land, I had almost said of Great Britain, for it is the third city of the realm, has a noble history, as well as numerous points of local interest. The reader of Scotch history and literature will need no refreshing, as to the scenes here enacted, when the Covenant was a matter of life and death; or when Bailie Nichol Jarvie here lived and gossipped. The Clyde has formed many associations with the minds of the gifted in its ebbing and flowing; and none stronger than that with the poet Campbell, who was born at Glasgow; and who, after a long absence from his native stream and city, found the nineteenth century at work, with its coal and iron elements, destroying much of the poetry of the spot. He found it improved as we in America would say; and lamented in verse,

"That it no more through pastoral scenes should glide,
My Wallace's own stream, and once romantic Clyde."

Iron steam

On going up the Clyde, we found it full of craft. ers were plying up and down its muddy waters. Thousands of workmen were repairing and building other iron steamers. The clink of hammers resounded on every side. Energy never lags or slackens here. No wonder, with such calls as the world makes for Scotch iron and Scotch machinery.

Material prosperity walks abreast with charity and education in Glasgow. You may see this, without examining statistics, in the bright benevolent faces which pass you on the pave. My time will not permit me to speak of the monuments, edifices and institutions of this city. I would love to do so, for there is a close similitude between the American and Scotch character in all its developments, which is worthy of a Plutarch's parallel. The "perfervidum ingenium Scotorum" or, as the French term it, “Fier comme Ecossais," by which they manage to accumulate— to “get along" in the world, is so peculiarly Yankee, as to have attracted the attention of writers and travellers very frequently. There is no stupidity or slowness in a Scotchman's look or move

ment.

Besides, the Scotch have the logic-the intellect of

eye”

Great Britain, that is, the superior mind, the commanding mind of the island. Edinburgh has ruled for a half century from her throne of rocks, the realms of politics, taste, and philosophy, with a potency that Bonaparte feared, even though it was exercised by 'paper pellets of the brain.' And does she not deserve the epithet of modern Athens? Is she not the " of Great Britain? Was it not by a son of Caledonia, that the great, vital and universal principles of political economy received enunciation, an enunciation which time has not bettered— only confirmed? Is this not the home of Hume, Browne, Stuart, Scott, and Chalmers? But why dwell on these elements of greatness.

Farewell to the sooty exhalations of Glasgow-the mud boats of the Clyde-the monuments of Scott and Sir John Moore, and the Necropolis. Ho! for the Highlands! where the air of romance weaves its spell of enchantment, where nature paints the heather and makes musical the rill, where the Lochs reflect the Bens, and the old bare-headed Bens are peopled with cloud shadows and clouds themselves; where the clansmen once fought in the close defiles, and the misty heroes of Ossian came and went like the unresting shadows which lie 'in bright uncertainty,' upon the moving lake.

How had I longed to see Lomond and Katrine, with their isles and glens, their mountains and moors! Leaving Glasgow in the steamer in the afternoon, we reach Dumbarton, whose rock at the junction of the Leven and Clyde rises to the height of nearly 600 feet, measuring a mile in circumference at its base, terminating in two sharp points, studded with houses and battlements. Here, in one of the towers of Wallace's seat was the prison of that warrior, after his base betrayal by Sir John Monteith. A goodly number of heroic adventures, among which is the taking of the castle at its most formidable point, are connected with Dumbarton. A Captain Crawford, during one of those relentless wars which desolated Scotland in Queen Mary's time, contrived by scaling ladders to reach the summit

of the crags; and was proceeding with the men to enter the battlements, when one of them, while climbing, was struck with apoplexy, probably induced by excessive terror. He could neither go up nor down. To have slain him would have been cruel; besides, his fall would have created alarm. What was to be done? Invincible to the last, Crawford tied him to the ladder, then turned it over, and with his men gained the summit, by mounting the other side from that to which the apoplectic soldier was tied, slew the sentinel, and accomplished one of the most daring feats ever achieved, even in this wild Scottish warfare.

The town of Dumbarton has nothing in itself worthy of notice. The old ruin upon the opposite side of the Clyde is the Castle of Cardross, where Robert Bruce (whose crown we saw to-day in the Castle of Edinburgh) breathed his last. But if we should undertake to tell of all the renowned castles and battlefields we have seen, during the last few days, a volume would be necessary to contain them.

Let us at once take cars, and hurry up to Balloch, where the little steamer is awaiting us. The rain will hardly permit us five minutes at a time upon the deck. Clouds, dark and lowering, roll over the highlands, and are succeeded by sunshine. Rainbows and mountain-tops,-the purple heather of the isles and hills, the baldness of old Ben Lomond, his head silvered with a cloud, sunlit and beautiful,--the darkish waters of the lake, vexed and whitened, together with an original, sui generis wildness, that only belongs to Scottish scenery,-made up a view, our admiration for which could not be dampened by any rain nor enlivened by any sunshine.

The lake is full of green, rocky isles. Indeed, Lomond signifies "many-isled." As we approach our destination, Invernsnaid, the loch grows more narrow, until it seems lost among mountains of mist. While going along, gazing upon islet and shore, ever and anon turning to see the reverend form of Ben Lomond, we should not forget that the fierce clan of the Mac Gregors were once here, in their pride and power; that it was

while rowing down this loch, that the song for the gathering of the clan was sung:

"The moon's on the lake, and the mist's on the brae,
And the clan has a name that is nameless by day,
Then gather, gather, gather, Gregalich!"

It is pleasant, too, to think, as we step on shore at Invernsnaid, that Wordsworth has been here before us, and that his Muse, ever seeking the covert beauties and sympathies of nature, had rendered classic the spot and cascade by his exquisite poem called "The Highland Girl." We rested all night near the cascade, within sight and hearing of its wild foaming and music. From the top of the mountain, over which we go toward Katrine, it rushes, with many interpositions of rock and tree, bristling and white, until it plunges, sheer and broken, out of a clump of pines into a boiling basin, where it hisses and steams until it finds placidity in the Loch Lomond below. It was right grand to clamber up from crag to crag, leaping from rock to rock, and at last finding solid foothold under the flashing, foaming mass, and near the trembling, spraying abyss, to sit beneath the 'sweat of great agony' wrung from out this Highland Phlegethon that swayed in the wind which roared madly up the glen and amid the brae. True, it was not Niagara; nor are Lomond, Ben Ledi, Ben Ann, and their associates, like the Alps. They are but an abridged edition of them, with many of the finest figures and loftiest sentiments omitted; yet how much is here for the finest capacity to grasp and mould into mirrors "radiant with fair images." Wonder not that Fingal, and those children of the mist, waked by Ossian, here had their local habitation. Wonder not that Scott has inwoven such a rich and weird web of romance around

All the fairy crowds
Of islands that together lie.
As quietly as spots of sky
Among the evening clouds.

Well have the people of Edinburgh erected the Gothic monument to Scott-rising so solidly, yet so lightly, in such fair proportions, looming so loftily in the shadow of their Acropolis! Well have they honored Burns too, whose heart and soul sung a song for Scotia's sake, and whose genius has rendered more immortal than the Alps the mountains of Caledonia. Scott and Burns!-noble duümvirate! They have monuments-not alone in Edinburgh, but every peak and castled crag form monuments to their undying fame!

Why-what is that wild Loch Katrine, with its green gem called Ellen's Isle-its Rob Roy's prison; its Rhoderick Dhu's watchtower, and its Ben Venue; its groves vocal with the music of birds; its hundred white mountain streams, its bleached sand silvered by the wash of the clear wave; its wild goats climbing where no other feet, save those of the bird, can venture; its clumps of wood and ample fields, and, near by, its Trossachs, so wildly beautiful; what is all this without the creative genius which has peopled the isle, the moor, the mountain and the glen with the Lady of the Lake, the Douglass, the merry roaming King Fitz James, and the wild Roderick!

We found a tiny steamer ready to ply toward the Trossachs, and there we found an open carriage and an understanding driver, who talked queerly in the Gælic, as he gave us the legend which clung to each spot to beautify and embalm.

A few hours' ride and we were in sight of Stirling Castle. The superior attraction of this brave old rocky seat of power, drowns the associations of the Highlands. We cannot stop to paint the scene where Roderick and Fitz James fought, nor where the latter lost his gallant gray; for we are surmounting at Stirling the very seat of James V. himself; around which the sports and games of the olden time were enacted. We enter the halls of the kings-look at each old memento, not forgetting the big tarpaulin-looking hat worn by Cromwell. I am no heroworshipper, but there are some peculiarities which Old Noll had that tickle my fancy, if they do not engage my worship, such as