-long journey; but once arrived in the very hollow of their mighty embrace, his thoughts have returned to their grovelling with his luggage. We see him in imagination toiling up that steep road which leads directly to Gibb's Hotel, turning round every moment to see that the porter who is carrying his "three pieces,"―as as foreign travel has taught him to designate his portmanteau, hat-case, and carpet-bag,-is not absconding with them behind his back; when turning again, just as he reaches the level of Princes Street, that wondrous transparency suddenly bursts upon him. He stands in perfect amazement; and portmanteau, hat-case, and carpet-bag, may go on to Aberdeen, or back to London, for aught he cares!

But now morning is come again, fresh and blowy, with plenty of that dust which Edinburgh so unnecessarily scatters in her visitors' eyes. The Old Town is once more in its usual rusty suit, with waving smoke and glimmering window. We must break through

that gray crust, and penetrate deeper into its mysteries. Let us ascend one of those elevenstoried piles we have been admiring under such diversity of aspect. Take that massive front, with its high-peaked lucums to the right, near that exquisite green slope from the Castle Esplanade. It was here Johnson visited Boswell; and here also David Hume resided many years, till he removed into the oldest square of the New Town. We cross the Earthen Mound, or rather climb it, for it is a steep ascent, and enter an open doorway, looking like a burrowing-hole at the base of the great pile above it. A broad stone staircase is before us, regularly zig-zagging up, nine steps at a time. At every alternate flight are two sashless windows looking out into the world, or a door leading into the warren. Other walkers are 'following us,-women, and children, and bakers' boys, meet us,-for this stair is a regular thoroughfare into Milne Court, and so through to the High street, which sets on to it behind at about the fifth story. So far it is not only "a common stair," as the Scotch significantly call it, but a positive street; conducting between rows of houses which lift themselves one above another, each having its own private door, with their brass plates and iron scrapers, as if in the open air, instead of being side by side. One of these doors is open; we peep into a long, dark vestibule, leading right and left, with more doors and more brass plates leading off that;houses within houses, each having its parlor, bedrooms, kitchen, garret, and cellar, all on one floor. The warren is full, indeed! But we mount higher and higher-Heaven pity those who live at top; half way is treadmill sufficient!-and the brass knockers and plates of gentility vanish as we ascend, and the doors look poorer, and the wind whistles about us through the open windows, and our companion feels very much as if he were mounting a church steeple, or climbing the winding branches of a lofty silver fir to steal the nest that lies at top. At length we are at the last flight; and toiling slowly up, with a pail of water in her hand, is a poor old woman, who goes groaning and grumbling, and looks as if she would have been much more comfortable on a broomstick. We take the pail off her hands, beg in return to see her domicile, and are, in a few minutes, comfortably resting ourselves in a little cottage in the clouds. The room is lined with old smoke-dried panelling. A little fire is smouldering on an open hearth; a few odds and ends of primitive-colored prints are hung

around; there is a bedplace in the wall, with a rug for the covering. In short, her little abode might have been a biggin nestled in some nook of the Highlands, instead of a garret perched on the top of brass plates and cast-iron scrapers; at all events, it would not have seemed further removed from the rest of the world. But the view is one which the Highlands themselves could not have offered. The only window is in the recess of one of those lucums we had seen from below. This recess is evidently the old lady's scullery, wash-house, and back-kitchen. Here she has been washing out rags and gutting herrings, with a view of heaven and earth before her one would have thought she could not have turned her eyes from. New Edinburgh, with all her magnificence of square, street, monument, garden, and public building, lies spread out beneath us,-with field and homestead, and green slope beyond, and smoking Leith, and smiling Granton; and villages and country-houses, and the broad Forth speckled with vessels, and the grand Fife hills, which have risen higher and higher with us, and a sky above the whole which is alone worth climbing eleven stories to see.

From this window the birth and progress of that glorious city had been watched. Hence, if any one remained at home on such a day, the great festivity of laying the first stone was overlooked. From this garret conjectures had been formed how the great undertaking would end, and how far the building mania would extend. From this little lucum recess a whole history of the gradual progress and development of Scottish civilization might have been read; unless, as is most probable, the predecessors of our old lady had been, like herself, mere drawers of water and gutters of herrings, and had never thought of progress or civilization at all. For her ideas move very properly in her own small sphere; and when we compliment her on the beauty of the view, she complains that it is a hard thing to bring up "every drap o' water" that height and so it is. Then our traveller, in his best English, respectfully inquires whether she can tell him in which story David Hume lodged. "Dawvid Hume! Dawvid Hume!" says the old woman; "I hae been here this echteen year, and never mind sic a name. Dawvid Hume is no on this stair." To which he gently replies, in Toots' phraseology, that it is "of no consequence," and we beat a retreat.

But this is hardly a fair specimen of an Old Town abode; or rather, too fair an one. That old lady is of a different order of beings

to those we are going to see, although she knows nothing of David Hume. We emerge five stories higher than we entered, into a gloomy court, with high, blackened, grim houses round it, and, following a dirty alley to the right, are soon upon the broad expanse of the Castle Esplanade. Here, where the statue of the Duke of York now looks down on a few loitering soldiers, or an occasional passenger, all the beauty and fashion of the old city used to promenade. But the view is unaltered. On the one side that never-tiring Forth, with the Ochills lying in a different inclination to any other hills in Scotland, as if purposely to fill up the circular boundary to the eye; on the other the Braed Range, with the Blackford Hill, renowned in Marmion, and wood and villa beneath; and in the centre, standing apparently on the very tops of the houses in the Grass Market, that exquisite specimen of the architecture of the seventeenth century, Heriot's Hospital. But, as usual, there is too much to admire at once; for that stupendous Castle rock, of which you only perceive the real height now that you are yourself on an eminence, is alone all-sufficient to engross the eye. With its ancient fortifications, too, on this side; archways, portcullis, half-moon battery, and clean-cut sentinel-boxes, the very ideal of a stronghold of the middle ages. And that high-barred window towards the south-east, on that giddy continuation of the perpendicular outline, where Mary Stuart was confined of James VI., in a room not so big as any modern butler's pantry in any of those modern palaces beneath. That room is well worth seeing, with the royal cipher on the six feet square ceiling. And that dungeon, too, where the graceful regalia of Scotland lay hidden for a hundred and twelve years beneath an accumulation of dust, and is now shown sparkling with its jewels by the light of a lamp. But we must leave all those sights for the present, and Mons Meg, too, who waylays us cunningly on our passage, and plunge our traveller at once into all the noise, the dirt, the squalor, and the grandeur of the High street.

It does not matter if it be the first or the fiftieth time that this locality opens its picturesque perspective before your eyes, the same sense of strangeness, wonder, and doubt, as to time and place, is sure at first to beset us. Those lofty houses, with their gables towards the street, with their rows of double lucums, surmounted here and there with that of which no time or climate can obliterate the elegance-the fleurs-de-lis-with their tablets