clean and pleasant-looking stone; the streets are wide, and that part of it which overlooks the Frith of Forth to the barren mountains of the county of Fife, have a fair, romantic, as well as an extensive prospect; but the part which looks to the old town, and only divided by a low and dirty dell of about one hundred yards across, is subject to all the offensive smells occasioned by the teemings of the poor inhabitants of the latter place, who live in narrow closes, winds, and crannies; and, being on the declivity of a rock, empty their filth adown its sides into this dell, which serves as a convenient reservoir for what would be too indecent to mention to a delicate reader; so that, when the wind blows from the South, you are sure to have the very essence of the poor inhabitants

habitants conveyed to their opposite neighbours in the North.

I have had the pleasure of spending many pleasant hours in this irregular odd-built metropolis of Scotland, and have experienced much apparent hospitality; but never got up from a table without having the surfeiting and puerile foible of nationality thrown into my dish, or, by some illiberal reflection upon my own poor barren country, had my stomach turned or my digestion interrupted by fulsome eulogiums on the first country in all Europe!

I remember to have been in company, composed of some of the first lettered characters in that neighbourhood, when a professor of GlasgowCollege made his entré from England. He

X 2

He had been to Eton, near Windsor, and, on his road to Edinburgh, made Oxford in his way; where he confessed he had met with a prodigy, in respect to his mathematical abilities; being asked, by many of the gentlemen present, to what country this prodigy owed his birth, and being told that he was an Englishman, he was given by one of the party, with evident marks of national envy, the presumptive lie, by saying, with the most powerful emphasis that he was master of, "By the L-d, it cannot be! he cannot be an Englishman!"

Being an Englishman myself, and warmed at what had passed, I sat the breach which had been made in good manners aside, but could not help asking him, if Sir Isaac Newton, John Milton,

Milton, Sir Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Edmond Spenser, Joseph

Addison, Alexander Pope, or William Shakespeare, were Englishmen? On repeating the name of Shakespeare, I introduced a beautiful quotation from Churchill, who, speaking of that matchless bard while at Stratford upon Avon, says,

"Here Nature list'ning stood, while Shakespeare play'd,

"And wonder'd at the work herself had made!”

From this a confused murmur ensued, which fell into a smothered silence; and at last it was requested that the glass might go round, the subject dropped, and my health was drank with a visible air of sarcasm peculiar to themselves, and had that effect upon my feelings which has upon my memory to this

made it rest.

very

hour.

The

The last evening which I spent in Edinburgh was in a large company at the apartments of one of the gentlemen belonging to the College, when, as usual, the state, the splendor, and the beauty of countries were brought upon the tapis, which is for ever the case ere the second bumper has gone round, when their goodly nation is uniformly preferred to the first country in Europe, from which they so often suffer by comparison.

One of the gentlemen in this welllettered party had the good breeding to say (knowing me to be an Englishman) "that there was nothing good came from England but cheese!" I could not help telling him that there were truth and good-manners, both of which he seemed to be a stranger to;

but