rld; but Edinburgh, with its castle, its hills, its pretty
little sea-port, conveniently detached from it, its vale of rich land
lying all around, its lofty hills in the back ground, its views across
the Frith;--I think little of its streets and rows of fine houses,
though all built of stone, and though everything in London and Bath is
beggary to these; I think nothing of Holyrood House; but I think a
great deal of the fine and well-ordered streets of shops--of the
regularity which you perceive everywhere in the management of
business; and I think still more of the absence of all that
foppishness, and that affectation of carelessness, and that insolent
assumption of superiority, that you see in almost all the young men
that you meet with in the fashionable parts of the great towns in
England. I was not disappointed; for I expected to find Edinburgh the
finest city in the kingdom. Conversations at Newcastle, and with many
Scotch gentlemen for years past, had prepared me for this; but still
the reality has greatly surpassed every idea that I had formed about
it. The people, however, still exceed the place: here all is civility;
you do not meet with rudeness, or even with the want of a disposition
to oblige, even in persons in the lowest state of life. A friend took
me round the environs of the city; he had a turnpike ticket, received
at the first gate, which cleared five or six gates. It was sufficient
for him to _tell_ the future gatekeepers that he had it. When I saw
that, I said to myself, "Nota bene: Gate-keepers take people's word in
Scotland--a thing that I have not seen before since I left _Long
Island_."

* * * * *

_King John_--died at Swinshead Abbey, in Lincolnshire; his body was
interred at Worcester; his bowels in Croxton Abbey Church, in
Leicestershire, the abbot being his physician; and his heart at
Croxden, in Staffordshire. Perhaps the most precious portion of his
relics would be the hand that signed Magna Charta. (_See page 279_.)

* * * * *

_The River Dove_.--The fertility of the land on the upper parts of
this river has always been proverbial: "as rich as Dove" being applied
to any spot highly forced. The land has a perpetual verdure, and the
spring-floods of the river are very gratifying to the land-occupiers,
who have this proverb--

In April, Dove's flood
Is worth a king's good.

It is also said of Dove's banks in spring, tha