One regrets that this is all that our noble Laureate’s experience of Edinburgh enabled him to say. The east winds do bite there fearfully now and then, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes as you cross the North Bridge; but, with that exception, what a city! Gray! why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or gray and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and green and purple, according as the heaven pleases, and you choose your ground! But, take it when it is most sombrely gray, where is another such gray city? The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy Castle; the chasm between the Old Town and the New, showing grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the New Town itself, like a second city spilt out of the Old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! Then Calton Hill in the midst, confronted by the precipitous curve of the Salisbury Crags; Arthur Seat looking over all like a lion grimly keeping guard; the wooded Corstorphines lying soft away to the west, and the larger Pentlands looming quiet in the southern distance! Let the sky be as gray and heavy as the absence of the sun can make it, and where have natural situation and the hand of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the city picturesque? And only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of new glories in and around. The sky is then blue as sapphire overhead; the waters of the Forth are clear to the broad sea; the hills and the fields of Fife are distinctly visible from every northern street and window; still more distant peaks are discernible on either horizon; and, as day goes down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blaze and glance with the radiance of the sunset. It is such a city that no one, however familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five minutes at any hour of the day or of the night, or in any state of the weather, without a new pleasure through the eye alone. Add to this the historical associations. Remember that this is the city of ancient Scottish royalty; that there is not a close or alley in the Old Town, and hardly a street in the New, that has not memories of the great or the quaint attached to it; that the many generations of old Scottish life that have passed through it have left every stone of it, as it were, rich with legend. To an English poet all this might be indifferent; but hear the Scottish poets:— “Edina! Scotia’s darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers!”