was the salutation of Burns, when first brought from his native Ayrshire to behold the Scottish capital. “Mine own romantic town,” was the outburst of Scott, in that famous passage where, after describing Edinburgh as seen from the Braids, he makes even an English stranger beside himself with rapture at the sight:— “Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent; As if to give his rapture vent, The spur he to his charger lent, And raised his bridle hand, And, making demi-volte in air, Cried, ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land?’” Here, though it is an Englishman that is supposed to speak, it is a Scotsman that supplies the words; but there can be no such objection in the case of the following lines from a sonnet, entitled “Written in Edinburgh,” by Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam:— “Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be, Yea, an imperial city, that might hold Five times a hundred noble towns in fee ... Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets, As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,— And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.” At the time with which we are concerned this city had the advantage of containing, as has been said, only about eighty thousand people. For comfortable social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is overwhelming and paralysing. There can be no intimacy, no unity of interest, in such a vast concourse. Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John’s Wood would know nothing of either fact till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. Hardly since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been all agitated simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we have an illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and produce. That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades, Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see now far distributed through space and time, _nantes rari in gurgite vasto_,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so in such a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in greatness should have been kept up by so small a population for several ages, seems miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had something to do with the miracle; but the compactness of the place,—the aggregation of so many finely and variously endowed human beings precisely in such numbers as to keep up among them a daily sense of mutual companionship,—must also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens”