“_Et tu Brute!_” The very magistrates of Edinburgh,--that provost Arbuthnot, the moment that he knew his own was to be the only “_gentry_” conferred upon a Scottish magistrate, cut his country cousins. Not even Glasgow herself, notwithstanding her lodgings hired at a thousand guineas a week, could be permitted to taste so much as a glass of cold water in the presence of the King. Perth “tried herself o’ the Gaelic,” and swore all the oaths of the mountains; the little, side-fidgetting, owl-faced provost of Inverness, who had come “over the hills and far away” in a dog-cart, in order that he might avoid the contamination of his bailies, poked out his under-lip like the edge of a singed pan-cake, and with his right hand gave a most fierce and ominous scratching to his left elbow. Aberdeen blasted the eyes of his own cats, and vowed that he would “vote for Josaph Heem, oat o’ pyure retrebeeshon.” Never, indeed, was bold beginning brought to so lame and impotent a conclusion; but it was a conclusion which any person, except a Scotch burgh magistrate, might have anticipated. Even the Lord-Mayor of London is a commoner at Hampstead or Brixton, and what, then, could an Inverness or a Perth Bailie, or even a Glasgow Provost, be in the modern Athens, and while the whole of the official men there were bowing before the King, in the hope of securing all the advantage to themselves? If neglect be the portion of the man who can afford to place upon the table at his election-dinner as much turtle as would float a seventy-four, and who sends over the world, ----“Argosies with portly sail, Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,” what could be expected of the man who retailed pig-tail tobacco by the yard, or played the leach to the breechless urchins of the mountains? “Nothing,” will be the answer of any uninterested spectator or hearer; but to put any corporation man, more especially if he be Scotch, in possession of this part of his utter insignificance without his own burgh, or indeed, to any rational purpose, within it, would be as hard and hopeless a task as ever was undertaken by man. Thus the chances are, that though these poor innocents (and to have beheld their rueful looks on their neglect and disappointment, would have created bowels in a Turk, or made Burdett pity, if not love, borough-mongers,) felt all the bitterness of the infliction, they would profit nothing by the wholesome hint of the lesson,--just as in a school, the blockheads get all the whipping, and none of the Latin.