Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk

Page.

PETER'S

LETTERS TO HIS KIN'S FOLK.

LETTER I.

TO THE REV. DAVID WILLIAMS.

Oman's Hotel, Edinburgh, March 5.

I ARRIVED here last night, only two hours later than my calculation at Liverpool, which was entirely owing to a small accident that befel Scrub, as I was coming down the hill to Musselburgh. I was so much engaged with the view, that I did not remark him stumble once or twice, and at last down he came, having got a pretty long nail run into his foot. I turned round to curse John, but perceived that he had been fast asleep during the whole affair. However, it happened luckily that there was a farrier's shop only a few yards on, and by his assistance we were soon in a condition to move again. My chief regret was being obliged to make my entry into the city after night-fall, in consequence of the delay; and yet that is no great matter neither. As for the shandrydan, I never had the least reason to repent my bringing it with me. It is positively the very best vehicle in existence. The lightness of the gig-the capacity of the chariot-and the stylishness of the car-it is a wonderful combination of excellencies. But I forget your old quizzing about my Hobby.

My evil genius, in the shape of an old drivelling turnpike-man, directed me to put up at the black Bull, a crowded, noisy, shabby, uncomfortable inn, frequented by all manner of stage-coaches and their contents, as my ears were well taught before morning. Having devoured a tolerable breakfast, however, I began to feel myself in a more genial condition than I had expected, and sallied out to deliver one or two letters of introduction, and take a general view of the town, in a temper which even you might have envied. To say the truth, I know not a feeling of more delightful excitation, than that which attends a traveller when he sallies

out of a fine clear morning, to make his first survey of a splendid city, to which he is a stranger. I have often before experienced this charming spirit-stirring sensation. Even now, I remember, with a kind of solemn enthusiasm, the day when (in your company too, my dear David,) I opened my window at the White Horse, Fetter-lane, and beheld, for the first time, the chimneys and smoke (for there what else could I behold?) of London. I remember the brief devoirs paid by us both to our coffee and muffins, and the spring of juvenile elasticity with which we bounded, rather than walked, into the midst of the hum, hurry, and dusky magnificence of Fleet-street. How we stared at Temple-Bar! How our young blood boiled within us as we passed over the very stones that had drank the drops as they oozed from the fresh-dissevered head of the brave old Balmerino! With what consciousness of reverence did we pace along the Strand-retiring now and then into a corner to consult our pocket-map -and returning with a high satisfaction, to feel ourselves under the shadow of edifices whose very names were enough for us! How we stood agaze at Charing Cross! The statue of the Martyr at our right-Whitehall on our leftWestminister Abbey, lifting itself like a cloud before uspillars and palaces all around, and the sun lighting up the whole scene with rays enriched by the deep tinges of the atmosphere through which they passed.

I do not pretend to compare my own feelings now-a-days with those of that happy time-neither have I any intention of representing Edinburgh as a place calculated to produce the same sublime impressions, which every Englishman must experience when he first finds himself in London. The imagination of a Southern does not connect with this northern city so many glorious recollections of antiquity, nor is there any thing to be compared with the feeling of moral reverence, accorded by even the dullest of mankind, to the actual seat and centre of the wisest and greatest government in the world. Without at all referring to these things, the gigantic bulk and population of London, are, of themselves, more than sufficient to make it the most impressive of all earthly cities. In no place is one so sensible, at once, to the littleness and the greatness of his nature-how insignificant the being that forms scarcely a distinguishable speck in that huge sweep of congregated existence-yet how noble the spirit which has called together that mass-which rules and guides.

and animates them all-which so adorns their combination, and teaches the structures of art almost to rival the vastness of Nature. How awful is the idea which the poet has expressed when he speaks of "all that mighty beart!"

And yet there is no lack of food for enthusiasm even here. Here is the capital of an ancient, independent, and heroic nation, abounding in buildings ennobled by the memory of illustrious inhabitants in the old times, and illustrious deeds of good and evil; and in others, which hereafter will be reverenced by posterity, for the sake of those that inhabit them now. Above all, bere is all the sublimity of situation and scenery-mountains near and afar off-rocks and glens-and the sea itself, almost within hearing of its waves. I was prepared to feel much; and yet you will not wonder when I tell you, that I felt more than I was prepared for. You know well that my mother was a Scotchwoman, and therefore you will comprehend that I viewed the whole with some little of the pride of her nation. I arrived, at least, without prejudices against that which I should see, and was ready to open myself to such impressions as might come.

I know no city, where the lofty feelings, generated by the ideas of antiquity, and the multitude of human beings, are so much swelled and improved by the admixture of those other lofty, perhaps yet loftier feelings, which arise from the contemplation of free and spacious nature herself. Edinburgh, even were its population as great as that of London, could never be merely a city. Here there must always be present the idea of the comparative littleness of all human works. Here the proudest of palaces must be content to catch the shadows of mountains; and the grandest of fortresses to appear like the dwellings of pigmies, perched on the very bulwarks of creation. Every where-all around-you have rocks frowning over rocks in imperial elevation, and descending, among the smoke and dust of a city, into dark depths, such as nature alone can excavate. The builders of the old city, too, appear as if they had made nature the model of their architecture. Seen through the lowering mist which almost perpetually envelops them, the huge masses of these erections, so high, so rugged in their outlines, so heaped together, and conglomerated and wedged into each other, are not easily to be distinguished from the yet larger and bolder forms of cliff and ravine, among which their foundations have been pitched. There is a certain gloomy indistinctness in the

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