Doubtless, as a picturesque town, Edinburgh stands in the foremost rank. The natural configuration of the ground in ridges and hollows, and the commanding prospects from its heights of undulating landscape, of broad Frith, of distant hills, and of the adjacent Arthur’s Seat, like a couchant lion guarding the town, are striking, and stir up any poetic feeling that may be lurking in the heart. In the architecture there is a strange and incongruous mingling of the modern and the antique, of the genuine and the meretricious. There are many interesting historical memorials, and very many reminders of the everyday present. Buildings and monuments bring cherished and illustrious names to our mind; other names are obtruded which we would gladly forget. But no one can, from the Castle bastions, see the panorama of the city and its surroundings, without intense interest, and an admiration which will abide in the memory. In 647, Edwin, the son of Ella, Saxon King of Northumbria, extended his conquests beyond the Forth. He re-fortified the rock-castle, called Puellerum, and to the little town which rose up around it, was given the name of Edwinsburgh. In 1128, Edinburgh was made a Royal burgh by David I. In 1215, a Parliament of Alexander II. met here for the first time. In 1296, the title of the chief magistrate was changed from Alderman to Provost. In 1424, James I. was, at £40,000, ransomed from his long and unjust imprisonment in England: the towns of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee, guaranteeing the ransom. James had, on his parole, been free to move about England; and he soon saw how far behind her his own land was in agriculture and commerce. To amend this he made laws, which to us seem meddlesome and going into petty details, but doubtless were then useful and progressive. For the prevention of fires in buildings it was advisable to enact that “hempe, lint and straw be not put in houses aboone or near fires,” and that “nae licht be fetched from ane house to ane uther but within covered weshel or lanterne.” The lofty piles of buildings for which the older town of Edinburgh is now remarkable, were in the fifteenth century represented by wooden houses not exceeding two stories in height; for we find that in providing against fires, Parliament ordained that “at the common cost aucht twenty-fute ladders be made, and kept in a ready place in the town, for that use and none other.” From the murder of James I. in Perth, in 1456, Edinburgh dates as the capital, and where Parliaments were exclusively held.