The night which preceded that eventful day was an anxious and unclosing one to the men of hope and of office, from all parts of Caledonia; and baron and bailie, parson, provost, and professor, great judge and small attorney, eloquent advocate and uneloquent scribe,--all that the land of heath, of herrings, and of black cattle, could produce, was, with proud but palpitating heart, bedecking and bedizening itself, in all sorts of dresses, official, courtly, and nondescript, in order that they might, in seemly array, kiss that Kaaba of all loyal men’s worship, (and who would not be a loyal man upon such an occasion,) the hand of a king. Three dukes, the same tale of marquesses, sixteen earls, a brace of viscounts, twenty-nine barons, a pair of right honourables, four great officers of state, sixteen judges of the land, twenty-two who were honourable, and eleven who lengthened the fag end of the Scottish household, were there. Besides seventy-seven baronets, twelve members of parliament, thirty-eight lords lieutenant, a hundred head of provosts, bailies, counsellors, and deacons, “after their kinds,” with as many parsons, professors, physicians, and pleaders, as were sufficient to convert, and cultivate, and cure, from plethora both of person and of purse, the whole British empire, together with military men, who had fought and who had not fought, proprietors or kinsmen of the soil, and burgesses, “simple persons,” swelled the amount to not fewer than two thousand persons, who had to pass in wonderful procession before the wondering king. When it was considered, that the whole of this mighty and motley squad, charged with addresses to the number of nearly a hundred, each more loyal and laboured than another, had to pass muster, and read, and retire, in the space of one brief hour, it was apparent that the official men of Scotland would have to dance about and deliver themselves with somewhat more of alacrity, and somewhat less of that slow profundity of bowing than is usually the case. Dreading that the addresses, from the importance of their contents, and the orthoëpal powers of the readers, would of themselves have consumed more than a day, it was wisely resolved, that the persons who were charged with them should continue enceinte of them till the Monday, upon which day they should be allowed to deliver themselves before the throne, or behind it in the closet, according to their several conditions and importance; and thus the mighty tide of the levee was undisturbed by any prosing from parchment, and undisconcerted by any uncouthness of provincial speech. The muster of beast-drawn vehicles was tremendous; and, though the magisterial equipages were reduced in their number of cattle, those which they contained never looked so big in their lives as when they were in progress to the levee, or so little as when they were fairly there. A grievous mishap befel their worships the under-magistrates of Glasgow: