lapis lazuli is seamed by gold. The view this way was to me peculiarly sublime, not only from the great contrast that it formed with every thing around, and indeed every thing that one could conceive to exist in the vicinity of a city, but because of its own peculiar and inherent sublimity, and the wild accompaniments with which it had been decorated for the occasion. The crags rose rugged and perpendicular, with their profile dark as night, while standards, and tents, and batteries, and armed men on foot and on horseback, hung over the wild and airy steep. A flood of mellow light which came in from behind gave them the lineaments of giants, and a glory of colouring far exceeding any thing that limner ever tinted. Then rose the more sublime height of Arthur’s Seat, thrown back by the vapour which the sun was exhaling from the dew in the dell between, and having its summit haloed with a glory of radiant prismatic colours, through which the solitary stranger or flitting picquet seemed beings of another world. And, as the sun-beams came and went upon burnished helm or brazen cuirass, the whole seemed spotted with gold, or inlaid with costly stones. At my feet was the court of the palace, in which the royal standard was guarded by a fine body of highlanders, and the palace-gates kept by a goodly array of the Edinburgh archery, who, though they seemed not to be the least important part of the spectacle in their own eyes, were yet intent upon procuring for their favoured fair those situations from which they would best view the glories of the archers and of the king. Before me, the Athens herself clustered her buildings, and shot up her towers, her spires, and her castles, with a witchery of effect, which can be equalled by the view of no other British city, and surpassed by that of the Athens from no other point. When one, for instance, ascends the top of St. Paul’s, one wonders at the business and bustle that is around; but the eye is tired with the interminable lines of dull brick, and the dingy clusters of puny steeples, and smoking chimney-stalks; while the sound, and the rushing, and the artificial origin of the whole, make one melancholy with the idea that it will not last. One should never look down upon a city: the sight is always dingy, and the view always produces melancholy.