The streets of the Athens, which had been thinning of people ever since the King’s arrival, were, on the morning of Friday the 30th of August, the day on which he was to take his departure, as still and silent as though the chariot-wheel of majesty had never been heard in them. The constables, lacqueys, and laced porters at the gates of the Holyrood had dwindled to a small and feeble remnant; no merry archer, in broad bonnet of blue, and doublet of green tartan, demanded the pass-word, with bent bow and pheon ready for the string; the foot of the casual house-maid wakened the old and melancholy echo in its deserted halls; and those apartments which were so recently gladdened by the gorgeous train of the King, and made lovely and gay by the presence of all that Scotland could boast of the fair and the noble, were in sure progress to being as usual “furr’d round with mouldy damp and ropy slime,” over which the faint recollection (for even then it was waxing faint,) that the King had been there, “let fall a supernumerary horror,” which, to those who during the King’s stay had been raised to office, and put on the guise of courtiers, only served to make the night of his absence “more irksome.” The cannon, which, for the previous fourteen days, had ever and anon been pealing royal salutes, began to be dragged from the heights of Salisbury Crags and the Calton Hill; and the royal standard was taken down, leaving the bare widowed staff bleaching in the air. The guns of the venerable castle too, had subsided into the common office of chronicling the several holidays and anniversaries, as though they had been a mere kalendar; the last booths and benches were in the act of being pulled down; and, excepting in shop-keepers’ books, in the blackening of a few houses in the illumination, and in the baronet’s patent of Sir William Arbuthnot, and the knighthood of Raeburn, a painter, and Fergusson, deputy-king of the Athenian beefeaters, the Athens retained no external trace of the royal visit, even when the royal cavalcade was barely escaping from the suburbs.