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FRASER'S MAGAZINE FOR NOVEMBER, 1856,

CONTAINS,

GLASGOW DOWN THE WATER.

IN RICHMOND PARK.

MEMOIRS OF FREDERICK PERTHES.

JOURNAL OF A TOUR IN THE CRIMEA, 1856. SECOND AND CONCLUDING

PART.

MEG OF ELIBANK.

ANCIENT GEMS. PART II.

COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE FAR EAST.

SKETCHES ON THE NORTH COAST. BY A NATURALIST. No. V.-THE LAND'S END.

MANSFIELD'S PARAGUAY, BRAZIL, AND THE PLATE.

THE BROTHERS.

JÁMI, THE PERSIAN POET.

WHAT ARE THE UNITED STATES COMING TO?

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

The Editor of FRASER'S MAGAZINE does not undertake to return papers

that are sent to him for consideration.

FRASER'S MAGAZINE.

THE

JULY, 1856.

EDINBURGH DURING THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

Modern Athens must have been looking its very worst during Mr. Tennyson's last visit, if we may judge from some lines in a charming little poem-one of those appended to Maud-which convey a decidedly gloomy and unfavourable impression of that city during the pleasantest months of the year. Mr. Tennyson tells us that one solitary evening he found between the leaves of a book he was turning over, a flower which he had plucked in Italy; and the sight of it carried him away to the genial clime where it grew :

And I forgot the clouded Forth,

The gloom that saddens heaven and earth:

The bitter east, the misty summer, And gray metropolis of the North.

No doubt there are summer days when this description is as true as it is suggestive; but, on the whole, Edinburgh has always appeared to us as being in early summer one of the most cheerful-looking of British cities. Never was there a great city where the country is so intermingled with the town. Fresh green gardens, of no stinted expanse or niggard growth, meet one everywhere, the bright verdure of the young leaves looking the brighter for the contrast with the branches they smoke-blackened And while in the spring from. streets of most large towns there is no horizon save the close-hemming one of darkened walls and chimney. tops, and one's only glimpse of nature must be had by looking right up at the firmament overhead; in Edinburgh, through every opening we can see that the works of man are sentinelled and overshadowed by those of nature; we have glimpses of bright blue sea surrounding the city on two sides, at the distance of only a mile_or two; of the slopes of the Calton Hill and the Castle Rock, so intensely

VOL. LIV. NO. CCCXIX.

green; of the misty hills of Fife
and East Lothian away over the
waters; and of the grim hill that
watched Holyrood when its gal-
leries were gay with royalty and
beauty, and has witnessed its de-
sertion and decay.

As the days lengthen towards
the close of May, and the foliage
grows thicker in the Princes-street
and Queen-street gardens, an un-
usual influx of black coats and
announces the
white neckcloths
season of the annual meeting of the
Scottish Convocation, the supreme
legislative and judicial court of the
Kirk, the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland. The ecclesias-
tics of Scotland have chosen for
their meeting literally the season
atween June and May,' twelve
days divided between the latest of
May and the earliest of June. It
is a time of those delightful long
twilights which Scotland gains over
the southern counties of England,
by some six or seven degrees of la
titude farther towards the north.
By the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth
of May the streets swarm with
clergymen of every possible di-
versity of appearance, and from
every corner of Scotland: old col-
lege friends, who had parted as
striplings, meet again as responsible
fathers of families; at the railway
stations we are constantly being
run against by men with white
stocks and large portmanteaus; the
lodging-houses are crammed with
them; not only does the General
Assembly of the Kirk meet at this
time, but also that of the Free
Church,' which has closely copied
the organization of the national
establishment: there are more clergy-
men, for the time, in Edinburgh than
there are priests in Rome.

The tourist or visitor from the south, who has sauntered along that unrivalled Princes-street, must have observed, high up on the Castle

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