[6] From the collection of the late Sir Henry Cole in the Edinburgh International Exhibition, 1890. APPENDIX. A. As to the representation in Parliament, the freeholders in the whole of the Counties of Scotland, who had the power of returning the County Members, were, in 1823, for example, just under three thousand in number. These were mostly gentlemen of position living on their estates, with a sprinkling of professional men; the former being, from their want of business training, ill suited, one would suppose, for conducting the business of a nation. The Town Councils were self-elective--hotbeds of corruption; and the members of these Town Councils were intrusted with the power of returning the Members for the boroughs. The people at large were not directly represented, if in strictness represented at all. B. Francis, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, in a letter of the 20th September 1799, describes the discomfort of a journey by mail from Perth to Edinburgh, when the coach had broken down, and he was carried forward by the guard by special conveyance. His graphic description is as follows:--"I was roused carefully half an hour before four yesterday morning, and passed two delightful hours in the kitchen waiting for the mail. There was an enormous fire, and a whole household of smoke. The waiter was snoring with great vehemency upon one of the dressers, and the deep regular intonation had a very solemn effect, I can assure you, in the obscurity of that Tartarean region, and the melancholy silence of the morning. An innumerable number of rats were trottin and gibberin in one end of the place, and the rain clattered freshly on the windows. The dawn heavily in clouds brought on the day, but not, alas! the mail; and it was long past five when the guard came galloping into the yard, upon a smoking horse, with all the wet bags lumbering beside him (like Scylla's water-dogs), roaring out that the coach was broken down somewhere near Dundee, and commanding another steed to be got ready for his transportation. The noise he made brought out the other two sleepy wretches that had been waiting like myself for places, and we at length persuaded the heroic champion to order a postchaise instead of a horse, into which we crammed ourselves all four, with a whole mountain of leather bags that clung about our legs like the entrails of a fat cow all the rest of the journey. At Kinross, as the morning was very fine, we prevailed with the guard to go on the outside to dry himself, and got on to the ferry about eleven, after encountering various perils and vexations, in the loss of horse-shoes and wheel-pins, and in a great gap in the road, over which we had to lead the horses, and haul the carriage separately. At this place we supplicated our agitator for leave to eat a little breakfast; but he would not stop an instant, and we were obliged to snatch up a roll or two apiece and gnaw the dry crusts during our passage to keep soul and body together.