Max O’Rell and other moderns have said very unkind things of Glasgow; but all the early travellers extol the prettiness, pleasantness, and cleanness of this city on a once limpid river, qualities not so apparent nowadays. Along with too many most squalid slums, Glasgow has fine features in her ancient Cathedral, in her lofty Necropolis, in her picturesque Trongate, in her noble University Buildings elevated above the West End Park, and in her central square with its forest of illustrious effigies, “an open-air Madame Tussaud’s.” But these monuments are not so remarkable as the wealth and manifold industry of which signs abound on every hand, drowning the rustic charms noted by Defoe and Burt. In the Commonwealth days Richard Franck had dubbed Glasgow the “non-such of Scotland”--“famous and flourishing”--on whose “beautiful palaces” and warehouses “stuft with merchandise” he expatiates in his conceited style. Even the crabbed Matthew Bramble was “in raptures with Glasgow.” Pennant twice calls this “the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw,” and tells how Glasgow had been “tantalised with its river,” soon to be deepened into such a highway of traffic. By the middle of the eighteenth century Glasgow had not 20,000 inhabitants, but she began to make her fortune fast while the rest of Scotland rather sullenly prepared to exchange thistly patriotism for more profitable crops. Rum and tobacco were the foundation of a prosperity that came to be checked by the American Revolution; then the long-headed worthies of the Saltmarket took up cotton, and cotton was weighed down by iron, and iron was set afloat as well as wood; and a host of other trades sprang up, among them that Turkey-red dyeing that is for Glasgow what its purple was for Tyre. On Glasgow Green, we are told, James Watt thought of the steam condenser that was the great practical step towards starting such merry-go-roundabouts here at Fair time, and so many wheels on which the progress of the world has spun with such acceleration “down the ringing grooves of change.” If the first model of a steamship was made in Edinburgh, the first passenger paddle-boat that plied in Britain was that between Greenock and Glasgow in 1812. Glasgow, not quite so large as Edinburgh in James Watt’s lifetime, had then begun to give the capital the go-by, even before she became environed by a wilderness of “pits and blast furnaces that honeycomb and blacken the earth, and burn with a red glare throughout the night for many a mile around,” where another writer describes daylight showing “patches of sour-looking grass surrounded by damp stone walls; gaunt buildings soot-begrimed and gloomy; and an ever-increasing blue-grey mist pierced by tall chimneys.” St. Kentigern, whose _petit nom_ was Mungo, could hardly now identify the site of his hermitage among noisy Clyde ship-yards and busy streets, noted by jealous neighbours as too familiar with