persons I proposed waiting upon anticipated my intentions, and called at the Buck's Head, with ready and cordial offers of all manner of civility and attention. This gentleman is a distant relation of my friend W, who had informed him, by a different letter, of me and all my motions. From what I have seen of him, he is likely to prove a capital Lionizer; for he seems to know every thing about Glasgow, and to be very willing to communicate every thing that he does know. What is best of all, he is a perfectly idle man,a character of very rare occurrence in such a town as this, so that I shall not be troubled in receiving his attentions with the painful idea that I am wasting valuable time. In all the mercantile towns I have previously visited, at home and abroad, it has been my fortune to fall entirely into the hands of merchants; and these, though they are as kind as possible, and as willing as you could wish to entertain you all the evenings, have a sad aversion to having their mornings cut up with parading a stranger through their curiosities. Now, Mr. His probably not unfrequently at a loss how to spend his own mornings in Glasgow, and I am doing him a favour by giving him occupation.

He seemed resolved that I should feel myself perfectly at home in his company, for the very first subject he began to enlarge upon was his own history; and, as we walked along the streets towards the Cathedral, (for that was the first Lion he proposed showing me,) he told me as many anecdotes of his adventures as would fill half-a-dozen even of my letters. He appeared to be very anxious, by the whole drift of his discourse, to create in my mind a very broad and marked line of distinction between himself and the other inhabitants of this his native city, for whom, indeed, it was easy to see he entertains no great feeling of partiality. "You will, no doubt, be much surprised," said he, "to find a person so idle as myself living here among such a set of drudges: but there's a reason for every thing, Doctor Morris; and, let me tell you, I have devilish good reasons for choosing to be a dweller in Glasgow, in spite of all my disgust for the doings of the place."

I comprehend, partly from what he has said, and partly from the conversation of my landlady, Mrs. Jardine, that a generation or two back, Glasgow was entirely a place of merchandise, and not at all connected with manufactures; that in those days the principal merchants, who had every thing their own way in the town, were not unfrequently persons of very.

respectable birth and education--some of them younger sons of good gentlemen's families-and all of them accustomed to live on terms of familiarity, if not equality, with the noblesse of the neighbouring counties. The introduction of manufacture, cotton-mills, sugar-works, soap-works, and a thonand other engines of prosperity, has had the effect of causing this primitive aristocracy of traffickers to be invaded in their privileges by a mighty swarm of mere novi homines--persons sprung from every variety of mean blood and place, and trained in every variety of narrow-mindedness and ignorance, who have now, by strength of numbers and of purses, almost succeeded in pushing the relics of the old school from their seats of dignity, and who constitute, at this moment, the most prominent element in every large society of Glasgow. My new acquaintance, whose own family held a high place in the days of the elder system, has witnessed, with a most lively dismay, this sad diminution of their importance, and mourns, in other words, over the increased wealth, population, and importance of his native city, as if his own birthright had been invaded at every step of its progressive prosperity. He is attached, however, to the soil of the place, partly by the feelings and recollections of his youth-partly by the necessity of keeping on good terms with an old absurd uncle, who thinks Glasgow the only town in Britain where any man of taste and discernment ought to live; but, most of all, I suspect, (although he did not say any thing expressly on that head,) from the gratification his vanity receives, by means of his sojourn here, he being not only the most idle, but also the most genteel and elegant person in the city, and therefore enjoying, in all fulness, the delights and dignities of being its arbiter elegantiarum. He is the very Potts of Glasgow.

Mr. H- cannot show his face in the Merchant's house, or on the Exchange, or on any other scene,

"Where most our merchants use to congregate,"

without finding himself a very insignificant sort of person; but the matter is much otherwise when he enters a ball room or assembly. His slim, figure, so different from those of the brawny swollen money-getters and punch-drinkers-his degagée and polite air, the fruit of his foreign travel, (for he, too, has been a wanderer in bis day)-his skill in dancinghis knowledge of women-his flatteries--and his foibles-all have contributed to make him the favourite beau of the ladies of this mercantile city. No young bourgeoise can be said

to have come out till Mr. H- has done her the honour to walk down a country-dance with her. Nobody dare venture to say she is a beauty, till his infallible imprimatur has been fixed upon her. Although long past the hey-day and buoyancy of youth and youthful spirits, he walks unrivalled and alone, among a thousand more sanguine pretenders-secure in the non-chalance of his long-established sway--eternal master of the ceremonies-the Prince and Apostle of the Drawcansirs of the West.

Of the many things on which he piques himself-one, and not the most trivial, is his connexion with the ancient and lofty blood of my friend W's family. He goes into Edinburgh now and then, and the reception he meets with there through the means of W so very different from the utter neglect with which most Glasgow visiters are received in that metropolis, is always sufficient to renew and refresh this vanity in the most effectual manner. He is proud, moreover, of the high personal character and literary reputation of the laird, and altogether his kinsmanship has become quite one of his hobbies. "My cousin, Mr. W of W," is a formula never out of his mouth. He can say by heart a variety of W's minor love poems, which he repeats in a most moving manner to the young ladies, when they are warmed with an extra glass of sherry-negus at a ball-supper. His chansons-a-boire furnish him in like manner with a no less appropriate armoury of fascination for the punch-table-and never does he either sing or say, without introducing a full account of the tie which subsists between his own family and that of his author. My friend, I suppose, has written concerning me in much higher terms than I deserve--for I observe that Mr. H- takes it for granted I am a man of wonderful accomplishments. I have lost, however, not a little way in bis good opinion, by not having been present at a ball and supper, given on board the flag-ship at Leith, the week before I left Edinburgh. He cannot understand how I should have neglected such an opportunity of exhibiting my Cambrian graces. I might tell him I have bad the gout-but am quite willing to sustain the weight of his contempt as it is. It is very bad policy to make a man think he has no point of superiority over yourself. I have no ambition to rival the Toeocracy of Mr. H—————.

Making some allowances for the prejudices of this gentleman-and, above all, for the jaundiced view he may be expected to give of some of the present prime ones in this mer

cantile city, and their manner of deporting themselves-and having, as usual, my own eyes about me to correct any misstatements that may creep into his account of things, I imagine I have lighted upon an excellent cicerone. I am sure he is, at least, a civil, and he promises no less surely to be an indefatigable one.

P. M.

LETTER LXVII.

TO THE SAME.

THE situation of the Cathedral of Glasgow has been so exquisitely described in Rob Roy, that it would be quite useless. to do any thing more than refer you to it-only the fine pine trees which, in the novel, are represented as covering the whole of the opposite bank of the ravine, and extending their funeral shade quite to the back of the cemetrey-these (miserabile dictu!) have been sacrificed to the aur sacra fames, and that bank is now bare and green, as if black pine had never grown there. The burial-ground, with which the Cathedral is on all sides surrounded, is certainly one of the largest and one of the most impressive I have ever visited. The long and flat grave-stones, in their endless lines, seem to form a complete pavement to the whole surface-making it a perfect street of the dead-the few knots of tall wiry grass and clustering nettles, which find room to shoot from between the layers of stone-work, being enough to increase the dreariness, but not to disturb the uniformity of the scene. building stands on the declivity of a slight hill, at the bottom of which a brawling rivulet tumbles along with a desolate roar of scanty waters--but it would seem the ground had been dug up originally, so as to give the Cathedral a uniform and even line of foundations. Yet-such in many succeeding centuries has been the enormous accumulation of the dead, that their graves have literally choked up the one end of the church altogether--so that of a tier of windows which are seen entire at the east, at the west the tops only can be traced, sculptured and ornamented like the rest, just peering above the surface of the encroaching tombs.

The

The feelings one has in visiting a Gothic cathedral, are always abundantly melancholy, but the grand and elevating accompaniments by which this melancholy is tempered in a

Catholic, and even in an English cathedral, are amissing-sadly amissing-in the case of a cathedral that has fallen into the bands of the Presbyterians. When one enters one of those antique piles in Southern Germany, or in Spain, (for there only can a Catholic Gothic cathedral be seen in all its glory,) I know not that it is possible for the heart of man to desire any addition to the majestic solemnity of the whole scene. The tall narrow windows, quite dark with the long purple garments of pictured martyrs, apostles, and kings, tinge every ray that passes through them with the colours and the memory of a thousand years of devotion. The whole immeasurable space below,-nave, transept, and sounding aisles, are left glowing in their bare marble beneath these floods of enriched and golden light-no lines of beavy pews are allowed to break the surface-it seems as if none could have any permanent place there except those who sleep beneath. You walk from end to end over a floor of tombstones, inlaid in brass with the forms of the departed-mitres, and crosiers, and spears, and shields, and helmets, all mingled together--all worn into glass-like smoothness by the feet and the knees of long departed worshippers. Around, on every side each in their separate chapel--sleep undisturbed from age to age the venerable ashes of the holiest or the loftiest that of old came thither to worship their images and their dying prayers sculptured, and painted above the resting-places of their remains. You feel that you are but a visiter amidst the congregation and home of the dead--and walk with gentle steps along the precious pavement, that answers with a clear prophetic echo to your living tread.

The rich old tapestries which sometimes cover the walls of these cathedrals, mingle better with the storied windows than even the finest of painting or Mosaics--for the exhibition of perfect art throws discredit on rude art, however impressive, and disturbs the uniform eloquence with which the whole should be made to teem. But the greatest of all cur wants is, that of the long processions of kneeling priests, which carry the eye onward to the steps of some high illuminated altar--where the blaze of the antique candlesticks comes faint and dim through the clouds of perfumed smoke, swung ever and anon, slow and solemn, from their waving censers. It is, I sometimes think, a thousand pities that errors and corruptions, in far different matters, should have made protestants part with so much of the old hereditary ceremonial of the church. Even the sacred music of our