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DESCRIPTION OF EDINBURGH.

Cleeas 'll come to Scotland some day. We'll gie him a gran' denner at Awmrose's; and to Mr Voelkner too, wha's a capital Ggghymnast, likewise, they say, and a model o' a man for muscularity and banieness, without an unce o' superfluous flesh, and balanced in a' his powers, to verra perfection. Major Downes,' I'm sure, 'll accept an inveetation, and we'll be a' glad to do honour to sic a clever and accomplished offisher; nor maun we forget honest Serjeant Lawson, wha has proved himsel a worthy disciple o' Cleeas, and dune wonders wi' his poopils in sae short a time. We'll a' get fou thegither, and we'll hae a rape frae the ceilin for a game at Ggghymnastics afore oysters. Mr Tickler's back-green practice will gie him a great advantage.

Tickler. Ah! Jamie, Jamie nae mair o' your satireshafts, for like elf-shots they're no canny.

Shepherd. Gie's your haun. Ay, that's a hearty squeeze. Nane o' thae cauldrife forefinger touches for me, that fine folk are sae fond o'. I like a grasp that gars the nails grow red, for then the bluid gangs back wi' birr again in circulation to the heart.

Tickler. Your right hand, my dear Shepherd, is like a vice, in friendship or in love.

Shepherd. I'm out o' breath. Ane o' you tak up the thread o' the discoorse, or rather spin a new yarn. Mr North, sir, gie's ane o' your gran' speeches. I want to fa' asleep.

North. Yes, Edina, thou art indeed a noble city, a metropolis worthy the Land of Mountain and of Flood, Glen, Forest, Loch, and long-winding arms of Ocean! Queen of the North! which of thy august shrines dost thou love the best-the Castle-Cliff, within whose hoary battlements Kings were born -the Green Hill looking down on deserted Holyrood-the Craigs smitten into grandeur and beauty by time and the elements or the Mountain, like a lion couchant, reposing in the sky ? 2

Shepherd. Losh me! that's beautifu' language.

North. The glorious works of Nature everywhere overshadow those of man's hands, and her primeval spirit yet reigns, with paramount and prevailing power, over the region that art has

1 At this time Major Downes was the superintendent of the Military Academy which had been recently instituted in Edinburgh.

2 Arthur Seat and Salisbury Crags.

SHEPHERD GETS DROWSY.

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made magnificent with spires and obelisks, towers, temples, and palaces!

Shepherd. Nane o' your astmatic coughs-on wi' ye—on wi' ye-ye deevil.

North. Wheel round the city as on eagle's wing, skimming the edge of the smoke, and the din, and the tumult, in itself a world, yet bordered how beautifully by another world of plains, woods, and ranges of hills, and that glorious Firth—all silent, serene, sublime—and overhead a heaven swept into cloudless azure by the sea-blasts, and stretching out an ample circumference for the path of the sun!

Shepherd. Eh? Was ye speakin to me? Ou ay, it's a gude jug. North. Eastward-those are ships hanging afar off between wave and weathergleam ;-westward-those are not clouds, but snow-capt mountains, whose sides are thundering with cataracts, and round whose bases lie a hundred lakes.

Shepherd. Whoo-ah-uch-awe!

North. The eye needs not, here, the aid of Imagination : but Imagination will not, in such a scene, suffer the eye to be without her aid. The past and the future she makes to darken or brighten on the present-the limits of the horizon she extends afar-and round "stately Edinborough, throned on craggs," arises a vision of old Scotland from sea to sea!

Shepherd (starting). Lord, sirs, I thocht I had coupit ower a precipice just then.

North. Thou hast been a great traveller, Tickler. Say, then, if ever thou didst behold a more splendid Panorama? Conjure up in competition the visions of great Capitals—for there is room enough in the mind's domain for them all-for all the metropolitan cities whose hum is heard in the centre of continents, by the flowing of rivers, or along the sounding seashore. Speak thou-and I shall be silent. Let those stone buildings fall into insignificance before mansions of marble-those domes sink to the dust beneath the height of Oriental cupolas -those puny squares disappear beside palace-bounded plains, on which a people might congregate—and those streets shrink up like a scroll, as fancy sees interminable glens of edifices, from which the music from the van of a mighty army would be emerging as the rear was entering the gate.

Shepherd. Did ye say ye heard the bawn? Are the sodgers 1 Bawn-band.

246

SHEPHERD STRUGGLES AGAINST SLEEP.

gaun by? If sae, I maun hae a look out o' the wundow. Hoots, ye gouk, it's only the watchmen crawing the hour to ane anither like sae mony midden-cocks. Dinna be angry gin I lay down my head on the table-for it's a lang ride, sirs, frae Mount Benger, and the beast I hae the noo's an awfu' hard trotter, and his canter's a wearifu' wallop. Do ye think Mr Awmrose could gie me the lend o' a nicht-cap?

Tickler. Why, James, I have heard you talk in your sleep better than any other man awake, half-an-acre-broad. The best ghost story I ever shuddered at, you delivered one Christmas midnight, to the accompaniment of one of your very finest

snores.

Shepherd. Wauken me, Mr Tickler, when Mr North's dune. Whew-hoo-whew-hoo-whew-hoo-ho, ho-ho, ho-ho, ho-hro-hro-hro-hro-hro-hro!

Tickler. Had I never heard the Shepherd in his sleep before, North, I could have sworn from that snore that he played the fiddle. What harmony? Not a note out of tune.

North. Why he is absolutely snoring the "Flowers of the Forest." A Jew's harp's a joke to it. Heavens! Tickler, what it is to be a man of genius!

Shepherd. A man o' genius! Did ye never ken afore that I was a man o' genius? But I really feel it's no gude manners to fa' asleep in sic company; so I'll do a' I can to struggle against it. Gang on wi' your bonny description, sir. Just suppose yoursel speakin to some stranger or ither frae England, come to see Embro'-and astonish the weak native.

North. Stranger! wilt thou take us for thy guide, and ere sunset has bathed Benledi in fast-fading gold, thou shalt have the history of many an ancient edifice-tradition after tradition, delightful or disastrous-unforgotten tales of tears and blood, wept and shed of old by kings and princes and nobles of the land?

Shepherd. O man, but that's bonny, bonny! Ye hae mair genius nor me yoursel.

North. Or threading our way through the gloom of lanes and alleys, shall we touch your soul with trivial fond records of humbler life, its lowliest joys and obscurest griefs? for oh! among the multitudes of families all huddled together in that dark bewilderment of human dwellings, what mournful know

NORTH GOES ON DESCRIBING.

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ledge have we from youth to age gathered, in our small experience, of the passions of the human heart!

Shepherd. Dinna fa' into ony imitation o' that flowery writer1 o' the Lichts and Shadows. I canna thole that.

North. Following that palsy-stricken crone to her lonely hearth, from her doom we could read a homily on the perishing nature of all this world's blessings-friendship, love, beauty, virtue, and domestic peace! What a history is written on that haggard face, so fair and yet so miserable! How profound a moral in that hollow voice! Look in at that dusty and cobwebbed window, and lo! a family of orphans, the eldest, not fifteen years, rocking an infant's cradle to a melancholy song! Stoop your head below that gloomy porch, and within sits a widow beside her maniac daughter, working day and night to support a being, in her malignant fierceness still tenderly beloved! Next door lives a woman whose husband perished in shipwreck, and her only son on the scaffold! And hark to an old grey-headed man blithely humming at his stall, who a month ago buried his bedridden spouse, and has survived all his children, unless, indeed, the two sons, of whom he has heard no tidings for twenty years, be yet alive in foreign lands.

Shepherd. O man! what for dinna ye write byucks? There ye hae just sketched out subjects for Tales in Three Volumms. North. It is long, James, since Poetry became a drug, and Prose is now in the same predicament.

Shepherd. Ye never said a truer word in a' your life. Some o' thae late Lunnun stories garred me scunner. There's Treman, that Lockhart or some ither clever chield praises in the Quarterly and there's Mawtildy, and there's Graunby, and there's Brambleberry-hoose, and there's the Death Fetch,2 and Carry, and some dizzen ithers, whase teetles I hae forgotten -no worth, a' o' them pitten thegither, ony ae volumm of my Winter Evenings' Tales, that nae reviewer but yoursel, Mr North (and here's to ye in a bumper), ever either abused or panegaireezed-because, forsooth, they are not "Novels of Fashionable Life."

1 "That flowery writer" was Professor Wilson himself.

2 Tremaine, by Ward; Matilda, by Lord Normanby; Granby, by Lister; Brambletye House, by Horace Smith; the Death Fetch, by Banim.

248

TREMAINE.-THE COCKNEYS.

Tickler. Tremaine is a sad ninny. Only imagine to yourself the beau ideal of a Freethinker, who is unable to give any kind of answer, good, bad, or indifferent, to the most commonplace arguments urged against his deistical creed. The moment he opens his mouth, he is posed by that pedantic old prig, Dr Evelyn, and his still more pedantic daughter, on subjects which he is represented as having studied professedly for years. There he stands gaping like a stuck pig, and is changed into a Christian by the very arguments with which he must have been familiar all his life, and which, in the writings of the most powerful divines, he had, it seems, continued utterly to despise. Such conversion proves him to have been an idiot-or a knave.

North. The third volume is indeed most despicable trash. But you are wrong, Tickler and James, about the Doctor and his daughter, as they show themselves in the first two volumes. There we have really a pleasing picture of a fine, old, worthy, big-wigged, orthodox, and gentlemanly divine of the Church of England, and of a sweet, sensible, modest, elegant, and well-educated, lovely young English gentlewoman. Had it been my good fortune, James, to fall in with Miss Evelyn at the rectory, I would have bet a board of oysters to a rizzard haddock, that I should have carried her off to Gretna Green, without any preliminary exposition of my religious principles, and, within the fortnight, convinced her of my being an orthodox member of her own church.

Shepherd. O siccan vanity-siccan vanity! and it's me that you're aye lauchin at for haeing sic a gude opinion o' mysel. I never thocht I could hae married Miss Evelin, though I've aye been rather a favourite amang the lassies-that's sure aneuch.

North. Imitators-imitators are the Cockneys all. They can originate nothing. And in their paltry periodicals, how sneakingly they blaspheme that genius, from whose sacred urn they draw the light that discovers their own nakedness and their own impotence !

Tickler. Title-pages, chapter-mottoes even-stolen, transmogrified, and denied!

North. What a cadger crew, for example, are the Cockney chivalry! At a tournament, you think you see the champion of some distressed damsel holding fast by the pummel, that he may not be unhorsed, before the impugner of his lady's