gaudiest fabrics to attract the eye of ingenuous youth. Whole streets bristle with "lodgings to let." Edinburgh is again filled. The University class-rooms are crowded; a hundred schools are busy; and Young Briefless, "Who never is, but always to be, fee'd," the sun-brown yet on his face, paces the floor of the Parliament House, four hours a day, in his professional finery of horse-hair and bombazine. During the winter-time are assemblies and dinner-parties. There is a fortnight's opera, with the entire fashionable world in the boxes. The Philosophical Institution is in full session; while a whole army of eloquent lecturers do battle with ignorance on public platforms--each effulging like Phœbus, with his waggon-load of blazing day--at whose coming night perishes, shot through with orient beams. Neither mind nor body is neglected during the Edinburgh season. [Sidenote: The Scottish Academy.] In spring time, when the east winds blow, and grey walls of _haar_--clammy, stinging, heaven-high, making disastrous twilight of the brightest noon--come in from the German Ocean, and when coughs and colds do most abound, the Royal Scottish Academy opens her many-pictured walls. From February to May this is the most fashionable lounge in Edinburgh. The rooms are warm, so thickly carpeted that no footfall is heard, and there are seats in abundance. It is quite wonderful how many young ladies and gentlemen get suddenly interested in art. The Exhibition is a charming place for flirtation; and when Romeo is short in the matter of small talk--as Romeo sometimes will be--there is always a picture at hand to suggest a topic. Romeo may say a world of pretty things while he turns up the number of a picture in Juliet's catalogue--for without a catalogue Juliet never appears in the rooms. Before the season closes, she has her catalogue by heart, and could repeat it to you from beginning to end more glibly than she could her Catechism. Cupid never dies; and fingers will tingle as sweetly when they touch over an Exhibition catalogue as over the dangerous pages of "Lancelot of the Lake." If many marriages are not made here, there are gay deceivers in the world, and the picture of deserted Ophelia--the blank smile on her mouth, flowerets stuck in her yellow hair--slowly sinking in the weedy pool, produces no suitable moral effect. To other than young ladies and gentlemen the rooms are interesting, for Scottish art is at this moment more powerful than Scottish literature. Perhaps some half-dozen pictures in each Academy's Exhibition are the most notable intellectual products that Scotland can present for the year. The Scottish brush is stronger than the Scottish pen. It is in landscape and--at all events up till the other day, when Sir John Watson Gordon died--in portraiture that the Scotch school excels. It excels in the one in virtue of the national scenery, and in the other in virtue of the national insight and humour.