"Observant travellers! of every time,
Ye quartos! published upon every clime;
O say, shall dull Romaika's heavy round,
Fandango's wriggle, or Bolero's bound;
Can Egypt's Almas-tantalizing groupe-
Columbia's caperers to the warlike whoop-
Can aught from cold Kamschatka to Cape Horn,
With Waltz compare, or after Waltz be borne?
Ah no! from Morier's pages up to Galt's,
Each tourist pens a paragraph for Waltz.'

"Shades of those belles, whose reign began of yore, With George the Third's-and ended long before; Though in your daughters' daughters yet you thrive, Burst from your lead, and be yourselves alive! Back to the ball-room speed your spectred host, Fools' paradise is dull to that you lost; No treacherous powder bids Conjecture quake, No stiff-starched stays make meddling fingers ache; (Transferred to those ambiguous things that ape Goats in their visage, women in their shape ;) No damsel faints when rather closely pressed, But more caressing seems when most caressed; Superfluous hartshorn and reviving salts,

Both banished by the sovereign cordial Waltz.'

*

Though gentle Genlis, in her strife with Staël,
Would e'en proscribe thee from a Paris ball;
Thee Fashion hails-from Countesses to Queens,
And maids and valets waltz behind the scenes;
· Wide and more wide thy witching circle spreads,
And turns-if nothing else—at least our heads;
With thee e'en clumsy cits attempt to bounce,
And cockneys practise what they can't pronounce.

Gods! how the glorious theme my strain exalts,
And rhyme finds partner rhyme in praise of Waltz.""

And now, my dear aunt, I have surely written to you, at the least, with most dutiful ful

LETTER XX.

TO THE REV. DAVID WILLIAMS.

DEAR WILLIAMS,

THE life I have led here has been such a strange mixture of all sorts of occupations, that were I to send you a literal diary of my transactions, I believe you would not fail to discover abundant room for doubting the authenticity of the M.S. I shall therefore reserve the full and entire history of this part of my existence, till I may have opportunity of communicating it to you viva voce over a bottle of Binn D, and proeeed in the meantime, as I have been doing, to give you little glimpses and fragments of it, exactly in the order that pleases to suggest itself.

In Smollet's time, according to the inimitable and unquestionable authority of our cousin, Matthew Bramble, no stranger could sleep more than a single night in Edinburgh, with the preservation of any thing like an effectual incognito. In those days, as I have already told you, the people all inhabited in the Old Town of

Edinburgh-packed together, family above family, for aught I know clan above clan, in little more than one street, the houses of which may, upon an average, be some dozen stories in height. The aerial elevation, at which an immense proportion of these people had fixed their abodes, rendered it a matter of no trifling moment to ascend to them; and a person in the least degree affected with asthma, might as soon have thought of mounting the Jungfrau, as of paying regular devoirs to any of the fair cynosures of these υπερτατα δωματα. The difficulty of access, which thus prevented many from undertaking any ascents of the kind, was sufficient to prevent all those who did undertake them, from entering rashly on their pilgrimages. No man thought of mounting one of those gigantic staircases, without previously ascertaining that the object of his intended visit was at home-unless it might be some Hannibal fresh from the Highlands, and accustomed, from his youth upwards, to dance all his minuets on Argyle's bowling-green. To seek out a stranger among a hundred or two such staircases, was of course an undertaking beyond the patience even of a person who had enjoyed such an education as this; and so it became a matter of absolute necessity, that Edin

burgh should possess some body of citizens set apart, and destined ab ovo, for climbing staircases, and carrying messages.

From this necessity, sprung the high lineage of" the Cadies of Auld Reekie." When I use the word lineage, I do not mean to say that their trade ran in their blood, or that the cadies, as the Lake poet sings,

"To sire from grandsire, and from sire to son,
Throughout their generations, did pursue
With purpose, and hereditary love,

Most stedfast and unwavering, the same course
Of labour, not unpleasant, nor unpaid."

The cadies bore more resemblance in this respect to the Janissaries and Mamelukes of Modern, than to the hereditary hammermen, cooks, physicians, and priests of Ancient Egypt. The breed of them was not kept up in the usual way,

rr

"By ordinance of matrimonial love;"

but by continual levies of fresh recruits from the same rugged wilds, wherein alone, the Genus Iapeti was supposed to retain sufficient vigour for the production of individuals, adapted for so aspiring a course of life. Every year brought from the fastnesses of Lochaber and Braemar, a new supply of scions to be engrafted upon the stock rooted immoveably in the heart