a
despotic authority, without contracting those peculiarities of character
which the master-spirits,--our Scots, Lambs, and Goldsmiths,--have
embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, and which have
hitherto militated against the practical realization of those
unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of the status and standing of the
teacher of youth which have been originated by men less in the habit of
looking about them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how
invariably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has run every
scheme under water that, confounding the character of the "village
schoolmaster" with that of the "village clergyman," would demand from
the schoolmaster the clergyman's work.

We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its white surges and
dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin lighthouses rising tall and
ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We then skirted the shores of South
Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Copinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling
Moul Head, and threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the
Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, amid the
uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest glimpse of the
ancient Cathedral of St. Magnus. It seems at first sight as if standing
solitary, a huge hermit-like erection, at the bottom of a low bay,--for
its humbler companions do not make themselves visible until we have
entered the harbor by a mile or two more, when we begin to find that it
occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the middle of a gray
straggling town, nearly a mile in length. We had just light enough to
show us, on landing, that the main thoroughfare of the place, very
narrow and very crooked, had been laid out, ere the country beyond had
got highways, or the proprietors carts and carriages, with an exclusive
eye to the necessities of the foot-passenger,--that many of the older
houses presented, as is common in our northern towns, their gables to
the street, and had narrow slips of closes running down along their
fronts,--and that as we receded from the harbor, a goodly portion of
their number bore about them an air of respectability, long maintained,
but now apparently touched by decay. I saw, in advance of one of the
buildings, several vigorous-looking planes, about forty feet in height,
which, fenced by tall houses in front and rear, and flanked by the
tortuosities of the street, had apparently forgotten th