The magistrates of Glasgow, feeling the need for ‘ane diurnal’--that is, newspaper, a luxury hitherto little known in Scotland--‘appoint John Fleming to write to his man wha lies at London,’ to cause one be sent for the town’s use. Whether John Fleming’s man, from the fact of his _lying_ at London, is to be presumed as himself connected with the public press, may be left to the consideration of the reader. Before this time, it appears that John Nicoll, a legal agent in Edinburgh, often quoted here on account of his _Diary_, had supplied the magistrates of Glasgow with weekly intelligence. * * * * * Mr Thomas Stewart, the hero of the plague anecdote of 1645, married in 1654, and retired to enjoy a quiet country life on his father’s estate of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. His relative, Sir Archibald, gives us a minute recital of what he did with the old place, in extending its accommodations and ornamenting its environs, and the result is that we get a tolerably clear idea of a Scotch gentleman’s country-house, according to the views and tastes which prevailed in the time of the Commonwealth. [Sidenote: 1657.] ‘He set himself to planting and enclosing, and so to embellish the place. But [as] the old mansion was straitening, and their family likely to increase, he thought of adding to the old tower (which consisted only of a vault and two rooms, one above the other, with a small room on the top of the turnpike stair, and a garret) a large addition on the south side of the staircase, of a good kitchen, cellar, meat-room or low parlour; a large hall or dining-room, with a small bedchamber and closet; over these, and above that, two bedchambers with closets; and yet higher, in a fourth story, two finished roof-rooms. And thus he made an addition of a kitchen, six fire-rooms with closets; and the vault in the old tower, built by Hamilton of Uddeston, was turned to a convenient useful cellar, with a partition for outer and inner repositories. The office-houses of bake-house, brew-house, garner-room, and men-servants’ bedchamber, were on the north of a paved court; and a high front wall towards the east, with an arched entry or porch, enclosed all. Without this arched gate was another larger court, with stables on the south side for the family and strangers’ horses, and a trained up thorn with a bower in it. Opposite to the stables, north from the mansion-house, with an entry to a good spring draw-well, as also leading to the byre, sheep-house, barn, and hen-house, all which made a court, to the north of the other court, and separate from it with a stone-wall; and on the east part of the court was a large space for a dunghill. The gardens were to the south of the house, much improved and enlarged; and the nursery-garden was a small square enclosure to the west of the house. The slope of the grounds to the west made the south garden, next the house, fall into three cross terraces.