of old dates, and old coats-of-arms, and old Latin and French inscriptions--might represent France or Flanders at the present day, only rougher, ruder, and grander; or Paris, or London, three centuries ago. That stal wart-looking female, with basket on back, and short, striped, woollen petticoat, may be Norman; that decrepit old crone with closefolding cap, through which her wrinkled features and gray locks peep as through a crevice, may be Flemish; that girl, with fullbordered cap, flopping back from her face with the wind, if it were but clean, might be Dutch. But these are only passing impressions; those houses were built by a ruder and hardier race than any we have mentioned; those crowds above and below, on every side, are Scotch, and nothing but Scotch, and their squalor that of the nineteenth century. It is a strange scene, however often viewed. We are treading a mighty causeway where kings and princes have passed in triumph, and might still pass with gorgeous consistency of effect, and nothing but the lowest misery meets our eyes. We are standing in what is evidently the great thoroughfare of a great capital, and it is the capital only of the poor. Poverty in every form, of dirt, and care, and carelessness, has taken possession of the great city. It lolls impudently out of mullioned windows; it swarms merrily beneath arched doorways; it drags itself wearily up picturesque open stone staircases, and disappears in mysterious dimness; it dives recklessly into deep cellars, and is lost in utter darkness; it emerges from beneath doorways surmounted with ducal coronets; it totters down filthy alleys, into which you would as soon follow it as into a coal-pit; it lounges and sprawls in every attitude upon a noble breadth of granite pavement, elevated two steps above the street, which Regent street might envy; it fights, and gossips, and scolds, and screams in the centre of a causeway where six carriages might drive abreast. If you look upwards, clothes are fluttering to dry out of wretched garrets, where one would hardly think they could be worn. "Lodgings to let" stick out of eight-story-high pigeon-holes, where one would hardly think it possible a fellow-creature could exist. Human heads are protruded at a giddy height, whence one would imagine it impossible for them to descend. On all sides, up and down, population is swarming in those numbers which poverty and wretchedness alone venture to rear, till your heart sinks within you as you contemplate it all, | and think of government, and societies, and district visitors, or any other form in which the charity of the day seeks to do battle with the misery of the day, and feel how fruitless must be all such efforts against an impregnable stronghold of squalor like this. But we did not transport our traveller here to moralize. The character-studying and picturesque-seeking parts of his mind are all he must bring into Auld Reekie with him. Doubtless a tribute of feeling may be paid at the sight of fellow-creatures, poor, idle, and wretched; but we must remind him that it is not all misery in Scotland that looks miserable; and meanwhile the spell of excessive picturesqueness, which ever presides over dirt and disorder, especially in such a framework as the High street of Edinburgh, begins to operate. He is now fairly in the vortex of its vast world, and something exciting or characteristic, for eye or fancy, meets him at every step. Here is a great termagant woman, bony and powerful, who lunges against him, and then looks up, with all the soul of Jenny Geddes in her face, as if she would hurl her cuttie-stool or anything else at his head, for having intercepted her path. There are a couple of fellows standing insolently in his very way, with a regular Burkeing scowl on their faces; but they are figures fit for a Scotch garde mobile, and pictures fit for the Illustrated News. Here are those subterranean depths burrowing deep under the houses, in which whole families live interred, with no other communication with air and light than the hole by which they enter, and our traveller lingers involuntarily over the abyss, for the only specimen of a bonny lassie he has yet seen has just plunged down the ragged steps, and turned and looked at him as she wen. There are those flights of stairs open up to the first story, which go winding into the house, and disappear suddenly behind a time-worn stone shaft, and which, in spite of the noise and bustle around, seem to lead to the very mysteries of Udolfo; or there are steps projecting into the street from the upper story, so common in Scotland, with picturesque wretchedness of every sort gathered together upon them-ragged cherubs with shock heads, clustering about the rude stone balustrades; and hideous old crones, nose and knees together, gossipping upon the steps. Then there are gatherings around the pump, like Mulready; and chafferings over herringbarrels, like Wilkie; and drunken quarrels, like Hogarth; and dirty-soled, laughing urchins, with their mouths full, stretched on. the pavement, like Murillo; and among them all, the Newhaven fishwoman, pursuing her steady way, with basket on back, and head bent low, coarse in costume, but clean and whole, the very model of strength, industry, and lowly content; or a couple of English soldiers tripping it jauntily from the Castle, with their scarlet jackets, trim waists, and smart caps, who flourish their sticks with a kind of contemptuous coquetry as some boldfaced lassie bawls to them as they pass, "Bonny feathers make bonny birds.' Nor is it the sights alone which make up the picture to the mind. Even the sounds have their merit, for through all the din of voices the buzz of a distant bagpipe falls with a kind of appropriate harmony on the ear; nay, the very smells have a picturesque association, for they remind him of Coleridge's "two-and-seventy" at Cologne, which they in every way equal, with a whiff of whisky over and above. In the ugliness of the people, too-and they are the ugliest set we ever saw-there is a kind of spell of character which takes strong hold of the mind. There is plenty of the dark eye, small head, and wild sluttishness of the sister across the water; and a few specimens of the clean complexion, set off with the rusty, would-be-fine black cap, of the sister across the border; but the majority of that squalid crowd bear the indubitable marks of the national physiognomy. There are those gaunt, misshapen features, with deep lines and small eyes, which are known as Scotch; there are those knotty faces, flat and coarse, like lumps of granite, which are perfectly Scotch; there are those features which, with speech or smile, seem suddenly to open and flop back, like the borders of the cap, which are nothing but Scotch; there is the sandy hair, sandy skin, and even sandy eye, which is historically Scotch; there are the red coarse faces, and pale thin ones, both alike fetched from the whisky shops, which are sadly Scotch; and then there are the very facsimiles of the witches in Macbeth, who, as everybody knows, were Scotch plain, perhaps, but beautified by a sorrow which has hallowed and not hardened it; and then that loveliest of all expressions, never utterly absent, it is to be hoped, where mother and child abound-that picture oftenest repeated, yet always fresh to eye and heart-the sweet Madonna head, gazing at the babe in her lap. We observed but one in that vast nursery of population, and she was sitting apart beneath the shadow of an ancient doorway. As for the children of the High street, the harvest is too thick to be computed. They cover the ground, like the brushwood beneath a race of taller growth. They swarm like a plague of locusts in Egypt, only the west wind does not carry them off. They lie in shoals on the pavement; they gather in clusters in the street; they sit in rows on the kerbstone; they pour in legions up the wynds; crowds of them are playing upon every heap of coals or dirt; whole battalions of them are lying at ease in the gutter. Down every stair a couple of little naked feet are seen pattering; up every cellar a little dirty head is peeping. They run and riot without hindrance; they tumble and roar without pity; they thump, and get thumped, without mercy; they are too dirty to be touched, and too ugly, one would think, to be loved, yet, even in this infant pandemonium there are little imps who fasten on your sympathies. Here lies a ragged, filthy, innocent little thing, stretched out asleep on the pavement, whom you can't help looking down upon with tenderness; and then a little curly-headed, limpid-eyed monkey, lifts its face trustingly up to you, whom you could almost run away with; and it would not be missed, for it is five years old, and the mother has, doubtless, at least half-a-dozen others to bring up under it. Next to children, herrings are the most plentiful things in the High street; and there seems to be a kind of natural bond between them. Every slut of a woman carries a baby on one arm, and a bundle of herrings on the other. Babies are sucking raw herrings to keep them quiet; children are playing with putrid ones; while the most popular toy going seems to be these same delectable herrings' viscera, (to call them by a polite name,) which we first made acquaintance with in our old woman's recess on the eleventh story, and which we have since met with in such profusion at every step, that they have become quite a familiar object. But now our traveller must turn his eye away from that fascinating throng, and give a little attention to the equally characteristic | features which the buildings above and around him present. There is a kind of analogy between the national scenery and character, and the aspect and build of this old town. The houses are rough, and rugged, and wretched, but never tumble down. The giddiest garrets stand rude and misshapen against the sky, but as steady in their places as the highest boss of granite on the top of Arthur's Seat. Below, the houses have undergone some kind of civilization. In many of them the old tough walls have been smoothed and painted, and the small, deep-seated windows enlarged into the likeness of a modern shop; but the tillage seldom extends above the first story; the higher you lift your eye, the bleaker does the scene appear, till their tops look as if they had been vitrified by some process of fire, or hewn out of the solid rock. tween the houses, looking like gorges and gullies worn by the action of mountain torrents. These wynds are the most wretched features of all. The traveller's greatest enthusiasm cannot gild the misery that too obviously dwells there. There is a species of dirt and wretchedness which goes beyond the spell of the picturesque. Some of them are wider and less squalid, and still tenanted, here and there, by the brass plates and iron scrapers of such few respectable householders as still linger on in the Old Town; but the greater number are such as it seems purgatory to dwell in, and not always safety to pass through. Nature does all she can to cleanse the filthy pavement and purify the mouldering walls; blasts of wind whistle through them, and deluges of rain pour down them; but not all the rivers of ́Damascus, nor the breezes from Arabia, could sweeten these wretched ravines. The traveller feels, as overcoming his strong disgust he stoops under the dark, cavern-like entrance, and plunges into the murky twilight of the wynd, that he has entered that atmosphere of poverty which brings fever and pestilence, and every ill, moral and physical, to which flesh is heir, in its train. Here are none of the light and sunshine of the High street, which made all look free, if they did not look happy. The blackened, broken win rectly on a blank wall, or down on to the opposite dwellers' misery. Neighbors can shake hands out of the second story, or break heads, which they are more likely to do, out of the third; for the houses project at each story till they almost meet, and you look up at a sepulchral light at top, as through a dark chimney. As for sunshine, it would be melancholy to see it here, and moonshine to expect it. There is also a strength of character, a determination to get over difficulties, in the very positions the houses occupy. Auld Reekie is built on, and between, and up that succession of rocky ridges, which makes it the most wonderful town in the world to look upon, but the most difficult to erect. The houses, almost all, stand with their limbs gathered underneath them on one side, and hanging down over a precipice on the other. They are like giraffes, with short hind legs, and long front ones, or vice versa. There is hard-dows, stuffed up with clouts of rags, look dily one which is privileged to stand comfortably on level ground. Modern improvements enable the spectator to take in the construction of the town at a glance. We step with our traveller on to that grand George the Fourth's Bridge, which now conveys all the traffic of this side of the capital, at one leap, from one ridge to another. A wilderness of ragged roofs, and garret windows, and smoking chimneys, all tumbling and battered in irregular rows, like a jaw of broken teeth, are level with our feet. The gilt weathercock of a venerable church tower seems within arm's length. The grand pile of the Castle rock towers in the distance above, while deep below us runs that other muddy current of life, the Cowgate, with a repetition of the same scenes we have just related going on, coal-heaps, dirt-heaps, children, herrings, and all. From this depth, up to the level of the High street, the houses go climbing, like trees up a mountain side; the foundations of some level with the tops of others, like trees, too, on uneven ground, throwing out deep roots of masonry in search of support. A wild and rugged scene of artificial growth, with those alleys or wynds deep be But while your head is up, like the astrologer in the fable, you must take care what becomes of your feet. The ground is steep, and worn slippery with the perpetual passage of this barefooted race. The traveller has much ado to keep from slipping himself, while a dirty little vagabond child, who has nearly tripped him up in its headlong descent, tumbles prostrate before us, with its heels. higher than its head, and lies roaring with its mouth directly in a collection of our old friends-the herrings' viscera. Upon which, a beldame, with red face and dishevelled hair, rushes out of a coroneted door, clutches the unfortunate youngster by the shoulder, and finding it is not hurt, immediately gives it something to cry for. We have mentioned a coroneted door. But the house that owns it, and all above and below, are as wretched in their scale of original construction as they can be in their aspect of present misery. Story is piled above story, seeking the space which was denied below; but each story is so low that our companion's head is almost on a level with the second tier. And men and women with tangled locks, hardly to be distinguished the one from the other in the general gloom, are looking upon us from upper windows, with the ceiling evidently so close upon them that it is a wonder how they draw their heads back without striking them; while below, at the foundation, are shapeless holes leading into dark rocky cavities, which one would take for the dens of animals only, were it not for the glare of fire which is seen deep within. At this moment, a woman, toiling slowly up from the opposite end of the wynd, calls out in the strong, harsh, drawling voice of the Edinburgh people,-"Can ye tell me how Mistress M'Culloch is the day?" And a voice from above as harshly answers,-"She deed last Sotherday was a week, and was buried yesterday." On which the woman ejaculates," Puir bodie! Ah, weel!" and goes slowly toiling on as before. But the words have struck with a ghastly sound upon our traveller's ear. He has been picking his way, and turning up his nose, and holding himself drawn up together, as one who fears contamination with all around, and wondering with an idle wonder how any fellow-creatures could exist in such loathsome living graves; but that note of death has stirred a deeper chord, and as he hastens back out of the narrow way, in which the coffin of the dead woman could hardly have turned, the memory of poor Mrs. M'Culloch has found a mourner she little thought of. "Puir body!" indeed, to have lived and to have died there! Domestic architecture is an incontrovertible tell-tale. As we look at the very construction of these miserable abodes of humanity, we are led to conclude, either that these closes and wynds are far more appropriately tenanted by their present race of possessors, or, that their original ones were not so superior to them as coronets, shields, and other insignia of rank and consequence, which are scattered about, would lead one to suppose: wretched as the scene may be now, it is one which, from the very nature of the dwellings, could never have been otherwise than barbarous. But now our traveller must return to the High street. Here, at least, that prestige | of grandeur ever lingers which is extinguished in the deep, dirty defile of the wynd. How noble it looks, even with all its present apparel of poverty! an old aristocrat, though sunk now in the lowest misery. In one respect, it still triumphs over that young parvenu below: that can boast of no such churches, old or new, as here arrest the eye in the fine perspective of the Lawn Market and the High street. The Tron Church is no ornament, and the fire of 1824 has destroyed its prestige of antiquity; but that old St Giles', or High Church, in which royalty and vice-royalty have worshipped, with its picturesque coroneted tower seen from afar, has still that certain cathedral something about it which no Presbyterian renovations or innovations have been quite able to remove! And then that other grand edifice, which, with its exquisitely formed and finished tower and steeple, one can hardly believe to be the work of the last ten years; far surpassing any other modern sacred building we know in beauty and courage of detail, and combining so marvellously with the peculiar character of the great and strange Past around it, that, in spite of the freshness and sharpness of the stone, it carries with it a look of antiquity; yet modern enough, in one sense, when we see that the tower is put at the wrong end of the building, and an out-and-out Presbyterian modern in another sense, as the name first sounds incredibly, and then astoundingly, and then, to say the least, discordantly, on the ear- -Victoria Hall! With the deepest loyalty for our earthly sovereign, one can hardly bring one's self to pronounce these words in connection with a building, not only erected for the purpose of divine worship, but which is expressly stamped with every association of reverence and devotion towards the Lord of lords and King of kings that architecture can express. How strange that the holiness of purpose which has been so carefully uttered in stone should be denied in name! Victoria Hall! Why, Minerva Temple would hardly have a more heathenish twang! Pugin might place this building, with its name underneath it, as frontispiece to his volume of anomalies and contrasts. But let this pass; they must not throw stones who live in glass houses. Altogether, Catholic names, as may be supposed, are as little adopted as they are retained here in this stronghold of Knoxianity. There are St. Mary's Wynd, and Lady Wynd, and Blackfriars' Wynd still; and Abby Hill fur ther on; and another venerable precinct to which we are now approaching, whose significance of denomination is forgotten in the familiarity of custom. For we follow the gradual descent of the High street into a lower and narrower part, also redolent of old Catholic sound-the Canongate,--where signs of past importance crowd thicker around us; balconies, bas-reliefs, arches; high gates, with isolated houses within them; the ancient town-house, with its projecting clocktower, and the old cross half-buried in the wall; not to omit a cluster of more fragile tenements, with John Knox's pulpit, looking, like the Church he has instituted, as if it would tumble two ways; and crossing the imaginary line of Sanctuary, find ourselves before the ancient towers of the old palace of Holy Rood. The left-hand side attracts our chief attention, with its more time-worn aspect, and smaller-sashed, deep-set windows; for this was the Holyrood of that sovereign of Scotland whose beauty and misfortunes are matters of certainty, and whose errors (at least the worst of them) it seems impossible to prove. We cannot refuse to let our travelÎer enter in here, for not all the sentimentdisturbing companionship of sight-showers and fee-takers can dispel the excessive interest that invests these ancient apartments. The bed, the chairs, the relics of old furniture, may have belonged, as antiquarians aver, to the unfortunate and scarcely less beautiful Mary of Modena, for whom the additional quadrangle was built; but the miserable rooms themselves are sufficient memorial of the life and history of her who was Mary Stuart, queen of France and Scotland. There is that first state-room and the one bed-room through it, not half so big as any of the usual two drawing-rooms of a modern Edinburgh lady; and then that scanty, wretched closet, which an average-sized woman must stoop her head to enter, where Mary-if not wickedly, yet not wisely,-and if not wisely, yet most naturally-threw off the restraints of royalty, and enjoyed the society of those more congenial with herself in habits and education than the highest peers and peeresses in Scotland. And if the apartment be not memorial sufficient, there is that other witness which calls aloud to Heaven, and has told the tale from generation to generation of the ruthless barbarity which environed the unfortunate queen. Who can look at those thick, dim stains, sunk deep into the old oak floor,—who can examine the antiquity of that partition which shuts out this portion of the apartment from the queen's sight, or remark the local evidence of the vicinity to the door to which the victim was dragged, without acknowledging that this is, indeed, the blood which flowed from the fifty-six wounds of the hapless Rizzio? There is something in the silent solemnity of such a stain which the archest skepticism or the silliest levity cannot withstand. We have seen them both hushed over the heart's blood of poor Mary's murdered musician, though they might be renewed on the other side of the door. And though we have thrown out a sneer at the tribe of sight-showers who infest such places, and though we believe Mr. Hume has established the right of the public to a free entry into Holyrood Palace, yet we must make an exception for that worthy individual who, if she be not the very original of the Mrs. Policy of Holyrood memory mentioned in the inimitable preface to the Chronicles of the Canongate, is her undoubted descendant; for she would defend the blood of Rizzio, or any other relic intrusted to her care, at the expense of her own. It is edifying to hear the reverence with which she articulates the name of Queen Mary's Apartments !" as she ushers you solemnly in ; to see the faith with which she shows a glove of Darnley's, which may have belonged to one of Cromwell's soldiers; a picture of Rizzio, in the school of Sir Peter Lely; and a miniature of Mary herself, executed, to all appearance, by a living artist: and then the equanimity with which, observing the doubting expression on our companion's countenance, she remarks to us, in Mrs. Malaprop language, "That gentleman appears to be sceptible of everything." But she has her triumphs, for the blood of Rizzio converts him at last. The rest of the palace is uninteresting, unless we could show our companion that night vision of it we have seen, when the shortlived regality of the Lord High Commissioner revives something of its ancient barbaric splendor, and the Lady High Commissioner summons all loyal lieges to attend her court on the queen's birthnight; when the great deserted court-yard swarms with guards and attendants, and the crimson of the vice-royal liveries; and beneath every arch of the arcade are seen groups of youthful pages and uncouth "body-men," now vanishing in the deep shadow of the moonlight, now emerging into the glimmer of the widely-scattered lamps; and figures uncouther still, half-soldier and half-savage, stand like mutes on the great stairs, and point the way upward; |