From the house in Castle street I went to the rooms of the Royal Society, where there is a portrait of Scott, by John Graham Gilbert, more lifelike,--being representative of his soul as well as his face and person,--than any other that is known. It hangs there, in company with other paintings of former presidents of this institution,--notably one of Sir David Brewster and one of James Watt,--in the hall in which Sir Walter often sat, presiding over the deliberations and literary exercises of his comrades in scholarship and art. In another hall I saw a pulpit in which John Knox used to preach, in the old days of what Dr. Johnson expressively called "The ruffians of Reformation," and hard by was "The Maiden," the terrible Scottish guillotine, with its great square knife, set in a thick weight of lead, by which the grim Regent Morton was slain, in 1581, the Marquis of Argyle, in 1661, and the gallant, magnanimous, devoted Earl of Argyle, in 1685,--one more sacrifice to the insatiate House of Stuart. This monster has drunk the blood of many a noble gentleman, and there is a weird, sinister suggestion of gratified ferocity and furtive malignity in its rude, grisly, uncanny fabric of blackened timbers. You may see, in the quaint little panelled chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, in the Cowgate, not distant from the present abode of the sanguinary Maiden,--brooding over her hideous consummation of slaughter and misery,--the place where the mangled body of the heroic Argyle was laid, in secret sanctuary, for several nights after that scene of piteous sacrifice at the old Market Cross; and when you walk in the solemn enclosure of the Grayfriars church,--so fitly styled, by Sir Walter, The Westminster Abbey of Scotland,--your glance will fall upon a sunken pillar, low down upon the northern slope of that haunted, lamentable ground, which bears the letters "I. M.," and which marks the grave of the baleful Morton, whom the Maiden decapitated, for his share in the murder of Rizzio. In these old cities there is no keeping away from sepulchres. "The paths of glory," in every sense, "lead but to the grave." George Buchanan and Allan Ramsay, poets whom no literary pilgrim will neglect, rest in this churchyard, though the exact places of their interment are not positively denoted, and here, likewise, rest the elegant historian Robertson, and "the Addison of Scotland," Henry Mackenzie. The building in the High street in which Allan Ramsay once had his abode and his bookshop, and in which he wrote his pastoral of _The Gentle Shepherd_, is occupied now by a barber; but, since he is one that scorns not to proclaim over his door, in mighty letters, the poetic lineage of his dwelling, it seems not amiss that this haunt of the Muses should have fallen into such lowly hands. Of such a character, hallowed with associations that pique the fancy and touch the heart, are the places and the names that an itinerant continually encounters in his rambles in Edinburgh.