Sometimes, in the course of exhibition, there occur distresses nearly resembling that which happened to Captain Clutterbuck, in the company of the Benedictine,—that is to say, he “finds himself a scholar when he came to teach,” by the strangers actually knowing more of his favourite study than himself. This happens most frequently in the case of “gentlemen from Edinburgh,”—elderly persons with black coats and low-crowned hats, which may be called the costume of terror to our antiquary. To these habiliments, if we add the circumstance of hair-powder, O——n would as soon face a hyena as any person so clothed. He is said to fly from a wig as from a pestilence. Yet, even in these predicaments, the Captain is never entirely at a loss. Repulsed from one stone, he can retreat to another; refuted in any part of his intelligence, he can make an honourable stand at another, of which his visitors had not been aware; and, even when found to be wholly fabulous and absurd in his anecdotes, he can, as a _dernier resort_, turn them off with some pleasantry or other, which is, of course, irrefragable. Besides, even when he catches a complete, resolute, ANTIQUARIAN Tartar, he generally contrives to profit by the encounter, by picking up some new intelligence, which he adds to his own former stock. In describing this part of the character of a local antiquary, with all his ignorance and all his fables, it is forced upon our observation, how little certain information is commonly to be found, concerning the relics of antiquity, among those who dwell in their immediate neighbourhood. They know that there is an “_auld abbey_” or a “_queer sort o’ stane_,” near them; but for any more particular notice of their history, you might as well inquire in a different quarter of the globe. We have known instances of people, whose playground in infancy, and whose daily walks in manhood, had been among the ruins of an ancient Collegiate Church, (not the least interesting in the kingdom,) being yet quite ignorant of every circumstance connected with it, except that it was “_just the auld Kirk_.”