for ever," but in Mary's case, the thing of
beauty is a sad memory for evermore—
beautiful, no doubt, as the story of her
youth comes down to us, from the haze and
cloud and roseate sunset of the past, but
with melancholy as its all-pervading halo.

We are accompanied, as we pace up to
the Castle, to start from thence on our
pilgrimage to Holyrood, by a friend, who is a
poet and an artist, and a prosperous citizen
to boot, which not all poets and artists
are, and who might be called, for his
patriotism, Scotus Scotorum—one born in
Edinburgh, and familiarly acquainted with
every ancient stone and every venerable
nook on all its classic ground. We soon
exhaust the Castle and its treasures; see
the regalia of Scotland; the crown on its
cushion of crimson velvet, fringed with
gold; the sceptre, the sword, the mace,
and all the rest of the paraphernalia of a
royalty that is not extinct, though merged
in that of Great Britain; and, next of all,
the little—the very little—room in which
Mary gave birth to James the First of
England and Sixth of Scotland. It is of
irregular form, only eight feet square,
overlooks the steep precipice of the Castle Rock,
and is eminently suggestive of the discomfort
in which our ancestors were content to
live and to die. George the Fourth, when
he visited Edinburgh, was particularly
curious to examine this room—why, is not
stated; but that the motive was poetical
or romantic does not appear very likely to
those who remember the King's character.
We take a look at Mons Meg, a great,
old-fashioned, and useless gun, which the
worthy Scottish people have somehow or
other taken it into their heads to regard as
a kind of palladium of the liberties of Scotland,
and learn that it was employed by
James the Fourth at the siege of Norham
Castle in 1498; that it accidentally burst
in firing a salute in honour of James the
Seventh in 1682; that it was removed to
the Tower of London, to lie perdu in that
repository of old arms and artillery, and that
it remained there until 1829, when it was
restored to Scotland amid the rejoicings of
the Edinburgh people. The street that
extends from the Castle to Holyrood—and
that in different parts receives the name
of the Castle Hill, the Lawnmarket, the
High-street, and the Canongate, and that
swarms from morn to night, and long into
the night, with people who seem to have
nothing to do but to lounge and gossip, or,
as the Scotch say, "to crack" at corners,
and with children enough to stock one of
the states of America is richer—in
historical associations than any street in the
world, unless some of the older streets of
Paris be exceptions. All the other
thoroughfares of ancient Edinburgh are but
feeders to this one. There is not a solitary
wynd, or close, or alley leading out of it
on either side—sordid, mean, squalid, and
wretchedly over-peopled, as they all are—
which, could the tale of its former inhabitants
be truly told, would not shine and
sparkle with the names of the great, the
noble, the beautiful, the learned, the wise,
and the witty. Our poetical friend Scotus
draws our attention to one of these wynds
or closes—a narrow alley, which the
outstretched hands of a man could touch
simultaneously on both sides—and informs
us that in early boyhood he used to spit
down it in passing, to show his contempt;
and that he registered a vow never to pass
down it as long as he lived—a vow which
to this time he has religiously kept. I ask
him why? "It is Monteith's Close," he
replies; "so called from the name of the
wretch who betrayed Wallace! There is
pollution in the very remembrance of such
a scoundrel." I know my friend Scotus
well enough to be convinced that he will
keep his juvenile vow: and that his
veneration for Wallace, and his hatred of
Monteith, are realities, and not shams affected
for the occasion.

Descending the Castle Hill to the
Lawnmarket, I strive to recal to mind what
brilliant and gorgeous, and what tragic
processions have passed over these stones
from the early days of the Stuarts until our
own. And first of all there flits over my
waking fancy that processsion of ghosts,
all clad in the semblance of mail, "in their
habit as they lived," like Hamlet's father,
who gathered at the cross (the ancient site
of which we are now passing) on the eve
of the fatal battle of Flodden, and I recal
the lines which they chanted in the pale
moonlight:

           Dim the night, but dark the morrow,
           Long shall last the coming sorrow,
                     Woe to Scotland, woe!

This procession was but a dream of the
excited popular imagination of the time,
although to my remembrance it wears the
guise of a fact; like all great fictions that
are narrated by true poets and romancers.
Falstaff, who may never have lived at all, is
as real as any actual personage of the days
of Queen Elizabeth, and Lady Macbeth is
as indubitable a reality as Mrs. Manning.
The other historical processions that might