Gentle Shepherd; and here, look, a slab, set in the side-wall of the new church, bears the name of Allan Ramsay, and a quatrain signed Burns, which I cannot now recall, but it includes a line from Gray's Elegy. An old man who was mowing the grass told me-with an interest in the matter (it was not pecuniary) which it would be hard to find in England-that Allan's grave was not near the slab, but he could show me where it was-under that birch tree-his and his wife's. The varse is Burns's,' he added. All but one line,' said I. ' 'Ay ay, ye're richt, that's Gray.' His manners were at once respectful and independent. He at once moved off and resumed his mowing. I have often thought that the old-fashioned respectable Scottish working people both of town and country are superior to the same class anywhere else. But I doubt the new generation has not improved on the old school.

Why has there never been a sexton-poet? I daresay Hamlet has given the true reason.

Against the oldest looking part of the churchyard wall (a fragment, is it not? of the ancient city wall) is an upright monument,-'From May 27th, 1661, that the Most Noble Marquis of Argyle was beheaded, to the 17th of February, 1688, that James Renwick suffered; were one way or other Murdered and Destroyed for the same Cause, about Eighteen Thousand, of whom were execute at Edinburgh about an hundred of Noblemen, Gentlemen, Ministers, and Others, noble martyrs for Jesus Christ. The most of them lie here.' But, surely, by far the greater number owed their fate to politics rather than religion. The old Greyfriars Church, built 1612, was burnt down in 1845, and the present building is in no way notable.

John Knox's house (provided for him about 1560 as minister of Edinburgh, and in which he lived

some twelve years) I failed not to enter, mounting to the first floor by the old outside stair, which, like the countless other stairs of the High Street, swarmed with dirty barefooted children. The rooms, albeit restored and painted up, retain a veritably quaint aspect in their low ceilings, dark panels, and latticed windows. Here is the projecting little room which the Town Council built for the stern preacher, for a study, with an oak-chair in it vouched for as his. From this window in another room he used to preach to the crowd in the High Street. Hereabouts he sat when the bullet intended for his head went through the brass candlestick. Outside, on the corner of the gable is carved a sun issuing from clouds, and bearing on his disk OE02, Deus, GOD, at which a bearded man points with his right hand, while he holds a book in his left. This perhaps has been added since Knox's time, but not so the inscription that runs along the wall :—

LVFE. GOD. ABUFE. AL. AND. YI.

NYCHTBOUR. AS. YI. SELF.

Under this is the window of a tobacconist's shop which occupies the ground-floor, with theatre and music-hall bills displayed among the pipes and 'birds-eye.' At the counter they serve you with a cigar, or with a ticket, price sixpence, to see John Knox's rooms.

The cemetery in which his body was laid is now Parliament Square, where you will find 'I. K. 1572 'cut on a slab in the pavement, just behind the horse's tail of a leaden equestrian statue (the horse in the act of performing a curious dancing step), with a long inscription on the pedestal, beginning 'Augustissimo, magnificentissimo, Carolo Secundo.'

At Geneva, one Sunday evening, I went to look at Calvin's grave, and found the citizens thronging into the doors of an Opera House hard by. In this old street in

which Knox lived, preached, and has found a grave, folk do not go to theatres on Sunday; but on Saturday night, and not that night only, a drunken, blasphemous, vicious, shameless multitude swarm in the main thoroughfare and up every stinking court and 'wynd,' and on every foul common-stair, and through every stifling hole and passage of the huge old frowsy gray houses, crammed with filth and disease, crawling with every kind of vermin, of which the human is only the largest. The public-houses close at eleven, but the people drink hard up to the hour, and then take out whiskey in bottles. The dissolute women in the streets are less audacious than in London, and not on such easy terms with the police their being out without lawful business after ten is ground enough for an arrest. Still they are very nu

merous.

It is no easy matter to reform mankind.

The right way, it would seem, has not yet been discovered.

I saw the National Gallery of Scotland, a pleasant suite of rooms, containing several noble pictures of the Venetian school; a fine Gainsborough (the Honourable Mrs. Graham), a noteworthy 'Madame Pompadour' by Boucher, and other interesting portraits; but what I really learnt there was to appreciate the genius of Thomson of Duddingstone.' There are eight of his landscapes in the gallery combining a highly cultivated artistic breadth and richness with a delicate and reverential regard for natural truth; Aberlady Bay' (No. 537) being perhaps the best of all. John Thomson was born in the Manse of Dailly, Ayrshire, September 1, 1778, succeeded his father as minister there, in 1805 was presented to the parish of Duddingstone near Edinburgh, and died there October 20, 1840. He painted a large number of

pictures. He is described as of very kindly disposition, with good scholarship, and also a fine taste for music.

The most popular pictures in the gallery seem unquestionably to be two, by Sir Noel Paton, purporting to represent scenes from the Midsummer Night's Dream, very elaborate, clean and pretty in execution. They contain a crowd of naked figures, which, if they were not called 'fairies' and presented under the shield of Shakespeare's authority, would certainly be thought rather queer in their attitudes and goings on.

This reminds me of a walk I had in the Sculpture Gallery (over the Antiquarian Museum) on a day when it was open free to the public, and of the astonished looks of two young women, evidently fresh from the country, as they marched down the central lane between two double rows of life-size casts from the antique-Ajaxes, Antinouses, and the rest of them. In the same place I heard a rough fellow say to his comrade, as they stood before a gigantic statue of Neptune, 'There wur nivir a mon as muckle as yon!' So practical in its views of art is the uncultivated mind.

I rambled to several interesting places near Edinburgh,-to the wild sheep-walks that so strangely rise hard by-one might almost say among-the crowded city streets: to the grim gray seaport of Leith, and, crossing the Forth, watched that striking prospect of the mingled towers and mountains of the Metropolis of the North; to Roslyn Chapel (an hour's drive away through the stone-fenced barleyfields), fine-wrought gem of Gothic carving, looking down its grassy slope upon the glen where Eske brawls among rocks and highpiled trees, and the shadowy path leads to Hawthornden (whose guest was Ben), standing solid on its verdurous precipice, while high around rise the valley-woods. I wandered

out to Morningside, name of pleasant promise, a well-to-do suburb looking to the green slopes of the Pentlands. But, alas! when I got there I found myself in a network of high gray stone walls. 'Lover's Lane' has a cemetery wall on one side and a garden wall topt with broken glass on the other, each ten feet high. At the lower end comes one pretty peep of the green Pentlands across a meadowy vale, and they would have been visible all along the lower road but for the endless stone walls of 'Canaan Park,' 'Eden Hermitage,' 'Harmony House,' and other mansions. The 'Jordan' burn flows through the valley. These' (as Mr. Pecksniff said, in reference to his daughters) are not unholy names, I believe.' But they seemed true Calvinistic paradises, within their high and harsh walls of gray stone, length after length, and no glimpse even at the gates, which all kept tight their wooden lips.

I solaced myself by making a childish rhyme—

All tall wall, dreary weary way! Harsh, grim, gray, dreary weary wall! And it applies to most of the Edinburgh suburbs. Stone is so plentiful that people build eightfoot walls round their cabbage-gardens and turnip-fields. One gets sick of the harsh gray stone. Beyond Dean Bridge I came on the still quaint up-and-down red-roofed village of the millers, with the muchpolluted Water of Leith' flowing through it; and wandered through Dean Cemetery on the hill above, where among the multitude of tombs are those of Jeffrey and Professor Wilson, once- but hardly nownames to conjure with.

How the important business of eating and drinking is carried on in Scotland as distinguished from other parts of the United Kingdom is a not uninteresting topic, but I

have no room to handle it. Let me merely recall a pleasant hour in an old tavern, yclept 'John's,' in a huge old gray courtyard off the High Street, close to Parliament House, a house of long passages, low ceilings, heavy sashed windows, good meat, excellent toddy, once the lawyers' great house of call, and retaining a certain grave and learned aspect. I sat at the open window supping my toddy. The bit of evening air above the tall housetops was for the time smokeless, and the shrill swifts darted to and fro in it. Far down in the courtyard was a noise of children at play, merry too, though doubtless dirty and barefooted. I was reminded of an old house of my childhood far away from Scotland, and of the Waverley Novels read aloud by my aunt to a delighted fireside audience, nothing critical. What dreams I had then of the Canongate, and the Heart of Midlothian, and Holyrood, peopled with the great Romancer's men and women! And of true historic memories also how brimful is this wonderful old city around me!

Methinks, having had my toes trodden on, I may have spoker hard things. Where after all is there such another city? Do I not enjoy Scotch dialect, Scotch songs, Scotch music (even the bagpipes sometimes), Scotch toddy?—and so I sallied forth in a kindly humour.

But near George the Fourth's Bridge a whiff entered my nostrils of no Arabian odour; suddenly a terrific yell rang through the steamfiend-haunted valley, and at the same time Calton Hill hove in sight with its crowd of architectural curiosities.

Far' ye weel, Auld Reekie, says I (speaking, I dare say, very indif ferent Scotch)-I'm aff to the Hielands the morn's mornin',' and gude be wi' ye!

TRISH

RISH questions are still among those which most occupy the British political mind. They are the questions, too, which every British Government finds it most difficult to solve. Even the present Government with all its manifold advantages finds itself very disagreeably perplexed when it has to legislate for Mr. John Martin's country. The present Government has a large majority in the House of Commons to supply it with votes and cheers; it possesses men of working faculty and of eloquence; it has a very speedy if not very scientific method of cutting political knots where their disentanglement is difficult. And yet, after all, its legislation for Ireland turns out to be timorous in progress and incomplete in issue. The solution of the Irish Church Question was not undertaken till it was seen to be the most facile means of reuniting the Liberal party, and now that the Irish Church Question has been solved the solution cannot be considered to have brought contentment to the Irish mind. The Irish Land Act was supremely creditable both to the skill and to the intelligence of the Prime Minister; yet the weight of it falls less on those representatives of Protestant ascendency at whom it was aimed than

on

the native landjobbers: and Hibernian hearts have not been much affected nor much composed by the right honourable gentleman's labours. Irish public parks give much more trouble than English public parks. The police of Dublin do not entertain the same ideas of duty that are held by their blue brethren of London. And, if one is to believe the statements of the Irish newspapers with regard to Irish telegraphy, it would appear that in Ireland even 'the electric fluid' gets somewhat

VOL. IV.-NO. XXII. NEW SERIES.

nationalised, and becomes as a consequence somewhat intractable.

But of all the Irish questions with which the British Parliament could have to deal-which have come, or which are to come, to show up Saxon shortcomings-the question of Irish University Education is by many degrees the hardest to settle. The proper settlement of it-that settlement which reason calls foris not very difficult to find. The probable settlement of it—that settlement which party exigencies are likely to necessitate is also not very much involved in mystery. Cardinal Cullen is reported to anticipate that his views will inspire the Cabinet in Downing Street as they formerly inspired the Council in the Vatican. Mr. Gladstone himself, though in a manner characteristically oracular, has given of late much ground for thinking that his Eminence will not in the end be disappointed. The Premier of course expects assistance in return. And very probably it has been promised to him-with a mental reservation. The Cardinal will give no present encouragement to the agitation for Home Rule. He will even, through his henchman, the classical MacSwiney, give it a public rebuff. And then, as a matter of strict religious obligation, the 'sanctimonious eloquence' which worked the downfall of an endowed Irish Protestant Church, will work for the establishment of an Irish Catholic University. The Maynooth grant in perhaps threefold its original magnitude, and of course with a new and not offensive name, will be restored to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and added to the 350,000l. Maynooth compensation, will be a very handsome sum wherewith to carry out Irish ideas. Cardinal Cullen, if he be not gone to the Papal Chair

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