Those sage counsels having been given and received, the loyalty of Athens was set fire to in a number of places, and anon the whole city was in a blaze. Lords of session, spies, men who had eaten flesh and drank wine for the glory of the throne, excisemen, crown-lawyers, holders and expectants of crown-patronages, address-grinders, beaconeers, and all the interminable file of that which had supported the loyalty and existence of Scotland in the worst of times, shone forth with first and fiercest lustre. In that great tattle-market (hereafter to be described,) the Parliament-house, you would have found the Tory barristers--the current of whose loyalty is seldom much broken by briefs, clubbing together, cackling as though they had been the sole geese of salvation to the capitol, and stretching their mandibles, and showing their feathers at the more-employed and laborious Whigs, as a race soon to be exterminated. The disposal of majesty himself was committed to the Great Unknown, who sagely counselled that they should make a still greater unknown of the King, by mewing him up in Dalkeith-house, where he could commune only with a few of the chosen; and, that they should bring him before the public only once or twice, to be worshipped and wondered at, more as a favour of _their_ procuring, than of his own Royal pleasure. How little they knew of his Majesty, and how much they had overrated their own importance occurred not to them at the time, but they found it out afterwards. The next weighty question was what the city should do in her municipal capacity; and, it was ordered _in limine_ that the nightly tattoo of “The Flowers of Edinburgh,” which from time immemorial had been played in the streets, should be suspended during the solemnity, under pain of escheat of the instruments, allenarly for the private benefit and use of the Lord Provost and magistrates. Every one who has seen Edinburgh must know the perfect resemblance which her High-street--that street in which magistracy is pre-eminently dominant, and where shows are wont to be exhibited--bears to the back-bone of a red-herring. Westward you have the castle in form, in elevation, and in grandeur, the very type of the head; eastward, at the further extremity, you have the palace of Holyrood, which from its lowly situation among cesspools and bankrupts, and its usual gloomy and forlorn condition, may very properly be likened to the tail; the intermediate street is the spine; while the wynds and closes which stretch to the North Loch on the one side, and the Cow-gate on the other, are the perfect counterpart of the ribs. This High-street was cleared of some old incumbrances, had exhibition-booths erected along its whole extent; and it was expressly ordered that, as the King passed along, no frippery or foul linen should be exhibited from even the third garret windows; and, that during the whole sojourn of royalty, no man should enter the