Of all the objects of Athenian detestation, the greatest, however, seem to be decently laid out pleasure-grounds, and trees. Strangers used to say that the rustic Scotch cut down all sorts of bushes, because ghosts and spirits whistled in them on windy nights; and really, when I looked at the many fine situations in and about the Athens, which the Athenians have taken particular care neither to improve nor to plant, I could not help thinking that this superstition, now banished from every province in Scotland, has taken up its abode in the Scottish metropolis. True, they have a public walk round the Calton-Hill, but that is merely a thing of yesterday; and though they have placed upon the top of it a monument to Lord Nelson, modelled exactly after a Dutch skipper’s spy-glass, or a butter churn; an astronomical observatory, tasteful enough in its design, but not much bigger than a decent rat-trap, or a twelfth-cake at the Mansion-House; and are to build “the National Monument;” yet they have never thought of planting so much as a thistle, but have left the summit of the hill in all its native bleakness, and allowed it to be so much infested by lazy black-guards and bare-footed washerwomen, as to be unsafe for respectable females even at noon-day;--while after dusk this, the most fashionable promenade of the Athens, is habitually the scene of so much and so wanton vice, that instead of an ornament to the city, as it might easily be made, it is a nuisance and a disgrace. The royal precinct of the Holyrood, which occupies a piece of rich level ground about the palace, and which stretches a considerable way up the romantic heights to the south, is, one would think, a chosen place for taste to display itself upon; and when there are taken into the account the boast of the Athenians that their Holyrood is the finest royal palace in Britain, and that other boast which is so habitual with them that there is no need of repeating it, one would imagine that among all their boasted improvements the royal precinct would not have been overlooked; but all that they appear to have done for it has been to make it as dirty and as desolate as ever they could. The whole filth of the old town (and that is no small commodity) is collected in cesspools within a few yards of the palace; and lest that should not be grateful enough to the Athenian olfactories, a considerable portion of the adjoining ground is set apart for the collection of manure from all places. Upon the other parts of the royal domain, about half a dozen of scraggy and withered trees, and an old thorn-hedge, more than half of which was when I viewed it reposing in the lap of its neighbour ditch, are the only attempts at landscape-gardening; and the grand-children of those by whom they were planted must, by this time, be in their graves or their dotage.