ested this afternoon in looking around from one to another of
the edifices with which History or the pen of the Wizard of the North
has rendered us all familiar--the Tolbooth, the Parliament House, the
Castle, the house of John Knox, the principal Churches, &c., &c. I spent
most time of all in the Palace of Holyrood, which, though unwisely
located, never gorgeously furnished, and long since abandoned of Royalty
to dilapidation and decay, still wears the stamp of majesty and will be
regal even when crumbled into ruins. Its tapestries are faded and
rotten; its paintings, never brilliant specimens of the art, have also
felt the tooth of Time; its furniture, never sumptuous, would but poorly
answer at this day the needs of an ordinary family; its ball-room is now
a lumber-room; its royal beds excite premonitions of rheumatism: its
boudoir says nought of Beauty but that it passeth away. Yet the
carefully preserved ivory miniature of the hapless Queen of Scots is
still radiant with that superlative loveliness which seems unearthly and
prophetic of coming sorrows; and it were difficult to view without
emotion the tapestry she worked, the furniture she brought over from
France, some mementoes of her unwise marriage, the little room in which
she sat at supper with Rizzio and three or four friends when the
assassins rushed in through a secret door, stabbed her ill-starred
favorite, and dragged him bleeding through her bed-room into an outer
audience chamber, and there left him to die, his life-blood oozing out
from fifty-six wounds. The partition still stands which the Queen caused
to be erected to shut off the scene of this horrible tragedy from that
larger portion of the reception-room which she was obliged still to
occupy, therein to greet daily those whom public cares and duties
constrained her to confer with and listen to, though Murder had stained
ineffaceably the floor of that regal hall. Alas! unhappy Queen!--and yet
not all unhappy. Other sovereigns have their little day of pomp and
adulation, then shrivel to dust and are forgotten; but she still lives
and reigns wherever Beauty finds admirers or Suffering commands
sympathy. Other Queens innumerable have lived and died, and their
scepters crumbled to dust even sooner than their clay; but Mary is still
Queen of Scots, and so will remain forever.

XXXIX.

SCOTLAND.

THE CLYDE, Wednesday, July 30, 1851.

I am leaving Scotland without having seen half enough