LITMIR.BIZ

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one uniform garb of home-made blue, with brass buckles to his shoes, a brass key suspended to his watch by a tough thong of black leather, greasy enough,—holding solemn colloquy with that reverend member of the Scottish Kirk, to whom he acted in the capacity of ruling elder, about the danger of compromising the interests of the Whig or high-flying part of that establishment, during the avatar of so many Tories. The reverend gentleman himself was no bad sight. His general-assembly coat and et cetera’s were duly kept at home,—that is to say, in his two-shillings-a-week apartments, up seven pair of stairs, in College-street, or haply in the house of that town acquaintance with whom he had found cheaper board,—till the eventful days should arrive. Thus he was habited in his parson’s grey, the breast of which, where it projected beyond the perpendicular, bore testimony to the fall, both of broth and of punch, while his inferior regions were shaded and shielded by dark-olive velveteens, a little tarnished, worsted hose furrowed as neatly as the turnip-division of his glebe, and cow-skin shoes of the most damp-defying power, which borrowed no part of their lustre from Mr. Robert Warren. Still the good man was clean in his linen; his chin was shorn like a new-mowed field; his visage beamed forth gratitude for “a competent portion of the good things of this life;” and his plump and ruddy hands slumbered with much orthodox ease in the capacious pockets of the velveteens. Anon, a highland laird, whose tail comprised only his lady and half a dozen of daughters, and who seemed to be meditating upon the roofless castle and ill-stored larder, to which the expense of parading full thirty-six feet of female charms before the King would subject him, during the weary moons of the Highland winter, hurried past, not at all at his ease.

      But, to describe the individuals, strongly marked as they were, would be altogether out of the question; and, indeed, to give any thing like even a sketch of the groups and classes and knots of men, women, and children, in all habits, of all ages, and in almost every variety of shape, would bankrupt even a German vocabulary, although in that language one be allowed, for clearness sake, to lump a score of sentences into a single epithet. The cry was still “they come,” and Caledonia, from fertile plain and far mountain,—from toiling city and tiresome wilderness,—from rock, and glen, and river,—upon the wings of the wind, urged on by steam, drawn in coach, chaise, waggon, cart, and hurdle, riding upon horses, mules, and donkeys, and running upon feet, shod and unshod,—came scudding and smoking, and creaking and crashing, and reeking and panting, in one conglomerating cloud, and one commingling din, to distract the attention from the attic glories of Edinburgh, and for a time drown her classic sounds in the discordant and untunable din of all the provinces. Here you had the broad shoulders and bold bearing of the borderer, delving an elbow, of the size and substance of a sirloin of beef, into the skinny ribs of an Aberdonian professor of humanity, who all the time kept squeaking like a sick fiddle, in response to the bellow of the other, which reminded you of a bull confined in the vaulted hall of an old castle. There grinned the fat face of an East Lothian farmer, between a Perth baillie on the one hand, and a Stonehaven scribe on the other, like a ram’s tail between the blades of a shepherd’s sheers. And, yonder gaped and wondered the great face of a Glasgow negro-driver, like a Gorgon’s head—not upon the shield of Minerva. Still there was something interesting in the mighty and motley throng: it put one in mind of Noah’s ark, which contained “clean beasts, and beasts that are not clean, and fowls, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

      The most delectable part of the gathering was the combined clans and the burgh corporations. The former belted like warriors and bellied like weasels, and tricked out for the occasion in their respective tartans of their names, each bearing a sprig of the symbolic tree in his bonnet, a huge claymore in the one hand, and a relay of brogues and stockings in the other, with a great horn snuff-mull thrust into his sporran—open and ready for action—hurried along at the pas de charge to their headquarters for the time-being, where they were instantly dispersed into the crowd, thence to reassemble when the bagpipe should frighten the last shadow of night.

      The corporation-men came in less military but more important guise. Glasgow, the queen of the west, Aberdeen, the glory of the north, Dundee and Perth, the rival empresses of the centre, with Cupar-Fife, Crail, and a hundred others, each charged with a loyal and dutiful address, which had been composed by the town-clerk, revised in the spelling by the schoolmaster, and was to be discharged at the King, in a manner so powerful and point-blank, as to procure knighthood if not earldom for such candle-selling provost, breeches-manufacturing baillie, or other chief magistrate “after his kind,” came on with a splendour and an importance that Scotland never before witnessed.

      Glasgow, as became her purse and her pride, came blazing like the western star—or rather like a comet whose tail would have girdled half the signs of the zodiac. The van was led by the magistrates, in a coach which previously knew every street and lane of the city, but which was relackered for the occasion, had the city arms emblazoned upon it as large as a pullicate handkerchief, and was drawn by eight grey horses of the genuine Lanarkshire breed,—the thunder of whose feet as they dashed along shook the kirk of Shotts, and had nearly laid Airdrie and Bathgate in ruins. The clatter which they made along Princes’ Street was astounding; the crowd collected in thousands at the din; some cried it was the king himself; but the final opinion was, that it was “naebody but the magestrates o’ Glasgow.”

      In the train of this goodly leading, there followed full fifty thousand,—or to speak by measure, as number was quite out of the question, full forty-four miles of merchants and makers of muslin; and the vehicles which carried the car-borne part of them were more strange and varied than ever appeared at the triumph of a Roman emperor upon his return from smiting the barbarous nations, and carrying themselves and all their utensils captive. Here you would see the equipage of a rich dealer in turmeric or tobacco, fashionable enough except in its contents; there you were presented with a Glasgow Noddy, squeezing forward its lank form like a tile, and dragged by a steed with three serviceable legs, and one eye the worse for the wear; in another place you would meet with a hearse, with a tarpaulin over it to hide the death’s head and the bones, and crammed full of the saints of the Salt-market laid lengthways for the convenience of stowage; while the rear was brought up by an enormous tilted waggon, which, though it was at first conjectured to contain Polito’s collection of wild beasts, was, upon examination, found to be charged very abundantly with that more important and polished matter—the ladies and gentlemen of Paisley and Greenock.

      The pride of the north had been more than usually upon the qui vive. The Provost had been attitudenizing before a great mirror for a week, and getting his pronunciation translated into English by Mr. Megget, of the Academy, for at least a fortnight; the town-clerk had been drudging at “steps” in private with Mr. Corbyn for a month, and the learned Mr. Innes had been applied to, to cast the nativity of the city; and, from the horoscope—Saturn in conjunction with Mars, and Venus lady of the ascendant, it was sagely inferred by the clubbed wisdoms of King’s and Mareschal that the Provost “wad get a gryte mickle purse o’ siller, for the gueed o’ the ceety, forby a triffle to himsel’;” and that, if not a duke, the town-clerk would be a goose at any rate, if both eschewed during their sojourn that hankering after the sex which was portended by the lady Venus being in the middle house. Those polite and philosophic preparations having been made, the state coach, with two cats (the emblems of bon accord) the size of a couple of yeanling lambs, gilt with Dutch fulzie, and spotted with coffin black, “all for the sparin’ o’ the cost,” rattled along the bridge of Dee at the tail of six hardy shelties from the Cabrach, “which could mak’ a shift to live upo’ thristles, or fool strae, or ony thing that they cou’d pyke up at a dykeside.” Still, however, this mighty magisterial meteor streamed across Drumthwackit, along the “how o’ the Mearns,” and adoun Strathmore, like an aurora borealis flashing from the pole to the zenith, flickering and crackling, and smelling of brimstone. While its tail drew the third part of the wilie natives of the city; the other two-thirds took their way in barks and steam-boats, because it was “cheaper by the tae half.”

      But what words can describe the grand array of the municipal authorities of Perth: Perth, the centre and heart of Scotland—the capital of the Picts, the delight of the Romans, who tumbled down in ecstasy when they first beheld it from the summit of Moncrief Hill, and, fancying that they saw in its green inches, its sweeping river, and its ample size, the Campagna, the Tiber, and the Eternal

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