A perfect library of books has been written about Edinburgh. Defoe, in his own matter-of-fact, garrulous way, has described the city. Its towering streets, and the follies of its society, are reflected in the inimitable pages of "Humphrey Clinker." Certain aspects of city life, city amusements, city dissipations, are mirrored in the clear, although somewhat shallow, stream of Fergusson's humour. The old life of the place, the traffic in the streets, the old-fashioned shops, the citizens with cocked hats and powdered hair, with hospitable paunches and double chins, with no end of wrinkles, and hints of latent humour in their worldly-wise faces, with gold-headed sticks, and shapely limbs encased in close-fitting small-clothes, are found in "Kay's Portraits." Passing Scott's other services to the city--the magnificent description in "Marmion," the "high jinks" in "Guy Mannering," the broils of the nobles and wild chieftains who attended the Court of the Jameses in "The Abbot"--he has, in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," made immortal many of the city localities; and the central character of Jeanie Deans is so unassumingly and sweetly _Scotch_, that she seems as much a portion of the place as Holyrood, the Castle, or the Crags. In Lockhart's "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk," we have sketches of society nearer our own time, when the _Edinburgh Review_ flourished, when the city was really the Modern Athens, and a seat of criticism giving laws to the empire. In these pages, we are introduced to Jeffrey, to John Wilson, the Ettrick Shepherd, and Dr Chalmers. Then came _Blackwood's Magazine_, the "Chaldee Manuscript," the "Noctes," and "Margaret Lindsay." Then the "Traditions of Edinburgh," by Mr Robert Chambers; thereafter the well-known _Edinburgh Journal_. Since then we have had Lord Cockburn's chatty "Memorials of his Time." Almost the other day we had Dean Ramsay's Lectures, filled with pleasant antiquarianism, and information relative to the men and women who flourished half a century ago. And the list may be closed with "Edinburgh Dissected," written after the fashion of Lockhart's "Letters,"--a book containing pleasant reading enough, although it wants the brilliancy, the acuteness, the eloquence, and possesses all the ill-nature, of its famous prototype. [Sidenote: Sir Walter Scott.]