the
entrancing tale. I cannot refrain from placing here one or two
vignettes, which I have no doubt the artist himself will allow to
surpass his best efforts, and which set the landscape before us with a
distinct yet ideal and poetical grace which pencil and graver can very
seldom equal. The first is of the exterior aspect of Edinburgh.

"Marching in this manner they speedily reached an eminence, from
which they could view Edinburgh stretching along the ridgy hill
which slopes eastward from the Castle. The latter, being in a state
of siege, or rather of blockade, by the northern insurgents, who had
already occupied the town for two or three days, fired at intervals
upon such parties of Highlanders as exposed themselves, either on
the main street, or elsewhere in the vicinity of the fortress. The
morning being calm and fair, the effect of this dropping fire was to
invest the Castle in wreaths of smoke, the edges of which dissipated
slowly in the air, while the central veil was darkened ever and anon
by fresh clouds poured forth from the battlements; the whole giving,
by the partial concealment, an appearance of grandeur and gloom,
rendered more terrific when Waverley reflected on the cause by which
it was produced, and that each explosion might ring some brave man's
knell."

The second introduces us to the interior of the city.

"Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering,
after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then
clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pie-men,
for it had, as his guide assured him, just 'chappit eight upon the
Tron.' It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a
crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of
trade, of revelry and of license, its variety of lights, and the
eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by night
especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most vulgar
materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are
combined, a striking and powerful effect on the imagination. The
extraordinary height of the houses was marked by lights, which,
glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended so high among the
attics, that they seemed at length to twinkle in the middle sky.
This _coup d'oeil_, which still subsists in a certain degree, was