THE movements of a people of so much gusto, and grace, and gravity, as those who had interposed their thickening clouds between my vision and those municipal and mental glories which I had come to see, could not choose but do every thing according to the most approved canons of philosophy; and thus the mighty matter of the royal visitation had to be received in its beginning, its middle, and its end, before I could proceed in my legitimate and laudatory vocation. Besides the people who came, there were the preparations made and the deeds done,--each of which is well worthy of a chapter. The rumour of the high honour came upon the Athens like the light of the morning,--beaming upon the most elevated points, while yet the general mass remained in shadow. The Lord President of the Court of Session, the Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, the Lord Advocate, Lady Macconochie, the very Reverend, and (by office and intuition,) very learned Principal Baird, the Sheriff of the County, Deacon Knox, of Radical-threshing renown, Mr. Archibald Campbell, and that fair dame who watches and wipes in Queen Mary’s apartments at the Holyrood, were the first upon whom the radiance broke; and, the summit of Ben Nevis gilded by the morning sun, looks not more proudly down upon the mists of Lochiel or the melancholy waste of Rannoch, than each and all of those high personages did upon the ungifted sons and daughters of Edinburgh. They were in a fidget of the first magnitude, as to what was to be done, and who was to do it. Long and deep were their deliberations; but, like the Areopagites of the Elder Athens, themselves and their deliberations were in the dark. Hence, as hope is the grand resource in such cases, they deputed the Lord President to seek aid from the Royal Society of Edinburgh,--a society which, composed of the wisest heads, and prosecuting the wisest subjects, always says and does the very wisest things in the very wisest manner.