ing lamps begin to make visible their filth, poverty, and misery, is like a sudden rush from the Elysian fields to the dominions of Pluto.
The past stands forth with peculiar distinctness in Edinburgh. It has been so well defined by her historians, that it mingles with the current of passing things. You can scarcely disentangle, from the web of the present, the associations that throng around you, while standing on the radiated spot in the pavement, where the "old cross of Dun-Edin once reared itself, walking in the purlieus of the Grass-Market, so often saturate with noble blood, or musing amid the corridors and carved ceilings of the Old Parliament-House, you pause at the trap-door, which from the "lock-up-house," eighty feet beneath, gave entrance to the haggard prisoners into the criminal court, and imagine the tide of agonizing emotions, which from age to age that narrow space has witnessed. A similar dreaminess and absorption in the past steal over you, when in the rock-ribbed Castle you gaze on the ancient regalia, so bright, yet now so obsolete; or while exploring the Register-Office, with its strong stone arches, enter the circular room, with its richly carved and sky-lighted dome, where repose in state the many massy volumes of Scotland's annals; or see in other apartments the decrees and signatures of her kings, for seven hundred years; the illuminated folio, where the articles of Union, in the reign of Queen Anne, were inscribed; and the repository of
