MR. JOHN SMITH.
prospect of the glorious ocean, and the fine vessels which continually appeared in the offing.
He was a true patriot, and, as he wandered on the beach, in his buff slippers and straw hat, with an umbrella over his head to shield him from the sun, he might often have been heard to sing, with laudable pride, 'Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!'
After sojourning for three weeks at Ramsgate he went northward; nor did he stop till he had reached that city so renowned for its beauty as often to be called the modern Athens—we mean Edinburgh. Mr. Smith wrote home frequently from thence to his family, and made many valuable remarks on the dialect and manners of the inhabitants; but it would appear that he did not altogether approve of what he saw, for in a letter to his son, after praising the goodness of the houses, and the excellence of the gas-fittings, and, indeed, of everything in the iron and brass departments, he observed that the poultry was tough and badly fed, and that the inhabitants had a most unwarrantably high opinion of their city, 'which I can tell you, is as dull compared to London,' he continued, 'as the British Museum is compared with the Pantheon in Oxford Street.' He also, in the same letter, made some new and valuable remarks on the lateness of the season in the North. In proof of the difference between London and Edinburgh he told his son that strawberries were then in full perfection in the latter city, though it was past the middle of August.
Some years after Mr. Smith's return he was elected churchwarden for the parish of Cripplegate, and performed the duties of that situation with great satisfac-
