To properly estimate the dangers of my position, imagine a boy of fifteen, at the Nore, as it were, of life, thus left dependent on his own pilotage for a safe voyage to the Isle of Man; or conceive a juvenile Telemachus, without a Mentor, brought suddenly into the perilous neighbourhood of Calypso and her enchantments. It will hardly be expected, that from some half-dozen of young bachelors, there came forth any solemn voice didactically warning me in the strain of the sage Imlac to the Prince of Abyssinia. In fact, I recollect receiving but one solitary serious admonition, and that was from a she cousin of ten years old, that the Spectator I was reading on a Sunday morning, “was no the Bible.” For there was still much of this pious rigour extant in Scotland, though a gentleman was no longer committed to Tolboothia Infelix, for an unseasonable promenade during church time. It was once, however, my fortune to witness a sample of the _ancien régime_ at an evening party composed chiefly of young and rather fashionable persons, when lo! like an Anachronism confounding times past with times present, there came out of some corner an antique figure, with quaintly cut blue suit and three-cornered hat, not unlike a very old Greenwich Pensioner, who taking his stand in front of the circle, deliberately asked a blessing of formidable length on the thin bread and butter, the short cake, the marmalade, and the Pekoe tea. And here, _en passant_, it may be worth while to remark, for the benefit of our Agnews and Plumtres, as illustrating the intrinsic value of such sanctimonious pretension, that the elder Scotland, so renowned for armlong graces, and redundant preachments, and abundant psalm-singing, has yet bequeathed to posterity a singularly liberal collection of songs, the reverie of Divine and Moral, such as “can only be sung when the punch-bowl has done its work and the wild wit is set free[3].”