adamised Royal
Road to London, flanked by one receptacle for the quiet dead, and by
another for the unquiet living--a churchyard and a prison dying away in
a bridewell. But, making amends for such hideous deformities, with front
nobly looking to the cliffs, over a dell of dwellings seen dimly through
the smoke-mist, stands, sacred to the Muses, an Edifice that might have
pleased the eye of Pericles! Alas, immediately below one that would have
turned the brain of Palladio! Modern Athens indeed! Few are the Grecians
among thy architects; those who are not Goths are Picts--and the King
himself of the Painted People designed Nelson's Monument.

But who can be querulous on such a day? Weigh all its defects, designed
and undesigned, and is not Edinburgh yet a noble city? Arthur's Seat!
how like a lion! The magnificent range of Salisbury Crags, on which a
battery might be built to blow the whole inhabitation to atoms! Our
friend here, the Calton, with his mural crown! Our Castle on his Cliff!
gloriously hung round with national histories along all his battlements!
Do they not embosom him in a style of grandeur worthy, if such it be, of
a "City of Palaces?" Call all things by their right names, in heaven
and on earth. Palaces they are not--nor are they built of marble; but
they are stately houses, framed of stone from Craig-Leith quarry, almost
as pale as the Parian; and when the sun looks fitfully through the
storm, or as now, serenely through the calm, richer than Parian in the
tempestuous or the peaceful light. Never beheld we the city wearing such
a majestic metropolitan aspect.

"Ay, proudly fling thy white arms to the sea,
Queen of the unconquer'd North!"

How near the Firth! Gloriously does it supply the want of a river. It is
a river, though seeming, and sweeping into, the sea; but a river that
man may never bridge; and though still now as the sky, we wish you saw
it in its magnificent madness, when brought on the roarings of the
stormful tide

"Breaks the long wave that at the Pole began."

Coast-cities alone are Queens. All inland are but Tributaries. Earth's
empiry belongs to the Power that sees its shadow in the sea. Two
separate Cities, not twins--but one of ancient and one of modern
birth--how harmoniously, in spite of form and features characteristically
different, do they coalesce into one Capital! This miracle, methinks, is
wrought by the Spirit of Nature on the World of Art. Her great features