persons, especially women, dressed in dirty,
wretched tatters, worse than none, and with an expression of listless,
unexpecting woe upon their faces, far more tragic than the inscription
over the gate of Dante's _Inferno_. To one species of misery suffered
here to the last extent, I shall advert in speaking of London.

But from all these sorrowful tokens I by no means inferred the
falsehood of the information, that here was to be found a circle
rich in intellect and in aspiration. The manufacturing and commercial
towns, burning focuses of grief and vice, are also the centres of
intellectual life, as in forcing-beds the rarest flowers and fruits
are developed by use of impure and repulsive materials. Where evil
comes to an extreme, Heaven seems busy in providing means for the
remedy. Glaring throughout Scotland and England is the necessity for
the devoutest application of intellect and love to the cure of ills
that cry aloud, and, without such application, erelong help _must_ be
sought by other means than words. Yet there is every reason to hope
that those who ought to help are seriously, though, slowly, becoming
alive to the imperative nature of this duty; so we must not cease
to hope, even in the streets of Glasgow, and the gin-palaces of
Manchester, and the dreariest recesses of London.

From Glasgow we passed to Stirling, like Dumbarton endeared to the
mind which cherishes the memory of its childhood more by association
with Miss Porter's Scottish Chiefs, than with "Snowdon's knight and
Scotland's king." We reached the town too late to see the castle
before the next morning, and I took up at the inn "The Scottish
Chiefs," in which I had not read a word since ten or twelve years old.
We are in the habit now of laughing when this book is named, as if it
were a representative of what is most absurdly stilted or bombastic,
but now, in reading, my maturer mind was differently impressed from
what I expected, and the infatuation with which childhood and early
youth regard this book and its companion, "Thaddeus of Warsaw," was
justified. The characters and dialogue are, indeed, out of nature, but
the sentiment that animates them is pure, true, and no less healthy
than noble. Here is bad drawing, bad drama, but good music, to which
the unspoiled heart will always echo, even when the intellect has
learned to demand a better organ for its communication.

The castle of Stirling is as rich as any place in romantic
associations