glour at a paper for the serious opinions of the haill bench!” Sunday was wont to be a very precious day to H——,—far too good to be lost in idle dram-drinking at home. On Saturday nights he generally made a point of insuring stock to the amount of half-a-crown in his landlady’s hands, and proposed a tour of jollity for next morning to a few of his companions. These were, for the most part, poor devils like himself, who, with few lucid intervals of sobriety or affluence—equally destitute of industry, prudence, and care for the opinion of the world—contrive to fight, drink, and roar their way through a desperate existence, in spite of the devil, their washerwoman, and the small-debt-court—perhaps even receiving Christian burial at last like the rest of their species. With one or two such companions as these, H—— would issue of a Sunday morning through the Watergate, on an expedition to Newhaven, Duddingstone, Portobello, or some such guzzling retreat,[13]—the termination of their walk being generally determined by the consideration of where they might have the best drink, the longest credit, or where they had already least debt. Then was it most delightful to observe by what a special act of Providence they would alight upon “the last rizzer’d haddock in the house,” or “the only hundred oysters that was to be got in the town;” and how gloriously they would bouse away their money, their credit, and their senses, till, finally, after uttering, for the thousand and first time, all their standard Parliament-House jokes—after quarrelling with the landlord, and flattering the more susceptible landlady up to the sticking-place of “a last gill,”—they would reel away home, in full enjoyment of that glory which, according to Robert Burns, is superior to the glory of even kings!