uninteresting to look back on two such generations of Scotchmen as those to which my uncles and grandfather belonged. They differed very considerably in some respects. My grandfather, with most of his contemporaries of the same class, had a good deal of the Tory in his composition. He stood by George III. in the early policy of his reign, and by his adviser Lord Bute; reprobated Wilkes and Junius; and gravely questioned whether Washington and his coadjutors, the American Republicans, were other than bold rebels. My uncles, on the contrary, were stanch Whigs, who looked upon Washington as perhaps the best and greatest man of modern times--stood firm by the policy of Fox, as opposed to that of Pitt--and held that the war with France, which immediately succeeded the First Revolution, was, however thoroughly it changed its character afterwards, one of unjustifiable aggression. But however greatly my uncles and grandfather may have differed on these points, they were equally honest men. The rising generation can perhaps form no very adequate conception of the number and singular interest of the links which serve to connect the recollections of a man who has seen his fiftieth birth-day, with what to them must appear a remote past. I have seen at least two men who fought at Culloden--one on the side of the King, the other on that of the Prince--and, with these, not a few who witnessed the battle from a distance. I have conversed with an aged woman that had conversed, in turn, with an aged man who had attained to mature manhood when the persecutions of Charles and James were at their height, and remembered the general regret excited by the death of Renwick. My eldest maternal aunt--the mother of Cousin George--remembered old John Feddes--turned of ninety at the time; and John's buccaneering expedition could not have dated later than the year 1687. I have known many who remembered the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and have listened to stories of executions which took place on the gallows-hills of burghs and sheriffdoms, and of witch-burnings perpetrated on town Links and baronial Laws. And I have felt a strange interest in these glimpses of a past so unlike the present, when thus presented to the mind as personal reminiscences, or as well-attested traditions, removed from the original witnesses by but a single stage. All, for instance, which I have yet read of witch-burnings has failed to impress me so strongly as the recollections of an old lady who in 1722 was carried in her nurse's arms--for she was almost an infant at the time--to witness a witch-execution in the neighbourhood of Dornoch--the last which took place in Scotland. The lady well remembered the awe-struck yet excited crowd, the lighting of the fire, and the miserable appearance of the poor fatuous creature whom it was kindled to consume, and who seemed to be so little aware of her situation, that she held out her thin shrivelled hands to warm them at the blaze.