And yet he murdered the very
They had been carousing the

liquor. In liquor! Why, he was drunk! man that had been drinking with him! whole night; and yet he stabbed him, after drinking a whole bottle of rum with him! Good God! my Laards, if he will do this when he is drunk, what will he not do when he is sober!'"'

As an elder this worthy representative of the old school was no less extraordinary than as a judge. The humour of Goldsmith has been described as hurrying him into mere unnatural farce when he describes his incarcerated debtor as remarking from his prison, in the prospect of a Gallican invasion," the greatest of my apprehensions is for our freedom!" and the profane soldier, very much a Protestant, as chiming in with the exclamation, "May the devil sink me into flames, if the French should come over, but our religion would be utterly undone." But from the real history of Lord Hermand similar examples might be gleaned, quite extreme enough to justify Goldsmith. We find Lord Cockburn thus describing his zeal for what he deemed sound views, in the famous Sir John Leslie case :

"Hermand was in a glorious frenzy. Spurning all unfairness, a religious doubt, entangled with mystical metaphysics, and countenanced by his party, had great attractions for his excitable head and Presbyterian taste. What a figure, as he stood on the floor declaiming and screaming amidst the divines!-the tall man, with his thin powdered locks and long pigtail, the long Court of Session cravat flaccid and streaming with the heat and the obtrusive linen! The published report makes him declare that the belief of the being and perfections of the Deity is the solace and delight of my life.' But this would not have been half intense for Hermand; and, accordingly, his words were, 'Sir, I sucked in the being and attributes of God with my mother's milk.' His constant and affectionate reverence for his mother exceeded the devotion of any Indian for his idol; and under the feeling, he amazed the house by maintaining (which was his real opinion) that there was no apology for infidelity, or even for religious doubt, because no good or sensible man had anything to do except to be of the religion of his mother, which, be it what it might, was always best. 'A sceptic, Sir, I hate! With my whole heart I detest him! But, Moderator, I love a Turk.""

Such was one of the characters of Edinburgh not more

than half a century ago; and yet he belongs as entirely to an extinct state of things as the oldest fossils of the geologist. And there are many such in this volume, drawn with all the breadth, and in some instances all the picturesque effect, of the best days of the drama. But, though a thoroughly amusing volume, it is also something greatly better; and there is, we doubt not, a time coming when the student of history will look to it, much rather than to works professedly historic, for the true portraiture of Edinburgh society during the periods in which it maintained its place most efficiently in the worlds of literature and of science. And yet, as may be seen from the sketch just given, all was not admirable in the ages in which our capital excited admiration most; and we must just console ourselves by the reflection that, though we live in a more mediocre time, it is in the main a more quietly respectable one. July 12, 1856.

THE BURNS' FESTIVAL AND HERO WORSHIP.

"THE BURNS' FESTIVAL," writes a respected correspondent in the west, in whose veins flows the blood of Gilbert Burns, "is already well-nigh forgotten in Ayr." We are not at all sure that it ought to be forgotten so soon. Could we but

look just a little below the surface of the event, with its chequered patchwork of the bizarre and the picturesque, and its, doubtless, much genuine enthusiasm, blent with at least. an equal amount of overstrained and awkward simulation, we might possibly discover in it a lesson not unworthy of being remembered. Deep below the ridiculous gaud and glitter, we may find occult principles of our nature at work in this commemorative festival,-principles which have been active

throughout every period of the history of man,-which gave of old their hero-gods to the Greek and the Roman, and the red-letter saint-days to the calendar of the Papist; and which in these latter times we may see scarce less active than ever in the worlds of politics and letters. We find them alike developed in the "hero-worship" of Carlyle, and the Pitt and Fox dinners and clubs of our politicians.

As a piece of mere show, the festival of Burns, like the tournament of Lord Eglinton, was singularly unhappy Both got sadly draggled in the mud, and looked like bepowdered beaus who set out for the ball-room in their thin shoes and silk stockings, and are overwhelmed in a thunder-shower by the way. Serious earnest stands a ducking: mere show and make-believe becomes ridiculous in the wet. The 92d Highlanders were thoroughly respectable at Waterloo, though drenched to the skin; and we have seen from twelve to fifteen thousand of their devout countrymen gathered toge ther amid their wild hills, in storm and rain, on a sacramental Sabbath, without appearing in the slightest degree contemptible. But alas for a draggled procession or a festival first dressed up in gumflowers and then bespattered with mud! Processions and festivals cannot stand a wetting. Like some of the cheap stuffs-half whitning and starch-of the cotton-weaver, they want body for it. Their respectability is painfully dependent on the vicissitudes of the barometer. Every shower of rain converts itself into a jest at their expense, that turns the laugh against them; and every flying pellet of mud becomes a practical joke. And as the festival of Burns, like the tournament of Eglinton, got particularly wet,-wet till it steamed and smoked like a salt-pan, and the water that streamed downwards from its nape to its heels discharged the dye of its buckram inexpressibles on its white silk stockings, and flowed over the mouth of its thin-soled pumps,—it returned to its home in

the evening, looking, it must be confessed, rather ludicrous than gay. It encountered the accident of being splashed and rained upon, and so turned out a failure. Nay, even previous to its mishap, there were visible in the getting up of its scene-work certain awkward-looking strings and wires, that did not appear particularly respectable in the broad day-light. Its prepared lightning took the form of pounded rosin; and the mustard-mill destined to produce its thunder was suffered to obtrude itself all too palpably on the sight of the public. People remarked, that among the various toasts given at the banquet, there was no grateful compliments paid, no direct notice taken, of its first originators. No one thought of toasting them. They were found to compose part of the vulgar string-and-wire work,-part of the pounded rosin and mustard-mill portion of the exhibition; and so, according to the poet,

"What would offend the eye

The painter threw discreetly into shade."

But it is well to remark that the Burns' festival had an element of actual power and significancy in it, altogether separate and apart from the lowness of its immediate origin, the staring rawness of its rude machinery, or the woeful ducking in which it made its ridiculous exit. It is significant that the mind of the country should exist in such a state in reference to the memory of the departed poet, that a few obscure men over their ale could have originated such a display. The call to celebrate by a festival the memory of Burns seems, with reference to those from whom it first proceeded, to have been a low and vulgar call; but that it should have been responded to by thousands and tens of thousands, that town and village should have poured forth their inhabitants to the spectacle, that eminent men from remote parts of the country should have flocked to it,-are matters by no means vulgar or low. The surface of the

pageant, like its origin, seems to have been a sufficiently poor affair; but underneath that surface there must have beat a living and vigorous heart, neither poor in its emotions, nor yet uninteresting in its physiology.

We would recognise in it, first of all, the singularly powerful impression made by the character of Burns on the people of Scotland. The man Burns exists as a large idea in the national mind, altogether independent of his literary standing as the writer of what are pre-eminently the national songs. Our English neighbours, as a people at least, are much less literary than ourselves. The fame of their best writers has scarce at all reached the masses of their population. They know nothing of Addison with his exquisitely classic prose, or of Pope with his finished and pointed verse. We have been struck, however, by finding it remarked by an English writer, who lived long in London, and moved much among the common people, that he found in the popular mind well-marked though indistinct and exaggerated traces of at least one great English author. He could learn nothing, he observed, from the men who drove cabs and drays, of the wits and scholars of Queen Anne, or of the much greater literati of the previous century; nay, they seemed to know scarce anything of living genius; but they all possessed somehow an indistinct shadowy notion of one Dr Samuel Johnson,-a large, ill-dressed man, who was a great writer of they knew not what; and almost all of them could point out the various places in which he had lived, and the house in which he died. Altogether independently of his writings, for these are far from being of a popular cast, -the Doctor had made an impression by the sheer bulk and energy of his character: he loomed large and imposing simply as a man: an impression of the strange kingly power which he possessed, and before which his contemporaries the Burkes, and Reynolds, and Charles James Foxes of the age,