And warble his sweet wintry song O'er our dwelling all day long!

And he shall warble his sweet song O'er your dwelling all day long.

Now, tender friends, my garments take, And lay me out for Jesus' sake!

And we will now thy garments take, And lay thee out for Jesus' sake!

And lay me by my true love's side, That I may be a faithful bride!-- We'll lay thee by thy true love's side, That thou may'st be a faithful bride!"

Ay--ay--thou too art gone, WILLIAM STANLEY ROSCOE! What years have flown since we walked among the "alleys green" of Allerton with thee and thy illustrious father! and who ever conversed with him for a few hours in and about his own home--where the stream of life flowed on so full and clear--without carrying away impressions that never seemed to be remembrances--so vivid have they remained amidst the obscurations and obliterations of Time, that sweeps with his wings all that lies on the surface, but has no power to disturb, much less destroy, the record printed on the heart.

We are all of us getting old--or older; nor would we, for our own part--if we could--renew our youth. Methinks the river of life is nobler as it nears the sea. The young are dancing in their skiffs on the pellucid shallows near the source on the Sacred Mountains of the Golden East. They whose lot it is to be in their prime, are dropping down the longer and wider reaches, that seem wheeling by with their sylvan amphitheatres, as if the beauty were moving morn-wards, while the voyagers are stationary among the shadows, or slowly descending the stream to meet the meridian day. Many forget

"The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,"

and are lost in the roaring whirlpool. Under Providence, we see ourselves on the river expanded into a sea-like lake, or arm of the sea; and for all our soul has escaped and suffered, we look up to the stars in gratitude--and down to the stars--for the water too is full of stars as well as the sky--faint and dim indeed--but blended by the pervading spirit of beauty, with the brighter and bolder luminaries reposing on infinitude.

OUR WINTER QUARTERS.

BUCHANAN LODGE--for a few months--farewell! 'Tis the Twelfth of November; and for the City we leave thee not without reluctance, early in March by the blessing of Heaven again to creep into thy blooming bourne. Yet now and then we shall take a drive down, to while away a sunny forenoon among thy undecaying evergreens, to breathe the balm of thy Christmas roses, and for one _Gentle_ bosom to cull the earliest crocuses that may be yellowing through the thin snows of Spring.

In truth, we know not well why we should ever leave thee, for thou art the Darling of all the Seasons; and Winter, so churlish elsewhere, is ever bland to thee, and, daily alighting in these gardens, loves to fold and unfold, in the cool sunshine, the stainless splendour of his pale-plumaged wings. But we are no hermit. Dear to us though Nature be, here, hand-in-hand with Art walking through our peaceful but not unpeopled POLICY, a voice comes to us from the city-heart--winning us away from the stillness of solitude into the stir of life. Milton speaks of a region

"Above the stir and smoke of this dim spot, Which men call earth;"

and oft have we visited it; but while yet we pursue the ends of this our mortal being, in the mystery of the brain whence ideas arise, and in the mystery of the heart whence emotions flow--kindred and congenial all--thought ever blending with feeling, reason with imagination, and conscience with passion--'tis our duty to draw our delight from intercommunion with the spirit of our kind. Weakest or wickedest of mortals are your soul-sick, life-loathing, world-wearied men. In solitude we are prone to be swallowed up in selfishness; and out of selfishness what sins and crimes may not grow! At the best, moral stagnation ensues--and the spirit becomes, like "a green-mantled pool,"

the abode of reptiles. Then ever welcome to us be living faces, and living voices, the light and the music of reality--dearer far than any mere ideas or emotions hanging or floating aloof by themselves in the atmosphere of imagination. Blest be the cordial grasp of the hand of friendship--blest the tender embrace of the arms of love! Nay, smile not, fair reader, at an old man's fervour; for Love is a gracious spirit, who deserteth not declining age.

The DROSKY is at the door--and, my eye! what a figure is Peter! There he sits, like a bear, with the ribbons in his paws--no part visible of his human face or form divine, but his small red eyes--and his ruby nose, whose re-grown enormity laughs at Liston. One little month ago, the knife of that skilful chirurgeon pared it down to the dimensions of a Christian proboscis. Again 'tis like a wart on a frost-reddened Swedish turnip. Pretty Poll, with small delicate pale features, sits beside him like a snowdrop. How shaggy since he returned from our last Highland tour is Filho da Puta! His mane long as his tail--and the hair on his ears like that on his fetlocks. He absolutely reminds us of Hogg's Bonassus. Ay, bless these patent steps--on the same principle as those by which we ascend our nightly couch--we are self-deposited in our Drosky. Oh! the lazy luxury of an air-seat! We seem to be sitting on nothing but a voluptuous warmth, restorative as a bath. And then what furry softness envelopes our feet! Yes--Mrs Gentle--Mrs Gentle--thy Cashmere shawl, twined round our bust, feels almost as silken-smooth as thine own, and scented is it with the balm of thy own lips. Boreas blows on it tenderly as a zephyr--and the wintry sunshine seems summery as it plays on the celestial colours. Thy pelisse, too, over our old happy shoulders, purple as the neck of the dove when careering round his mate.

Thy comforter, too, in our bosom--till the dear, delightful, delicious, wicked worsted thrills through skin and flesh to our very heart. It dirls. Drive away, Peter. Farewell Lodge--and welcome, in a jiffy, Moray Place.

And now, doucely and decently sitting in our Drosky, behold us driven by Peter, proud as Punch to tool along the staring streets the great-grandson of the Desert-born! Yet--yet--couldst thou lead the field, Filho, with old Kit Castor on thy spine. But though our day be not quite gone by, we think we see the stealing shades of eve, and, a little further on in the solemn vista, the darkness of night; and therefore, like wise children of nature, not unproud of the past, not ungrateful for the present, and unfearful of the future, thus do we now skim along the road of life, broad and smooth to our heart's content, able to pay the turnpikes, and willing, when we shall have reached the end of our journey, to lie down, in hope, at the goal.

What pretty, little, low lines of garden-fronted cottages! leading us along out of rural into suburban cheerfulness, across the Bridge, and past the Oriental-looking Oil-Gas Works, with a sweep winding into the full view of PITT Street (what a glorious name!) steep as some straight cliff-glen, and an approach truly majestic--yea, call it at once magnificent--right up to the great city's heart. "There goes Old Christopher North!" the bright boys in the playground of the New Academy exclaim. God bless you, you little rascals!--We could almost find it in our heart to ask the Rector for a holiday. But, under him, all your days are holidays--for when the precious hours of study are enlightened by a classic spirit, how naturally do they melt into those of play!

"Gay hope is yours, by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast; Yours buxom health, of rosy hue, Wild wit, invention ever new, And lively cheer, of vigour born; The thoughtless day, the easy night, The spirits pure, the slumbers light, That fly th' approach of morn."

Descending from our Drosky, we find No. 99 Moray Place, exhibiting throughout all its calm interior the self-same expression it wore the day we left it for the Lodge, eight months ago. There is our venerable winter Hat--as like Ourselves, it is said, as he can stare--sitting on the Circular in the Entrance-hall. Everything has been tenderly dusted as if by hands that touched with a Sabbath feeling; and though the furniture cannot be said to be new, yet while it is in all sobered, it is in nothing faded. You are at first unaware of its richness on account of its simplicity--its grace is felt gradually to grow out of its comfort--and that which you thought but ease lightens into elegance, while there is but one image in nature which can adequately express its repose--that of a hill-sheltered field by sunset, under a fresh-fallen vest of virgin snow. For then snow blushes with a faint crimson--nay, sometimes when Sol is extraordinarily splendid, not faint, but with a gorgeousness of colouring that fears not to face in rivalry the western clouds.

Let no man have two houses with one set of furniture. Home's deepest delight is undisturbance. Some people think no articles fixtures--not even grates. But sofas and ottomans, and chairs and footstools, and screens--and above all, beds--all are fixtures in the dwelling of a wise man, cognoscitive and sensitive of the blessings of this life. Each has its own place assigned to it by the taste, tact, and feeling of the master of the mansion, where order and elegance minister to comfort, and comfort is but a homely word for happiness. In various moods we vary their arrangement--nor is even the easiest of all Easy-chairs secure for life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the blue sky tempts the _Paterfamilias_, or him who is but an uncle, to lie back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet, is as much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward?

But without further illustration--be assured the cases are kindred--and so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently, however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper in the continuous and unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarised with each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried, we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly-kept parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a _flitting_ ever befall us or our friends! O mercy! only look at a long huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors, moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed--chairs crushed on the table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished feet up to heaven--a sight that might make the angels weep!

People have wondered why we, an old barren bachelor, should live in such a large house. It is a palace; but never was there a greater mistake than to seek the solution in our pride. Silence can be had but in a large house. And silence is the chief condition of home happiness. We could now hear a leaf fall--a leaf of the finest wire-wove. Peter and Betty, Polly and the rest, inhabit the second sunk story--and it is delightful to know that they may be kicking up the most infernal disturbance at this blessed moment, and tearing out each other's hair in handfuls, without the faintest whisper of the uproar reaching us in our altitude above the drawing-room flat. On New-Year's Day morning there is regularly a competition of bagpipers in the kitchen, and we could fondly imagine 'tis an Eolian Harp. In his pantry Peter practised for years on the shrill clarion, and for years on the echoing horn; yet had he thrown up both instruments in despair of perfection ere we so much as knew that he had commenced his musical studies. In the sunk story, immediately below _that_, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass and her daughter--and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our memory with an audit of their bray. In the sunk story immediately below that again, that distinguished officer on half-pay, Captain Campbell of the Highlanders--when on a visit to us for a year or two--though we seldom saw him--got up a _Sma' still_--and though a more harmless creature could not be, there he used to sit for hours together, with the worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive, in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the precipice of the back court.

Just as quiet are the Attics. They, too, are furnished; for the feeling of there being one unfurnished room, however small, in the largest house, disturbs the entire state of mind of such an occupant, and when cherished and dwelt on, which it must not unfrequently be, inspires a cold air of desolation throughout the domicile, till "thoughts of flitting rise." There is no lumber-room. The room containing Blue-Beard's murdered wives might in idea be entered without distraction by a bold mind.--But oh! the lumber-room, into which, on an early walk through the house of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment--and it was but for a moment, and about six o'clock--far away in the country--that appalling vision met our eyes--till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock, in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the journey--or voyage--we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!--In the Attics an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverock's in our youth at the gates of heaven.

At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer day's perusal of the "Castle of Indolence." O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson!--O that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we should have taken--the one would not have turned round the other, but when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand--and the canoe would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove--the cloud-mountains, immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.

Ay! Great noise as we have made in the world--our heart's desire is for silence--its delight is in peace. And is it not so with all men, turbulent as may have been their lives, who have ever looked into their own being? The soul longs for peace in itself; therefore, wherever it discerns it, it rejoices in the image of which it seeks the reality. The serene human countenance, the wide water sleeping in the moonlight, the stainless marble-depth of the immeasurable heavens, reflect to it that tranquillity which it imagines within itself, though it never long dwelt there, restless as a dove on a dark tree that cannot be happy but in the sunshine. It loves to look on what it loves, even though it cannot possess it; and hence its feeling, on contemplating such calm, is not of simple repose, but desire stirs in it, as if it would fain blend itself more deeply with the quiet it beholds! The sleep of a desert would not so affect it; it is Beauty that makes the difference--that attracts spirit to matter, while spirit becomes not thereby materialised--but matter spiritualised; and we fluctuate in the air-boat of imagination between earth and heaven. In most and in all great instances there is apprehension, dim and faint, or more distinct, of pervasion of a spirit throughout that which we conceive Beautiful. Stars, the moon, the deep bright ether, waters, the rainbow, a pure lovely flower--none of them ever appear to us, or are believed by us to be mere physical and unconscious dead aggregates of atoms. That is what they are; but we could have no pleasure in them, if we knew them as such. There is illusion, then, of some sort, and to what does it amount? We cannot well tell. But if there is really a love in human hearts to these distant orbs--if there is an emotion of tenderness to the fair, opening, breathing blossom that we would not crush it--"in gentleness of heart touch, for there is a spirit in the leaves"--it must be that we do not see them as they are, but "create a soul under the ribs of death." We could not be touched, or care for what has no affinity to ourselves--we make the affinity--we animate, we vivify them, and thenceforward,

"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus, Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."

Now you do believe that we do love Silence--and every other thing worthy to be loved--you and yours--and even that romp, your shock-headed Coz, to whom Priscilla Tomboy was an Imogen.

All our ceilings are deadened--we walk ankle-deep in carpeting--nobody is suffered to open a door but ourselves--and they are so constructed, that it is out of their power to _slam_. Our winter furniture is all massy--deepening the repose. In all the large rooms two fireplaces--and fires are kept perpetually burning day and night, in them all, which, reflected from spacious mirrors, give the mansion quite the appearance of a Pandemonium. _Not gas always._ Palm-oil burns scentless as moonlight; and when motion, not rest, in a place is signified, we accompany ourselves with a wax candle, or taper from time immemorial green. Yet think not that there is a blaze of light. We have seen the midnight heaven and earth nearly as bright, with but one moon and a small scatter of stars. And places of glimmer--and places of gloom--and places "deaf to sound and blind to light" there are in this our mansion, known but to ourselves--cells--penitentiaries--where an old man may sit sighing and groaning, or stupified in his misery--or at times almost happy. So senseless, and worse than senseless, seems then all mortal tribulation and anguish, while the self-communing soul is assured, by its own profound responses, that "whatever is, is best."

And thus is our domicile a domain--a kingdom. We should not care to be confined to it all the rest of our days. Seldom, indeed, do we leave our own door--yet call on us, and ten to one you hear us in winter chirping like a cricket, or in summer like a grasshopper. We have the whole range of the house to ourselves, and many an Excursion make we on the Crutch.

Ascending and descending the wide-winding stair-cases, each broad step not above two inches high, we find ourselves on spacious landing-places illumined by the dim religious light of stained windows, on which pilgrims, and palmers, and prophets, single or in pairs or troops, are travelling on missions through glens or forests or by sea-shores--or shepherd piping in the shade, or poet playing with the tangles of Neaera's hair. We have discovered a new principle on which, within narrow bounds, we have constructed Panoramic Dioramas, that show splendid segments of the great circle of the world. We paint all of them ourselves--now a Poussin, now a Thomson, now a Claude, now a Turner, now a Rubens, now a Danby, now a Salvator, now a Maclise.

Most people, nay, we suspect all people but ourselves, make a point of sleeping in the same bed (that is awkwardly expressed) all life through; and out of that bed many of them avow their inability to "bow an eye;"

such is the power of custom, of habit, of use and wont, over weary mortals even in the blessing of sleep. No such slavish fidelity do we observe towards any one bed of the numerous beds in our mansion. No one dormitory is entitled to plume itself, in the pride of its heart, on being peculiarly Ours; nor is any one suffered to sink into despondency from being debarred the privilege of contributing to Our repose. They are all furnished, if not luxuriously, comfortably in the extreme; in number, nine--each, of course, with its two dressing-rooms--those on the same story communicating with one another, and with the parlours, drawing-rooms, and libraries--"a mighty maze, but not without a plan,"

and all harmoniously combined by one prevailing and pervading spirit of quietude by day and by night, awake or asleep--the chairs being couch-like, the couches bed-like, the beds, whether tent or canopy, enveloped in a drapery of dreams.

We go to bed at no stated hour--but when we are tired of sitting up, then do we lie down; at any time of the night or the day; and we rise, neither with the lark, nor the swallow, nor the sparrow, nor the cock, nor the owl, nor the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor Lucifer, nor Aurora, but with Christopher North. Yellow, or green, or blue, or crimson, or fawn, or orange, or pinky light salutes our eyes, as sleep's visionary worlds recede and relapse into airy nothing, and as we know of a certainty that _these_ are real web-and-woof damask curtains, _that_ flock palpable on substantial walls.

True wisdom soon accommodates itself even to involuntary or inevitable change--but to that which flows from our own sweet will, however sudden and strong, it instantly moulds itself in a novel delight, with all its familiar and domestic habits. Why, we have not been in 99 Moray Place for a week--nay, not for two days and nights--till you might swear we had been all our life a Cit, we look so like a Native. The rustic air of the Lodge has entirely left us, and all our movements are metropolitan.

You see before you a Gentleman of the Old School, who knows that the eyes of the town are upon him when he seeks the open air, and who preserves, even in the privacy of the parlour, that dignity of dress and demeanour which, during winter, befits his age, his rank, and his character. Now, we shave every morning; John, who in his boyish days served under Barbarossa, lightly passes the comb through our "sable silvered;" and then, in our shawl dressing-gown, we descend about ten to our study, and sit, not unstately, beside the hissing urn at our protracted breakfast. In one little month or less, "or ere our shoes are old," we feel as if we had belonged to _this_ house alone, and it to us, from our birth. The Lodge is seen to be standing in its stillness, far away! Dear memories of the pensive past now and then come floating upon the cheerful present--like birds of fairest plumage floating far inland from the main. But there is no idle longing--no vain regret. This, we say, is true wisdom. For each scene and season--each pleasure and place--ought to be trusted to itself in the economy of human life, and to be allowed its own proper power over our spirit. People in the country are often restless to return to town--and people in town unhappy till they rush away into the country--thus cheating their entire existence out of its natural calm and satisfaction. Not so we. We give both their due--and that due is an almost undivided delight in each while we live under its reign. For Nature, believe us, is no jealous mistress. She is an affectionate wife, who, being assured of his fidelity, is not afraid to trust her husband out of her sight,

"When still the town affairs do call him thence,"

and who waits with cheerful patience for his return, duly welcomed with a conjugal shower of smiles and kisses.

But what is this we see before us? Winter--we declare--and in full fig with his powdered wig! On the mid-day of November, absolutely snow! a full, fair, and free fall of indisputable snow.

Not the slightest idea had we, the day before, that a single flake had yet been formed in the atmosphere, which, on closing of our shutters, looked through the clear-obscure, indicative of a still night and a bright morning. But we had not seen the moon. She, we are told by an eyewitness, early in the evening, _stared_ from the south-east, "through the misty horizontal air," with a face of portentous magnitude and brazen hue, symptomatic, so weatherwise seers do say, of the approach of the Snow-king. On such occasions it requires all one's astronomical science to distinguish between sun and moon; for then sister resembles brother in that wan splendour, and you wonder for a moment, as the large beamless orb (how unlike Dian's silver bow!) is in ascension, what can have brought the lord of day, at this untimeous hour, from his sea-couch behind the mountains of the west. Yet during the night-calm we suspected snow--for the hush of the heavens had that downy feel, to our half-sleeping fancy, that belongs to the eider-pillow in which disappears our aged, honoured, and un-nightcap'd head. Looking out by peep of day--rather a ghostlike appearance in our long night-shirt, which trails a regal train--we beheld the fair feathers dimly descending through the glimmer, while momently the world kept whitening and whitening, till we knew not our home-returning white cat on what was yesterday the back-_green_, but by the sable tail that singularly shoots from the rump of that phenomenon. We were delighted. Into the cold plunge-bath we played plop like a salmon--and came out as red as a cut of that incomparable fish. One ply of leather--one of flannel--and one of the linen fine; and then the suit of pepper-and-salt over all; and you behold us welcoming, hailing, and blessing the return of day. Frost, too, felt at the finger and toe tips--and in unequivocal true-blue at the point, Pensive Public, of thy Grecian or Roman nose. Furs, at once, are all the rage; the month of muffs has come; and round the neck of Eve, and every one of all her daughters, is seen harmlessly coiling a boa-constrictor. On their lovely cheeks the Christmas roses are already in full blow, and the heart of Christopher North sings aloud for joy.

Furred, muffed, and boa'd, Mrs Gentle adventures abroad in the blast; and, shouldering his Crutch, the rough, ready, and ruddy old man shows how widows are won, whispers in that delicate ear of the publication of bans, and points his gouty toe towards the hymeneal altar. In the bracing air, his frame is strung like Paganini's fiddle, and he is felt to be irresistible in the _piggicato_. "Lord of his presence, and small land beside," what cares he even for a knight of the Guelphic order? On his breast shines a star--may it never prove a cross--beyond bestowal by king or kaisar; nor is Maga's self jealous or envious of these wedded loves. And who knows but that ere another November snow sheets the Shotts, a curious little Kit, with the word North distinctly traceable in blue letters on the whites of his eyes, may not be playing antics on his mother's knee, and with the true Tory face in miniature, smiling upon the guardian of the merry fellow's own and his country's constitution?

What kind of a Winter--we wonder--are we to have in the way of wind and weather? We trust it will be severe. As summer set in with his usual severity, Winter must not be behindhand with him; but after an occasional week's rain of a commendably boisterous character, must come out in full fig of frost. He has two suits which we greatly admire, combining the splendour of a court-dress with the strength of a work-day garb--we mean his garments of black and his garments of white frost. He looks best in the former, we think, on to about Christmas--and the latter become the old gentleman well from that festival season, on to about the day sacred to a class of persons who will never read our Recreations.

Of all the months of the year, November--in our climate--whether in town or country, bears the worst character. He is almost universally thought to be a sour, sulky, sullen, savage, dim, dull, dark, disconsolate, yet designing month--in fewer words, a month scarcely fit to live. Abhorring all personalities, we repent having sometimes given in to this national abuse of November. We know him well--and though we admit at once that he is no beauty, and that his manners are at the best bluff, at the worst repulsive, yet on those who choose to cultivate his acquaintance, his character continues so to mellow and ameliorate itself, that they come at last, if not to love, to like him, and even to prefer his company "in the season of the year," to that of other more brilliant visitors. So true is it with months and men, that it requires only to know the most unpleasant of them, and to see them during a favourable phasis, in order to regard them with that Christian complacency which a good heart sheds over all its habits. 'Tis unlucky for November--poor fellow!--that he follows October. October is a month so much admired by the world, that we often wonder he has not been spoiled. "What a glorious October!"

"Why, you will surely not leave us till October comes!" "October is the month of all months--and, till you see him, you have not seen the Lakes." We acknowledge his claims. He is often truly delightful; but, like other brilliant persons, thinks himself not only privileged to be at times extremely dull, but his intensest stupidity is panegyrised as wit of the first water--while his not unfrequent rudeness, of which many a common month would be ashamed, passes for the ease of high birth or the eccentricity of genius. A very different feeling indeed exists towards unfortunate November. The moment he shows his face, all other faces are glum. We defy month or man, under such a trial, to make himself even tolerably agreeable. He feels that he is no favourite, and that a most sinister misinterpretation will be put on all his motions, manners, thoughts, words, and deeds. A man or a month so circumstanced is much to be pitied. Think, look, speak, act as he will--yea, even more like an angel than a man or a month--every eyebrow arches--every nostril distends--every lip curls towards him in contempt, while blow over the ice that enchains all his feelings and faculties, heavy-chill whisperings of "who is that disagreeable fellow?" In such a frozen atmosphere, eloquence would be congealed on the lips of an Ulysses--Poetry prosified on those of an Apollo.

Edinburgh, during the dead of Summer, is a far more solitary place than Glenetive, Glenevis, or Glenco. There is not, however, so much danger of being lost in it as in the Moor of Rannoch--for streets and squares, though then utterly tenantless, are useful as landmarks to the pilgrim passing through what seems to be

"A still forsaken City of the Dead!"

But, like a frost-bound river suddenly dissolved by a strong thaw, and coming down in spate from the mountains to the low lands, about the beginning of November life annually re-overflows our metropolis, with a noise like "the rushing of many chariots." The streets, that for months had been like the stony channels of dried-up streams--only not quite so well paved--are again all a-murmur, and people addicted to the study of political economy begin to hold

"Each strange tale devoutly true"

in the Malthusian theory of population. What swarms keep hovering round the great Northern Hive! Add eke after eke to the skep, and still seems it too small to contain all the insects. Edinburgh is almost as large as London. Nay, don't stare! We speak comparatively; and as England is somewhere about six times more populous than Scotland, you may, by brushing up your arithmetic, and applying to the Census, discover that we are not so far wrong in our apparent paradox.

Were November in himself a far more wearifu' month than he is, Edinburgh would nevertheless be gladsome in the midst of all his gloom, even as a wood in May with the Gathering of the Clans. The country flows into the town--all its life seems to do so--and to leave nothing behind but the bare trees and hedges. Equipages again go glittering along all the streets, squares, circuses, and crescents; and one might think that the entire "nation of ladies and gentlemen"--for King George the Fourth, we presume, meant to include the sex in his compliment--were moving through their metropolis. Amusement and business walk hand-in-hand--you hardly know, from their cheerful countenances, which is which; for the Scots, though a high-cheeked, are not an ill-favoured folk in their features--and though their mouths are somewhat of the widest, their teeth are white as well as sharp, and on the opening of their ruddy lips, their ivory-cases are still further brightened by hearty smiles.

'Twould be false to say that their figures are distinguished by an air of fashion--for we have no court, and our nobles are almost all absentees. But though, in one sense, the men are ugly customers, as they will find

"Who chance to tread upon their freeborn toe,"