Of all British cities, Edinburgh--Weimar-like in its intellectual and æsthetic leanings, Florence-like in its freedom from the stains of trade, and more than Florence-like in its beauty--is the one best suited for the conduct of a lettered life. The city as an entity does not stimulate like London, the present moment is not nearly so intense, life does not roar and chafe--it murmurs only; and this interest of the hour, mingled with something of the quietude of distance and the past--which is the spiritual atmosphere of the city--is the most favourable of all conditions for intellectual work or intellectual enjoyment. You have libraries--you have the society of cultivated men and women--you have the eye constantly fed by beauty--the Old Town, jagged, picturesque, piled up; and the airy, open, coldly-sunny, unhurried, uncrowded streets of the New Town--and, above all, you can "sport your oak," as they say at Cambridge, and be quit of the world, the gossip, and the dun. In Edinburgh, you do not require to create quiet for yourself; you can have it ready-made. Life is leisurely; but it is not the leisure of a village, arising from a deficiency of ideas and motives--it is the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history, which has done its work, which does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, to smelt its own iron. And then, in Edinburgh, above all British cities, you are released from the vulgarising dominion of the hour. The past confronts you at every street corner. The Castle looks down out of history on its gayest thoroughfare. The winds of fable are blowing across Arthur's Seat. Old kings dwelt in Holyrood. Go out of the city where you will, the past attends you like a cicerone. Go down to North Berwick, and the red shell of Tantallon speaks to you of the might of the Douglases. Across the sea, from the gray-green Bass, through a cloud of gannets, comes the sigh of prisoners. From the long sea-board of Fife--which you can see from George Street--starts a remembrance of the Jameses. Queen Mary is at Craigmillar, Napier at Merchiston, Ben Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, Prince Charles in the little inn at Duddingston; and if you go out to Linlithgow, there is the smoke of Bothwellhaugh's fusee, and the Great Regent falling in the crooked street. Thus the past checkmates the present. [Sidenote: Influence of the past.] To an imaginative man, life in or near Edinburgh is like residence in an old castle:--the rooms are furnished in consonance with modern taste and convenience; the people who move about wear modern costume, and talk of current events in current colloquial phrases; there is the last newspaper and book in the library, the air from the last new opera in the drawing-room; but while the hour flies past, a subtle influence enters into it--enriching, dignifying--from oak panelling and carvings on the roof--from the picture of the peaked-bearded