Mrs. Begg and her daughters were settled
in a cottage in Ayrshire. Mr. Robert
Chambers then went bravely to work with
his own hands and brains to help Burns's
kindred for Burns's sake. After devoting
admirable industry and research to the task,
he produced The Life and Poems of Burns,
in four volumes; published the work in
eighteen hundred and fifty-one; and devoted
the first proceeds of the sale, two hundred
pounds, to the necessities of Mrs. Begg
and her daughters—thus giving from his own
individual exertion more than half as much
as the entire sum which all Scotland had
given. We hope Mr. Robert Chambers will
forgive us for filling up an omission in the
newspaper history of the twenty-sixth of
January, and mentioning, by way of contrast,
the nature of his tribute to the memory
of Burns.

If there be a brighter and better side to the;
Burns centenary picture than we have
discovered, there happens, at any rate, as
circumstances at present exist, to be one easy
means of showing it to us. In the Times'
report of the Crystal Palace Festival, a
document is printed, with names attached, which
asks help for the only surviving daughter of
Burns; and the plain question is put below
it, whether that daughter would derive any
benefit from the proceedings of the day, so far
as the Palace at Sydenharn was concerned.
To our knowledge, that question has not
been answered yet. We looked carefully at
the reports of all the Dinners in England and
Scotland, and found no reference made to the
subject anywhere. Everywhere, the company
sang, and took tea and coffee, and admired
the relics with the tenderest curiosity; but
we can find no instance in which the hand of
the company is reported to have entered
the pocket of the company with a view to
Burns's daughter, at the close of the evening.
Until we are favoured with some satisfactory
explanation of this singular circumstance,
we can only repeat the question in the
Times; putting it, in our case, not to the
Crystal Palace Company only, but to every
other company, small and large, which
commemorated the anniversary of the twenty- fifth
of January last. What has this grand
outburst of enthusiasm done for the last
surviving daughter of Robert Burns?

    THE INQUISITION'S GALA-DAY.

In vain I went to worm out the house
where Murillo was born, and spent some time
watching some gipsy girls, and haggard old
crones with red rims to their eyes, who, in
the square of Seville, not far from the
Archbishop's palace, were busy cooking something
in a tripod cauldron, over a charcoal fire
that the wind kindled in gusts to a white
crimson.

Yes, even of sketching, as of other good
things, there may be too much; so I slapped
my pencils in their case with the angry haste
with which a hard-pressed soldier rings his
ramrod into the barrel, clicked my knife to
as if I had got an enemy's fingers under the
blade, and set off to go and inflict my dulness
on the English Consul,—a kind old man, and
a lover of art. Now, he who loves what I
love, I always love; but, to tell the real
truth, the rain of sun-fire had now dried up
an hour ago all love of humanity in me: my
heart seemed a hard Barcelona nut, my brain
a dried-up mad(r)epore; my veins were contracting;
I was rapidly becoming a baked man,—
a bad terra-cotta likeness of Adam. The
Spanish sun had turned my milk of human
kindness into curds and whey. Just now I
was admiring the Spanish nobility of bearing;
their quick rebound of wit; their
courage, their freedom from pride. Now
I find myself, yellow-faced victim of bile that
I am! sneering at the Inquisition, denouncing
the shoals of Indians whom Cortes drove
to death, laughing at the little strutting
baboon grandees, and speaking irreverently of
a certain Madrid lady, the Messalina of
modern times. All this comes of a rise in the
thermometer. But a man cannot kick himself,
or pull his own nose. So I let it pass.
Ill-tempered, bilious wretch that I am, I pretend
to be going to chat and trifle with an.
old friend; but don't I really know that I
am really going to vent on him my ill-temper;
to sit obstinately sullenly enjoying the fact
that a bored and long-suffering friend is not
allowed, by the rules of the Book of Etiquette,
to drive you down-stairs, with the word Bore
chalked on the back of your black coat.

I wind down all sorts of quiet streets in
the environs of the Archbishop's palace;
where, now that Peter's net is made of gold
wire, the fishers of men, Saint Peter's
descendants and worshippers, keep their fishing
materials. At last, after long trains of
blind walls and grated windows, from which
music here and there oozes out for my solace,
(poor bilious pilgrim that I am, with unboiled
peas in my life-pilgrim shoes), I come to
Numero X., and a grated door looking very
much like the entrance to a sort of Paradisaical
Newgate. As I stand at the threshold,
my tongue hangs out like a mad dog's; my
liver seems swollen as large as a hat-box; as
for my heart, it is like a bad horse in a race,
—nowhere; my throat is a potsherd. I
track my way as I go, like a water-cart,
with hot drops from my brow. I feel for
the first time the curse of Cain, and am
scarcely able to bear it. How long the fellow
is answering the bell. I stare through the
grated door like a felon from his condemned
cell. I feel blood-thirsty and felonious. I
long to bathe in a lemonade ocean, and wish
for a steady two days' rain of soda-water. A
man fast becoming a tile has a right to lose
his temper: flesh I had lost long ago. O, that
Spanish sun! Would I had a diving-bell,
that I might spend my afternoons at the