The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved for the Saturday after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain of Buccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood (which the Queen rightly pronounced "a royal-looking old place") to the Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan's pedantic Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be surpassed, in any portion of Her Majesty's dominions. [Sidenote: THE QUEEN IN EDINBURGH CASTLE.] It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen passed this day. Every one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being most intimately associated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On her way she passed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor, was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed that he was a "saur saunt for the Croon," she may have seen the blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns. Here was the ancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while immediately beneath her lay the Grassmarket--at once the Tower and the Smithfield of Scotland--where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.