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luded to overcome my resentment, my friend proceeded thus:"There," said he, "stood, and in fact still stands, the ancient castle, or mar, of the Macduffs, Earls and Thanes of Fife, who were once powerful enough to dispute authority and dominion here with majesty itself. This castle was afterwards forfeited to James the First, by an act of attainder against Macduff, and now composes part of the Palace which we are about to visit. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, this castle was committed to the keeping of King Robert's brother, the ambitious and most barbarously inhuman Duke of Albany, who, having prevailed upon his brother the king to commit his son and heir to the kingdom, the young, and somewhat licentious David Duke of Rothsay, to his protection, shut up the young Prince in a dungeon of this castle, and, with a view to his father's succession, actually starved him to death. The story is one which is enough to bring tears from the most rocky heart, and while it fixes an indelible stain—I had almost said upon Nobility itself-it sheds a lustre over the very peasantry, and these very burgesses you were but lately disparaging, which no title, or rank, or worldly grandeur, could ever confer.

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A poor woman, the wife, as is reported, of a Burgess of Falkland, having chanced, in passing by, to hear the groans and the miserable wailings of the unfortunate Captive, advanced, at the risk of her life, to a small chink, or loop-hole, in the wall, and there learning the helpless and perishing condition of the starving and totallydeserted Inmate, she ventured to slip through to him, from night to night, "cakes" made exceedingly thin on purpose, conveying, at the same time, to his perished and famished palate, through a reed, or piece of hemlock, the warm and reviving stream which proceeded directly from her own breast.* But the device was at last found out,

and in all probability to the destruction of this humane and most undaunted woman, as well as most assuredly to the lingering and revolting death of the now altogether supportless captive. Imagination recoils with loathing and shuddering from such deeds of darkness as this, and rests with delight and rapture on the kindly refreshment which the strong contrast, presented by the woman's conduct, affords."-"If I knew," added I," a single Brat in Falkland, the most ragged and vice-worn even, which tumbles a stone from that Palace roof, or shivers a window in that parish school-house,-if I knew any thing at all in the shape of humanity which owned this woman for Ancestor, I would adopt him as my son: he should eat of my bread, and drink of my cup, and lie in my bosom; and I would be unto him as a father."""Away, and away; you again run with the harrows at your heels, my good friend," rejoins my more cool and considerate monitor; "I am afraid your benevolence will have no opportunity of being exercised in this case, unless it instruct you to estimate the lower orders of society more highly than in your Lomond rhapsody you were lately disposed to do."

Having now come up to the very front of the Castle which looks down upon the town, towards the south, we put up our horses with Mrs Scott, ordered a beef-steak for dinner, and set out incontinently upon our investigation of the Palace and adjoining ruins.

Upon entering through the boldly arched and truly royal gate-way, which conducts into the interior of the square, two sides of which are still pretty entire, we found ourselves in the presence of a Character well known in Falkland,-distinguished not less by the antiquity of the family from which he is descended, and of which he is the last and only remaining branch, than by a most devoted and unequivocal attachment to Mrs Scott's chimney-cheek and whisky bottle.

"By this Annabel the queen dying, David her son, who by her means had been restrained, broke out into his natural disorders, and committed all kinds of rapine and luxury. Complaint being brought to his father, (Robt. 3,) he commits him to his brother, the governor, (whose secret design being to root out the offspring,) the business was so ordered as that the young man was shut up in Falkland Castle to be starved, which yet was for a while delayed, a woman thrusting in some thin oat-cakes at a chink, and giving him milk out of her paps through a trunck. But both these being discovered, the youth being forced to tear his own members, died of a multiplied death," &c. -HALL'S Preface to Drummond of Hawthornden's History of Scotland, p. 16. London edit. 1655. Vide likewise Lesly, Bishop of Ross.

VOL. X.

I

66

After a sufficient period of morning libations, he had just escaped from his favourite retreat, and was in the act, I nothing doubt, of reckoning kin and counting lineage with a full score of rather suspicious-looking faces, which were eying him in various stages of derangement, and mutilation, and decay, from the east and from the south walls. We were not long, under the management of my guide, in making him recognize our object, and in directing his antiquarian lore upon our ignorance. "You must know then," said he, taking me by the arm, and conducting us to the farther extremity of the western division; you must know, 'sed nil nisi bonum de mortuis;' you must understand that there were in former times only three great families in Europe, 'sed nil nisi bonum de mortuis,'-the house of Bourbon-the house of Stuart-and the house of D-m. The house of Bourbon was distinguished by many great princes, and mighty kings; the house of Stuart, sednil nisi bonum demortuis, built and inhabited this very palace before you; and the house of Dm, after four or five hundred years of distinguished effort, has at last produced me.' "*This was something like entering upon the Trojan war at the Egg, so we took the liberty of endeavouring to restrict his somewhat discursive and antique remarks to the objects immediately be fore us; in consequence of which we were apprised of the conflagration of the east wing of the Palace, in Charles II.'s time; of the residences of the Dukes of Athol, and Earls of Fife; of the devastations and sacrilege committed by Cromwell's soldiery; and of the more recent aggressions upon these venerable and still imposing Ruins, by the neighbours and town's people, who had long regarded them as a public quarry, or common good. "Even now," continued our man of family and "extensive latinity,' 66 even now that I am pointing out to you the chambers where Dukes resided, and Kings sat in judgment, these vile low-born wretches are preparing, I verily believe, to overturn the wall by which these ruins have of late been enclosed; and to assert, by main force, and without law or leave,' what they conceive to be their immemorial privilege of devastation."

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Scarcely had our Informer pronounced these words, when our ears were saluted with the distant sound of a drum, which seemed to beat furiously, and at every flourish gave rise, and lifting up, to a most dismal yell of human-and scarcely human voices. "Let us retire up this stair-way," said our nil nisi bonum' Conductor, "to the battlements, and there we shall be safe, and in a situation to observe their proceedings." So, in a few seconds, we were safely seated on the western Turret, far and happily removed above the tumult and turmoil which was now accumulating beneath-And turmoil and tumult of the most decided character were now exhibited. Wives were running into the streets with children in their arms; artizans were collecting, armed with the implements of their profession; and dykers and ditchers were driving in from all quarters, towards the centre of general rendezvous, making, all the while, a most furious demonstration of tongue and gesticulation. The tide of gathering and of bustle became every instant more strong and overpowering till, collecting all its strength and weight into one mighty swell of assault, it burst through the great gate-way of the Palace, and spread out in various fragments of confusion and uproar, in the very court-yard which we had so lately and so fortunately deserted. The drum at last, whether from the voluntary cessation of him who had so powerfully belaboured it, or from the giving way of the parchment, it was not easy to determine, was silent; and, elevated upon a fragment of the parapet wall with a pick in one hand, the other being extended in the attitude o impetuous and impassioned address "an Orator," apparently of no commo powers, delivered to the motley and unseemly mob around him, a harangue in which frequent mention was made of “law, rights, prescriptions, us and wont," &c. Here, Lass, hau that wean o' mine, there, for a jiffy,' exclaimed a virago mother, thrusting her brat, squalling rebellion and dis content, into the arms of a half-growi girl, who stood beside her," and I'l soon settle their dyke-bigging. A brav story, indeed"-taking hold of th orator's pick, and commencing he movements in advance-"a braw story

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* Parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus Mus,

in troth, to think to bar us out wi' stane and lime walls frae our ain aul' use and wont." So saying, she was down the green, and had fixed the point of her weapon of destruction into the obnoxious erection, and had hurled down the first stone, as a signal of encouragement to thousands, ere they had time to come up to second her efforts. "Nec longa erat mora," for when, after a very short interval, the multitude began, having effected their purpose, to open up and disperse, we could distinctly observe the breach they had made, large enough to afford a free thoroughfare to carts and carriages of all descriptions. 66 They are Goths-they are Vandals" exclaimed the last of the ancient and distinguished house of D- n, in which averment, I confess, I felt every disposi-, tion to concur; when, ere I had time to embody my feelings in articulate sounds, I could see my sagacious friend eyeing me with somewhat of a monitory aspect. "Let us suspend our opinion," said he, "at present; they tell me this day's transactions are like ly to become a question of litigation in a court of law, and it would be altoge ther injudicious in us to prejudge aquestion of right, respecting which I understand the very best judges may be divided in opinion. "Divided in a whistle, case!" retorted our hero of the whisky stoup, with an air of determined partizanship, which altogether, independently of a verbose and "nil nisi bonum" philippic which succeeded, sufficiently indicated in favour of which side, had he been placed in the chair of judgment, his decision would have been given. Having now succeeded in withdrawing our eyes and our attention from the motley band beneath, and having directed them leisurely and contemplatively over the surrounding scenery, we were amply repaid for all the disgusting turmoil we had seen, and for all the steps of steep, and sometimes broken ascent we had surInounted.

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Looking eastward, the closely woodel, and far stretching strath of the

Eden,-so named, undoubtedly, from its immemorial amenity,-lay beneath the stretch and the effort of our vision; we surveyed the extensive plain, where the Fallow deer once roamed amidst their forests of oak, and where a few straggling successors still remain in ancient and unrestricted freedom!— Turning towards the north, fertile and cultivated fields rose, tier above tier, on the eye, till the gently swelling ascents melted away into the blue heaven by which they were relieved from behind. Towards the west, the Elder of the " twin Lomonds" projected its basaltic and abrupt precipices far into the still (in this direction) admirably wooded plain, and presented the expression of a Lion in the act of grasping his prey. The East Lomond, which pressed its green, and plump, and undecayed freshness upon the sky, almost inmediately over our head, formed a striking and an agreeable contrast to the ruined achievements of man, amidst which we were seated. Here the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the memory with recollecting, nor the imagination with bodying out; and if any traveller by Falkland has an hour, whilst his beef-steak is making ready in Mrs Scott's, (and a capital beef-steak she makes,) to spare, let him ascend the western Turret of the Palace, and, seating himself on the parapet immediately over the gateway, let him look abroad in silent and solemn contemplation over ages that are past, and objects that are present-over much that is eminently calculated to gratify and delight the sight, and to elevate, and expand, and ameliorate the heart.

Without troubling you with the circumstantiality of order, and manner, and colloquy, I may just mention now, in conclusion of this long and some-, what discursive communication, that we visited the old chapel, with its fine roof, and massive oaken doors;-that we descended again into the area, and inspected a long race of open-mouthed*

Kings and Queens of Scotland, which thrust out their stoney countenances from the wall;-that we had in

I observed, that advancing from the more ancient to the more modern mouths, the lips gradually became closer and closer, till, in the two last of the series, the compression was such as to protrude the under lip considerably ;-a sure mark of high civiization and supercilious dignity in the Great, and of vanity and self-conceit in those of kes elevated rank. Many of the countenances, however, are remarkably fine, and present some valuable Spurzheim notices. One is amazingly, and what I would even term ridiculously, like the late ex-Emperor Buonaparte; and another wears the exact counenance of our tutelary saint, John Knox.

remembrance (though not under our eye, as it is completely destroyed) the chamber, where the merry-hearted King of Scotland, after his losses at Solway Moss, quantum mutatus! in all the disconsolate desolation of disappointed hopes and a broken heart, retired, to die;-that we passed across the square, and through the passage, (which we had seen so lately, and with so much violence, opened,) into the still entire and spacious "Tenniscourt," the only antiquity of the kind now remaining in Scotland;-that we surveyed the bare and now woodless fields, which still obtain-quasi lucus a non lucendo-the name of " Falkland wood," and which were stripped of their Caledonian oaks by the republican violence and rapine of Cromwell;-that, in compliance with my invariable practice, we visited the church-yard, or rather burial-ground, of Falkland, in which the monument erected to the memory of the pious and far-noted Emily Geddie, was all that attracted, or deserved to attract, our notice ;-that we rode out as far as the old church-yard of Kilgour, a most retired and romantic spot, where we found a farm-steading, constructed almost entirely of broken head-stones and monuments;-that we found the bones and flesh of a dead horse, festering, in sacrilegious and obscene contamination, in a large stone-coffin, where the body of the poor unfortunate Prince David, formerly mentioned, had, in all probability, been once deposited;-and that, after having qualified our beefsteak, with a quantum-suff. of Mrs Scott's whisky-toddy, and having obtained a full and a detailed account from our new friend" Nil nisi bonum!" of the ancient an honourable House of D- -m,—we returned to our places

*

of abode about night-fall, highly gratified, upon the whole, with our excursion, but exceedingly shocked by that barbarous disrespect for the relics of antiquity, and the manes of the dead, which we had been compelled to witness.

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Now, sir, I have finished my narrative; and if, through means of your extensively circulating Magazine, I can draw the attention of those in power to the object of it, namely, "to the enclosing and preservation of our old, and venerable, and national Ruins," I think I shall contribute to the keeping up among us of that patriotic and chivalrous spirit, which is utterly at variance with every tendency to radicalism and insubordination. And if by the slight allusion I have been compelled to make to the instance of Kilgour,-which is by no means a solitary one,—I shall have succeeded in awakening the attention of one single parish Proprietor to the subjec of church-yard dilapidation, I shall have done more for the repose of the dead, and for the rational satisfaction of the living, than if I had been the Inventor of an Iron-safe, to preserve their bodies from resurrection.

66

It is my intention, during the latte end of this harvest, to make an ex cursion over Scotland, with the view of giving you some Church-yard and "Ruin" intelligences of supply ing you with a list of the "mora maxims of the dead”—and with a state ment of the" sacrilegious and revoltin dilapidations of the living,"-and nei ther power nor interest shall induc me to spare the guilty, nor to calum niate or misrepresent the innocent.I am yours, &c.

VIATOR.

• This singularly pious and affectionate girl,-for she died at sixteen years of age,was daughter to John Geddie, in the Hill-town of Falkland, and has found a historian her" Choice Sentences and Practices" in a James Hogg, (not the Jacobite Hogg,) a together competent to the task he has undertaken. She was born in 1665, and died 1681. The pamphlet was published by James Halkerston, Bailie in Falkland, in 179 for the benefit, as he expresses it, of the rising generation; and is extremely rare, al not a little curious.

+Kilgour was formerly, previous to the union of the two parishes, the burial-grou of Falkland; and either Lesly or Buchanan, or both, for I cannot speak positivel not having the books by me at present,-mention the particulars of the funeral proce sion from Falkland to Kilgour. Drummond says, Prince David was buried at Lindor but this seems to be a mistake.

CHARACTERS OF LIVING AUTHORS, BY THEMSELVES.

No. I.

"Dans ce siècle de petits talens et de grands succès, mes chefs-d'œuvre auront cent éditions, s'il le faut. Par-tout les sots crieront que je suis un grand homme, et si je n'ai contre moi que les gens de lettres et les gens de goût, j'arriverai peut-être à l'Académie." LOUVET.

I'm a philosopher of no philosophy, and know not where the deuce my wisdom came from, unless it was inborn, or "connatural," as Shaftesbury will have it. I have studied neither the heavens, nor the earth, nor man, nor books; but I have studied myself, have turned over the leaves of my own heart, and read the cabalistic characters of self-knowledge. Nor without success, for truth, I trust, has been no stranger to my pen. If all the world followed my example, there would be some sense in it.—But they do not. They have not courage and alacrity enough to catch wisdom and folly "as they fly." They ponder and weighwind about a vacuum, like the steps of a geometrical stair-case. They do not "pluck bright knowledge from the pale-faced moon." They do not dare to look from the table land of their own genius, their own perceptions, nor sweep boldly over the regions of philosophy, "knowing nothing, caring nothing." They do not expatiate over literature with the step of freemen, they are shackled, and have not the spirit to be truly yagabond. They are not elevated to a just idea of themselves, their own feelings are not hallowed, and they put forth their thought fearfully, and in the dark." This is not the way to be wise ;-there is confidence required for wisdom as well as for war. We are all of one kind; the feelings of nature are universal, and he that can turn his eye in upon himself,-that has mental squint enough to look behind his nose, may read there the irrefragable laws and principles of humanity. This is the difficulty,the bar between man and knowledge, as is observed by Mr Locke, (who, by the bye, is an author I despise,—a philosopher who reasoned without feeling, and felt without reason). If a person can once enter into the receptacles of his own feelings, muse upon himself, watch the formation and progress of his opinions, he will then have studied the best primer of philosophy. If he can once lay hold of the end of that web, he can unravel it ad infinitum. With his pen in his fingers, and his glass before him, he no sooner be

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gins, than he is at the bottom of the
page; and the Indian jugglers, with
their brazen balls, were nothing to the
style in which he can fling sentences
about. I can speak but from my own
experience: I have found it so; and
though there is a degree of excellence,
which all persons cannot arrive at, yet
the fabrication of essays is a double em-
ployment, and I here record the prin-
ciple by which I arrived at its perfec-
tion, as a bequest and lesson to poste-
rity.-Despise learning; never mind
books, but to borrow. Let the ideas
play around self, and that is the way
to please the selfish reader-other read-
ers there are not in the world.

It is vulgarly supposed, that a man,
who is always thinking and talking of
himself, is an egotist. He is no such
thing; he is the least egotistical of all
men. It is the world he is studying
all the time, and self is but the glass
through which he views and specu-
lates upon nature. People call me ego-
tist; they don't know what they say.
I never think of myself, but as one
among the many-a drop in the ocean
of life. If I anatomize my own heart,
'tis that I can lay hands on no other
so conveniently; and when I do even
make use of the letter I, I merely mean
by it any highly-gifted and originally-
minded individual. I have always
thought myself very like Rousseau, ex-
cept in one thing, that I hate the wo-
mankind,'-I have reason he had
not. Nevertheless, had he hung up
his shield in a temple, I'm sure I should
recognize it. I feel within me a kind-
red spirit,-the same expansive intel-
lect that strays over the bounds of
speculation, and has grasped nothing,
because it met nothing worthy,the
same yearning after what the soul can
never attain, the same eloquent and
restless thought, whose trains are ropes
of sand, undone as soon as done,-the
same feverish thirst to gulp up know-
ledge, with a stomach in which no
knowledge can rest. If a fortuitous
congregation of atoms ever formed any
thing, it formed us, for truly we are
a tesselated pair, each of a disposition
curiously dove-tailed, as Burke said of
Lord Chatham's ministry,—of facul-

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