hy woe:
Wailing happy days gone by,
When fancied pleasures mock'd thine eye:
Days that never shall return.
Mortal, then, this lesson learn--
Struggle not against thy fate,
For thy last day hath its date!
It is written in the skies,
And a guardian angel cries,
Dream no more of earthly joys,
They are fleeting, fickle toys.

CYMBELINE.

* * * * *

THE TOPOGRAPHER

* * * * *

ROAD BOOK OF SCOTLAND.

Tourists will never cease to remember their obligations to Mr. Leigh, the
publisher of this pretty little volume. He has done so much for their
gratification in his New Pocket Road Books, (of which series the present
work is one,) that their success ought to be toasted in all the delightful
retreats to which they act as _ciceroni_. In his Road Book of England and
Wales, he has done what Mr. Peel is now doing with our old Acts of
Parliament--consolidating their worth, and rejecting their obsoleteness.
For our own part, one of the greatest bugbears of books is the Road Book on
the old system: it is all long columns of small type, in which we lose our
way as in the cross-roads of the last century--all direction-posts and
"_Vides_," puzzle upon puzzle, Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Pelion--crabbed
and complex abbreviations, with which we get acquainted at the end of our
journey. They contain nothing like direct information, and the only people
who appear to understand them are postmasters and innkeepers, and some
old-established bagmen, whose interests and heads will give you a clearer
view of the roads than all the itineraries ever printed. It was, however,
but reasonable to expect that the Macadamization of roads, or the mending
of ways, should be followed up by the improvement of Road Books, since
greater facilities and inducements were thereby afforded to the tourist for
the detection and exposure of blunders--such as placing a hall on the wrong
side of the road, or recording some relic which had never existed but in
the book.

The arrangement of the _Road Book of Scotland_ is clear and intelligible,
and, moreover, it is a book which may be read in the post-chaise or the
parlour, on or off the road, before or after the journey, with equal
pleasure. It is so portable, that the pedestrian will not complain of its
weight, for it bears the same proportion to an old Road Book that a Prayer
Book does to a Family Bible. The picturesque