LADY GLENORCHY'S CHAPEL.

"Carry up my bones from hence."-GENESIS, i. 25.

IN the lower and deeper part of the picturesque valley which separates the Old from the New Town of Edinburgh, there is a plain but massy and not unimposing structure, lately a place of worship, which a party of workmen are at present engaged in razing to the ground. It presented on the first day of the new year a singularly forlorn and desolate appearance. The rafters of the roof rose dark and bare over the dingy walls, like the ribs of a decaying carcase, from which the blackened integuments have dropped piecemeal away. The large windows, divested of the glass and the framing, revealed to the spectator outside, tottering columns, broken galleries, and ranges of dilapidated pews, with here and there a ragged gap in the plaster, from which some sepulchral marble had been recently torn. All around there lay huge heaps of stone, the debris of walls overturned to their foundations, blent with irregular piles of splintered trunks and torn branches of trees,-the sole remains of that old botanic garden of Edinburgh which was established about the middle of the seventeenth century, by one of the earliest cultivators of natural history in Scotland, Sir Andrew Balfour. Amid the desolation there rose, still entire, the single column of a gateway, which had given access to the building; and the iron gate itself swung unbroken on its hinges; but where the corresponding column had stood there yawned

a deep and wide excavation, through which one might look down, as in some pictured section of the geologist, from the travelled soil of the surface, to a lightish strip of native mould beneath, thence to a belt of red sub-soil, and thence to a deep stratified bed of yellow fire-clay, alternating with bands of stone, which belong evidently to the base of the Coal Measures. The chasm had cut off the pathway on which, for full seventy years, a devout and numerous congregation had found access to the place of worship beyond; and all that remained to indicate its place was a line of hawthorn bushes, that projected, root and branch, over the steep broken edge, and the remaining column of the gateway, with its hanging gate. There lay around, amid the heaps of earth and stone, the remains of iron pipes, incrusted with rust; tubes of lead, the conductors of another element, projected into the excavation; and the foggy atmosphere was largely charged with escaping gas,—an unmistakeable evidence that some of these useful underground veins and arteries of the city, when severed, in the course of the operation which had cut among them so deeply, had, as surgeons express themselves, been too carelessly “taken up." Rarely have we looked upon a scene of greater desolation than that furnished on the opening day of the year by this ruined place of worship, whether we regarded the dilapidated building itself, with its yawning openings and naked rafters, through which the rising breeze whistled so drearily, or the rough scene of ruin that bristled all around it, or the dismal enveloping atmosphere of mingled fog and smoke, charged with the oppressive scent that, "smelling horrible in the nostril," suggested to the imagination one circumstance more of decomposition and decay.

The broken chapel of our sketch had presented, seven days before, a different but not less striking scene. Nine in the

morning had struck on the clock of St Giles's; but a dense fog, accompanied by a thick drizzling rain, hung over the city, and the light of day seemed as if still engaged in an uncertain struggle with the darkness. The tall tenements of the Old Town rose over the valley, tier above tier; but the upper tiers on the hill-top, barely discernible amid the haze, seemed but the beginning of other and higher tiers; and the city, a thing rather of shadow than of substance,-appeared, like the city of a fairy tale, as if rising to the clouds. The huge North Bridge loomed through the fog as but the mere spectre of a bridge, as if a mere apparitional erection of gray cloud, with crowds of unsubstantial ghosts hurrying along its upper line; and inside the chapel below all was gloomy and brown, save where a few lights gleamed from the centre of the area, where a party of workmen were engaged in laying open an excavation in the floor. A hearse with its nodding plumes stood in waiting at the gate without. A few ponderous flags, one of which bore, inserted on its upper plane, a square plate of brass, were heaved warily aside with lever and bar, disclosing below a deep recess and a descending flight of steps; and in a narrow catacomb to which the steps led, the light flashed on the gilded studs of a solitary coffin, that for nearly sixty years had rested in the darkness. A line of coronets on the sides had borrowed from the close damps of the place a tinge of deep green; but the coal-black cloth seemed untarnished, and the gilding of the plates and nails atop were in some places scarce less fresh than when it had first passed from the burnisher of the workman. The

years of more than half a century had, however, accomplished their work of decay. The coffin, in the first attempt of the labourers to remove it from its place, parted longitudinally atop; and as it was carried past us, to be deposited within a new shell prepared for the purpose, we could see through the opening a human skeleton,-tall for that of a female,—enveloped in brown dust, in which there mingled the remains of the cerements that had attired the body for the tomb. The plate above bore, in characters still distinctly legible, that the remains were those of Lady Glenorchy, the foundress of the chapel, and that she had departed in July 1786, in her forty-fourth year. The cover of the new shell was then screwed down over both the mouldering skeleton and the coffin to which it had been consigned so long before; and after it had been removed to its place in the hearse, the vehicle moved slowly away, followed by a few gentlemen, members of the Free Church, who, in accordance with the terms of her Ladyship's will, were the trustees of the building. The whole scene, singularly picturesque and deeply impressive, was of a kind which, once seen, can never be forgotten.

"Her Ladyship," says her excellent biographer, the late Dr Jones, “had expressed a wish to be buried in her chapel at Edinburgh. The persons who took the charge of her funeral accordingly ordered a vault or catacomb to be prepared to receive the body. On taking up the flooring, the ground was found to be solid rock; but with considerable difficulty an excavation was made, sufficient to contain the coffin. The head of the excavation lies directly under the middle of the communion-table; and a stone, with a brass-plate inserted in the centre, on which is deeply engraved her Ladyship's name,

age, and time of death, closes the opening. On Monday the 24th,-fourteen days after her death,-the body was deposited in this place. The present [late] Earl of Breadalbane, who came from London for the purpose, attended as chief mourner; and her silent obsequies took place in the midst of a great multitude of weeping spectators, who on this occasion crowded the chapel." Such is the description given by Dr Jones, an eyewitness of the scene, and who, on the following Sabbath, preached her Ladyship's funeral sermon, to a congregation again moved to tears. The history of her deep interest in the chapel,-and it was but one of many which she had reared, some in England, some in the Highlands,arose out of the protracted struggle and the many prayers which it cost her, ere she had succeeded in placing it on a foundation at once independent of the National Church, and yet in connection with the Church's better ministers. Lady Glenorchy was peculiarly one of the class who, conscious of their high destiny as heirs of immortality, live in the broad eye of eternity, and walk with God. "As an entire character," says her biographer, "she did not leave one behind her who might be compared with her." She had watched the struggle then going on between the two great parties in the Establishment; and seeing that Evangelism had the worse in the contest, and that it was still sinking, she had built her Edinburgh chapel in the hope of furnishing it with a lodging place, in which, in its time of depression and defeat, it might find shelter. She reckoned among her friends and counsellors some of the best and ablest men of the party,—old Dr John Erskine of the Greyfriars, Drs Webster, Walker, and Hunter, and Dr David Johnstone of Leith. She found, too,