event of his own death, the India House would grant to his sister the same allowance as by custom is granted to a wife. This they did; but not venturing to calculate upon such nobility of patronage, Lamb had applied himself through life to the saving of a provision for his sister under any accident to himself. And this he did with a persevering prudence, so little known in the literary class, amongst a continued tenor of generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely known in any class. Was this man, so memorably good by lifelong sacrifice of himself, in any profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was not. We, from private communications with him, can undertake to say that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the study of Christianity, he was. What has injured Lamb in this point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from the first were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he had few religious persons amongst his friends, which made him reserved in the expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any case where he altered opinions for the better, the credit of the improvement is assigned to Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning life as a Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian. Coleridge passed through the same changes in the same order: and, here at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own knowledge of Lamb's views, we pronounce to be an error. And the following extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only that he was religiously disposed on impulses self-derived, but that, so far from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he ventured, on this one subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge. In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first great affliction, he says: "Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance; not one Christian; not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly, what am I to do? Wesley-[have you read his life?]-was not he an elevated character? Wesley has said religion is not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with me, or next to solitary. 'Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to me; and do some good to my mind-already how much 'warped and relaxed' by the world!" In a letter written about three months previously, he had not scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of religious speculation, which seemed to him at war with the simplicities of pure religion. He says:— "Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two when you talk in a religious strain. Not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than consistent with the humility of genuine piety.” Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:— "Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil: I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God in the New Testament, our best guide, is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent; and, in my poor mind, 'tis best for us so to consider him as our Heavenly Father, and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of His character.” About a month later, he says:— "Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them." We see by this last quotation where it was that Lamb originally sought for consolation. We personally can vouch that at a maturer period, when he was approaching his fiftieth year, no change had affected his opinions upon that point; and, on the other hand, that no changes had occurred in his needs for consolation, we see, alas! in the records of his life. Whither, indeed, could he fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? And to whom was the Bible an indispensable resource, if not to Lamb? We do not undertake to say, that in his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or consistent, but he was always earnest in his aspirations after its spiritualities, and had an apprehensive sense of its power. Charles Lamb is gone: his life was a continued struggle in the service of love the purest, and within a sphere visited by little of contemporary applause. Even his intellectual displays won but a narrow sympathy at any time, and in his earlier period were saluted with positive derision and contumely on the 66 few occasions when they were not oppressed ORIGIN OF JOHN GILPIN.-Perhaps the by entire neglect. But slowly all things name of no place in the vicinity of London right themselves. All merit, which is found- is so universally known as that of Edmonton, ed in truth and is strong enough, reaches by and this knowledge may be attributed to the sweet exhalations in the end a higher senso- famous visit of that citizen of credit and ry-reaches higher organs of discern- renown," who once set out to see the "Bell" ment, lodged in a selecter audience. But the from famous London town." The "Bell," original obtuseness or vulgarity of feeling which is a popular inn, still hangs out its that thwarted Lamb's just estimation in life, wide-sounding" sign, and calls the lovers will continue to thwart its popular diffusion. of fun and poetry to do their devoirs to There are even some that continue to regard" porter" and the genius of Cowper. The him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, standing by the side of Lamb's grave, seemed to hear, on one side, (but in abated tones,) strains of the ancient malice-" This man, that thought himself to be somebody, is dead-is buried-is forgotten!" and, on the other side, seemed to hear ascending, as with the solemnity of an anthem-"This man, that thought himself to be nobody, is dead—is buried; his life has been searched; and his memory is hallowed for ever!" CANNING'S ESTIMATE OF CHALMERS. When Dr. Chalmers first visited London, the hold that he took on the minds of men was unprecedented. It was a time of strong political feeling; but even that was unheeded, and all parties thronged to hear the Scottish preacher. The very best judges were not prepared for the display that they heard. Canning and Wilberforce went together, and got into a pew near the door. The elder in attendance stood alone by the pew. Chalmers began in his usual unpromising way, by stating a few nearly self-evident propositions, neither in the choicest language nor in the most impressive voice. "If this be all," said Canning to his companion, "it will never do." Chalmers went on-the shuffling of the conversation gradually subsided. He got into the mass of his subject; his weakness became strength, his hesitation was turned into energy; and, bringing the whole volume of his mind to bear upon it, he poured forth a torrent of the most close and conclusive argument, brilliant with all the exuberance of an imagination which ranged over all nature for illustrations, and yet managed and applied each of them with the same unerring dexterity, as if that single one had been the study of a whole life. "The tartan beats us," said Mr. Canning; "we have no preaching like that in England." VOL XVI. NO. L 8 following occurs in the life of the poet, as the origin of the world-famed ballad of "John Gilpin :" "It happened one afternoon, in those years when Cowper's accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made a part of his little evening circle, that she observed him sinking into increased dejection; it was her custom on these occasions, to try all the resources of her sprightly powers for his immediate relief. She told him the story of John Gilpin, (which had been treasured in her memory from her childhood,) to dissipate the gloom of the passing hour. Its effects on the fancy of Cowper had the air of enchantment. He informed her the next morning that convulsions of laughter, brought on by his recollection of her story, had kept him waking during the greatest part of the night, and that he had turned it into a ballad! So arose the pleasant poem of John Gilpin.' To Lady Austen's suggestion, also, we are indebted for the poem of the 'Task.'' A MISERLY MARQUESS.-A few days ago the furniture, &c., of the château of the miserly Marquess d'Aligré, in the village of Chatou, between Paris and St. Germain, was sold by auction. This old Marquess was the richest man in France; he possessed 300 houses in Paris and other towns, fifty estates in different parts of the kingdom, and upwards of 2,000,000l. capital placed in the public funds of different countries; and yet the furniture of his favorite château was old, dirty, wretched in the extreme, and would have disgraced a low lodging-house. There was not a decent picture, not a cushion or curtain, or carpet, that was not ragged; not a chair or table that was not rickety; not a piece of crockery that was not cracked.— Globe. From Fraser's Magazine. VIEWS OF EDINGURGH. TRAVELLING, like charity, should begin at home. Let no one lament that he is cut off from the delightful foreign tour which "the state of the Continent" has forbidden, if he have still to become acquainted with the beauties and treasures of his own dear land. There is more altogether to be seen in Great Britain, whether of the historical, the romantic, the wonderful, or the picturesque, than in any other country on the surface of the globe. We leave Ireland out of the question, for even tourists have become Repealers now. Let no one especially lament his hard fate who intended this summer to have become acquainted with St. Petersburg, or Constantinople, or Cairo, or Pesth, if he have not seen a city nearer home as singular as any of these, and more beautiful, viz., the fair capital of Scotland. We are not Scotch ourselves, nor, singular to say, could we have been, even had we been born in the very heart of Mid-Lothian. Edinburgh is not "our own romantic town," except in love, gratitude, and adoption, yet we envy every traveller his first impressions of her wondrous beauties; that is, if it be possible to envy another that of which we ourselves with a long and close acquaintance have never lost the freshness. Still it is a pleasure to live these impressions over and over again with any sensible and susceptible companion who will intrust himself to our guidance; and, after a hard day's work, to earn the thanks that are due to a kind and patient ciceroneship, when all the time we have been trotting our companion about quite as much for our own good pleasure as for his. How we enjoy, for instance, sallying out with him the first morning into Princes street, that our eyes may wander in admiration and astonishment through the whole length of that unrivalled causeway from west to east. Beginning with that pile of Castle rock, and its towers and guérites standing bold against the sky; we pass, in rapid glance, first the classic portico and rich pillared perspective of the Royal Institution, with sun. our Queen, in graceful robing, enthroned upon it; then that beautiful gothic structure starting up like a tall sprouting plant, or graceful jet d'eau, all sparkling still with the freshness of newly-hewn stone, with the thoughtful head of Sir Walter Scott seen beneath; and catch between them as we proceed glimpses of towers, and spires, and old houses, and rich foliage, till our vision rests on the Calton Hill, with its airy Parthenon pillars traced against the early eastern Or again, to place ourselves north and south, looking up on one side at that extraordinary pile of gray Old Town, with its giddy houses, eleven stories high; its ragged outline of wall and chimney, with tower, and spire, and coroneted steeple, seen above; and, nearer and lower, those grand arches of the North Bridge, spanning a very city in their length; and, higher and further, the blue line of Salisbury Craigs, with huge Ben Arthur presiding, like a lion couchant, over the scene;-and then down on the other side, on those splendid rows of palatial edifices, terrace below terrace, embosomed in rich gardens, with the blue Forth beyond, and the long sweeping lines of the Fife hills beyond that, till the old song comes into our heads, and we involuntarily exclaim, in a rhapsody of enthusiasm, Auld Reekie greet ye well; Or how we delight to stand with him at the top of the Lawn Market, looking up at strange old houses with their gables towards the street; their open stairs mounting above our heads; their dark cellars and cavities disappearing beneath our feet; with those dark, dirty, winding passages, like deep rents between the houses, sloping into misty darkness, or giving momentary glimpses of woods, and hills, and turreted mansions, like Paradise, beyond them; and to wonder in what part of the world we can possibly be, till the dress or physiognomy of the people -not their speech, for that's all Greek to us still-or the names on the many boards, Kenmore, Grocer; Porteous, Tailor; or MacBeth, Flesher; or the buzz of a distant bagpipe, or a whiff of Scotch broth, struggling with less agreeable perfumes, or, most significant of all, a sting of sharp east wind, convince us that we are in no other than the "Land o' Cakes." | Or how we love to loiter with him on the grand road beneath the Calton Hill, looking on the one side at all the crowded forms of both towns, and over and under those bridges and bands of communication which the old chieftain has extended like loving arms to his bride, and on the other at old Holyrood with her massive towers and delicate but ruined chapel; beyond which lies the glorious expanse of land and sea, where the cone of North Berwick Law overtops the coast, and even the Bass on a clear day is distinguishable; and, casting all comparisons to the wind, while it happens just here to blow so hard that we can hardly keep our hats on, to vow before heaven and earth that Edinburgh has not her equal in the whole world. It were strange if it had, for what other city can boast of such a concurrence of natural advantages? Situated on a quasi peninsula, having the sea, with its islands, and the Forth with its hills, as its east and north boundaries; with Salisbury Craigs flanking like a wall of defence the approach to Arthur's Seat on the south-east; and the rugged knolls of the Braed Hills, and the bold lines of the Pentlands stretching round from the south to the west; and, lastly, in the centre of all that splendid mass of rock, inaccessible on three sides, and sloping down on the fourth with a high rocky ridge, inviting a warlike race to perch their nests upon it; Auld Reekie, even when single, must have been the wonder of the world. And then to see that "bonny bride," whom | he has taken to his arms rather late in lifefor the old chieftain, like a true cautious Scot, did not encumber himself with a better-half till he could afford it-and whom he has not only placed in a position which would alone give grandeur to the meanest building, but also clothed in a splendor of architecture which would make a better St. Petersburg of her, even if, like that much over-praised city, she lay etched out on a swamp. Truly there is no city like Edinburgh. Twenty cities might be endowed with the superfluity of her beauties. The only draw back is, that there is too much in one feast even for the veriest gourmand in scenery to do justice to. One is almost distracted with the variety. You feel that, while you are enjoying some paragon of Art, you are losing some marvel of Nature; that while you are gloating on a Canaletti, you are neglecting a Turner: that you can nowhere place yourself before one grand object without turning your back on another; that, in short, if you are in Edinburgh but a few days, you are gorged with an over-abundance of good things; and that if you live there all your life, you can never be satiated. We English are especially entitled to a kind of fatherly pride at the sight of the New Town. It was the prosperity resulting to Caledonia by her alliance with England which built this city of palaces. It was the friendly, though at first hated, hand of the Union, which gave away the bride. The same deed, signed, as tradition reports, in a cellar in the High street, which gave Scotland finally to England, gave also some eighty years later. the New Town of Edinburgh to Scotland. One cannot but feel, on looking round, how puzzling it must have been for the first builders to know where to place their houses, for very embarras de belles sites. There were mountain, and sea, and river, and hill, and wooded knolls, and verdant slopes, and sunsets and sunrises, such as are seen nowhere else, all spread out to choose from; for front or back view, or both. Not that we should have doubted long. The centre of Princes street would have been our final choice for mountain and sea, hill and river, verdant slopes and wooded knolls, may be had in other countries: but where else is there to be found an object so strange, so various, so inexhaustibly fascinating, as that wonderful, gray, lofty, jagged thing, conglomerate of innumerable dwellings, and yet apparently all of one piece, spread out before us from east to west, which is known by the name of "the Old Town?" The wonder is how any mode of life, which requires abstraction of thought and closeness of application, could ever be carried on in rooms commanding this view. Lawyers, clergymen, and especially authors, unless so fortunate as to be blind, must have been ruined here. This accounts for the general passing of these houses in Princes street, originally built for gentlemen's families, into the occupation of shopkeepers, who, it may be remarked, borrow a leaf from out of our book, and are more civil than most others in escorting their customers to the door, just for an excuse to get a peep of that exquisite Old Town, and go back refreshed to their coun- | ters. One of the chief haberdashers in Princes street assured us, in true trading language, that he would not sell that view before his door for a thousand pounds; and, in the sympathy of our souls, we believed him. How the tourists who take up their abode at Gibb's Hotel can manage to get dressed of a morning is a perpetual enigma. That Old Town must have made many a poor man too late for the railway. How grand is the first morning view of it, as it rises from its high pedestal of rich foliage!—one huge gray mass, all jagged in outline, like an enormous granite ruin; till gradually a thousand windows--some scattered up and down, others in level rows eleven times repeated-glimmer murkily in the early light; and a thousand chimneys send forth their slender pennons of smoke in beautifully waving lines at every stage of altitude; some floating into the clouds above, others wending up their way from the very base as if sent forth by subterranean fires; and then, as the sun mounts higher, (if we have any sun at all,) and light and shadow fall upon this maze of monotonous confusion, to see how those eleven-storied patriarchs stand forward, with smaller structures clustering at their roots, throwing deep shadows into endless entanglements of roof, and wall, and gable, and dark hollows, and strange antiquated forms; till more murky windows glimmer, and more smoking pennons wave, and we feel that this is not only the accumulated erection of many past ages, but the present residence of a crowded people. We have doubted whether the sun would shine upon the traveller, but we are not sure that we even wish it for him. There is a mysterious affinity between the Old Town and the prevailing skies of Scotland which constitutes one of its greatest charms; there is an exquisite harmony of tint which, like a picture painted in the fewest colors, is always acceptable to the eye. Everything partakes of that beautiful rusty tone-the green gray rocks, the gray green trees, the blue gray sky; and then that pure gray Old Town, which, like a veritable Rembrandt etching, has a coloring all its own, which nothing else can attain. And now we should advise our traveller to tear himself from the window, if he can, and bestow his enthusiasm elsewhere for a time. It can come nowhere amiss in Edinburgh. But let him return to his post at the gloaming, or just before it, as the last glitter of the evening sun is dying away, and the huge mass is returning to its misty monotony, though not for long. For even before the last gold from without has passed away, the first spark from within has begun to shine; and here and there a ray is seen feebly piercing the gloom, irregularly placed, like the sentinel lights upon a huge scattered fortress; while window after window, faint and pink, dawns into view, and little earth-born stars twinkle in the clouds above, and brighter glowworms emerge in the depths below; and the illumination spreads upward and downward, and brightens as it goes. And now may be discovered, more clearly than by any daylight view, the distinction between the different classes of occupants; how the comfort diminishes as the light spreads upward, "small by degrees and dimly less." Those elevenstoried houses especially are regular gauges of social distinctions. Below, the burners of gas, brilliant and glowing, for two or three stories; then very respectable long-sixes; then the modest poverty of the dip; and, lastly, a little twinkle from garret and lucum which savors miserably of the rushlight. Not that any of the lights are very brilliant now, for a cold mist has shrouded the whole scene, and they glimmer mysteriously and ghostily; and the whole mass looks larger and loftier than ever; for, in the general gloom, the lights in the more modern houses which nestle in the hollow seem to be all one portion of the great façade; while, in the darkness which hides every object between us and it, the huge and dimly-illuminated monster seems to start from a bottomless abyss. And now this is surely enough of the Old Town front. But no, we have one aspect more to show our companion. He has shut the window and left it, for the night is raw, and who cares to look at the beautiful or the picturesque through spectacles? But he returns for one glance between ten and eleven, throws up the sash in hot haste to be sure that the wondrous object he has just caught sight of is not a phantasmagoria of his senses, and then stands transfixed. The night is dark, the fog has all cleared away, and a dense black curtain hangs from heaven to earth. studded with lights innumerable, like the fullest firmament of stars we have seen in the clearest tropical sky. Like the stars, too, in irregularity,-here a "burning row," there a Pleiades cluster; some twinkling like planets; others steady and distant as fixed orbs; some moving slowly across a space, others dancing like Jack-o'-lanterns, a few going out as he gazes: and he could stand and gaze all night. |