costume-namely, the gown of the keeper of the Privy Seal, of black satin, twisted with gold, a ruff, &c. The face represents a man of sixty-four and upwards, with a very short crop of hair, which, originally light-coloured › or reddish, has become gray through age. His features are thin and sharp, expressive of peculiar acuteness; the forehead narrow, tall, and wrinkled; while the dark hazel hue of his 'partridge-eye' quite justifies the Highlander's expression. At Tynningham is also preserved his state-dress; and it is a circumstance too characteristic to be overlooked, that in the crimson-velvet breeches there are no fewer than nine pockets! Among many of the earl's papers which remain in Tynningham House, one contains a memorandum, conveying a curious idea of the way in which public and political affairs were then managed in Scotland. The paper contains the heads of a petition in his own handwriting to the Privy Council; and at the end is a note 'to gar the chancellor' do something else in his behalf.

The cynical Scotstarvit who could find throughout the continued sunshine of the earl's prosperity scarcely a single shade whereon to exercise his malicious pencil, records with his usual satisfaction, that if his lordship was fortunate till the day of his death, at least his children were involved in disasters and poverty. This seems to have been fully as much, however, the result of accident and the troubles of the civil war as of any degeneracy in point of personal talent or virtue. The second earl (Thomas) joined the Covenanters, and was made colonel of one of their regiments. In 1640, when stationed at Dunglass Castle in East-Lothian, in order to watch the motions of the garrison of Berwick, he met his death in the following singular manner :-His lordship had for his page an English boy, named Edward Paris, whose temper he had the misfortune to exasperate one day, by telling him jestingly before company that his countrymen were a pack of cowards, for having suffered themselves to be beaten, and run away, at Newburn. The boy resolved upon revenging this insult in the most

decisive manner, and that not only upon the author of it, but also upon those who had witnessed and partaken in it. Sir James Balfour says, that Paris was intrusted with the key of the powder-vault, and that Lord Haddington reposed so much confidence in the youth, that he considered no other individual of his company so worthy of this important charge. He paid dearly for his jest and for this misplaced confidence. On Sunday the 30th of August, at noon, as the earl and many of his officers and vassals were standing in the courtyard of the castle, the page went down to the vault, and, with the utmost deliberation, thrust a hot iron into one of the powder-barrels, which, instantly exploding, blew the principal building of the castle into the air, with all the people in it, and threw down the side-walls of the court upon the unfortunate earl and his attendants. Lord Haddington, with his brother and other kinsmen, all the tenants, it is said, of the estate of Tynningham, about thirty gentlemen, a great number of soldiers, and not fewer than fifty-four male and female servants, perished in this dreadful calamity; together with the wretched page himself, of whose body no part was ever found, except an arm, the hand of which still grasped the iron spoon with which it had kindled the barrel! While the surviving children of Tam o' the Cowgate shared in the misfortunes of the time, or dilapidated their patrimonies by what Sir John Scott calls their riotous style of living, the line of the family was carried on by a series of luckless representatives, in whose hands the immense estates acquired by their sagacious ancestor rapidly disappeared. The eldest son of the second carl died before he came of age, after having made an imprudent match with a beautiful and accomplished, but profligate Frenchwoman,* who, in little more than six

*This lady (Henrietta de Coligny, great grand-daughter of the celebrated Admiral Coligny) afterwards married a Huguenot count, from whom she speedily got herself separated; and as she turned Catholic immediately after, Christina, queen of Sweden, took occasion to say that her apostacy was owing to her hatred to her husband, for she had desired never again to meet him either in this world or the

months of married life, involved his estates in such debts as were not fully paid by his successors in twice as many years. Other minorities succeeded, and were attended in those disastrous times with effects the very reverse of those which are now so favourable to infantine heirs. The languishing talent and impaired wealth of the family were, however, at length revived by an alliance with that of the celebrated chancellor, the Duke of Rothes; from which proceeded two successive generations of poets, and other ignes minores,* whose spirited characters reflected back credit on the name of their distinguished ancestor. It is needless to remind the reader that another century has not seen this second flame exhibit symptoms of decay.

To all that has been said respecting the philosopher of the Cowgate, we may add, that, though his land-buying propensities were such and so well known that everybody who wished to reduce their 'dirty acres' to the pleasant form of cash, thought of applying to nobody but him, yet he does not seem to have ever felt a desire of living in a house of his own property. What makes the circumstance of his continuing to rent the house in the Cowgate the more remarkable is, that the son of his landlord, Macgill, was 'in a selling way' long before the decease of the Earl of Haddington. We can only account for this seeming inconsistency, by supposing that the earl had got an exceedingly long and exceedingly cheap lease of the house when he first inhabited it, and found the rent which he paid for it to be less than the interest or yearly value of its purchase - money. That the rent was very moderate, is proved by a circumstance still remembered in the family-namely, that he also rented a tenement on the opposite side of the Cowgate, which he occupied as a coach-house and stables, and the rent of which, though perhaps little enough, caused him to complain, not without some show of reason, that he paid more for his stables than for his house!

* One of these was a lumen magnum, the late Lord Hailes, whose mother was the sister of the amiable, witty, and unfortunate Lord Binning.

young brother did the honours of the table with a graceful cordiality that we have never seen surpassed. Before retiring he was anxious to procure me a cup of tea, but to this I would not listen.

The gentlemen, I believe, occupied one side of the dormitory, the ladies the other. I am told 'seventy or eighty travellers may be accommodated with beds; three hundred may be sheltered; and five and six hundred have received assistance in one day? There was a grille, or iron gate, in the centre of the passage, which no woman's foot must cross.

Oh, how freezingly cold was the night! Although I had heaped upon my bed all the furniture of the spare one, I felt chilled to the bones. The atmosphere seemed laden with ice! At four o'clock I rose from my couch, and was conducted to the chapel, whence the pealing sounds of the organ had floated to my room.

A brother of the order, self-taught, was presiding at the organ; another was ministering at the altar; guides and peasants dropped upon their knees, said a prayer, independent, apparently, of the service then being performed, and departed. I had been conducted into the small space before the organ, whence I looked over the whole chapel. Beside me knelt a Capuchin friar, with sandaled feet, shaven crown, and dirty brown gown, girdled with a rope! As a Protestant, I could not enter into their whole form of worship; but I prayed sincerely in my own tongue for this benevolent and self-denying community.

After a cup of coffee and a roll we strolled forth, a small party under the guidance of the clavendier, to see the convent garden-a few feet of earth, containing a few lettuces! We gazed into the Inky Lake, where no fish can live; and placed ourselves with one foot in Italy and one in Switzerland; for here lies their respective boundary. And whilst the gentlemen visited the morgue, or dead-house-that melancholy receptacle for those unhappy wanderers who perish in the snow, and who, by the rarity of the atmosphere, are kept in a state

of wonderful preservation—I sought for such hardy plants as try to blossom here.

We returned, glowing with our ramble, to the hospice; the dogs, ten in number, gamboling and fighting around us. Before taking final leave, we repaired once more to the chapel, there to drop into the slit of the poor-box some acknowledgment of the kind hospitality we had received. With travellers, it is perfectly optional to give or to withhold a donation. But mean and niggardly in the extreme must be that hand that does not here give abundantly.

We have shaken hands with the courteous, kind. brother clavendier; Jean is beside us; the mule descends the icy causeway; and though we turn our heads to the last to catch a parting glance of the Hospice of the Great St Bernard, it soon vanishes from our sight—not so from our hearts, where it will be ever remembered with a blessing and a prayer.

TAM O' THE COWGATE.

THIS ludicrous name was conferred by King James VI., of facetious memory, upon one of the most sagacious and respectable of his councillors, the first Earl of Haddington, who happened to reside in that dingy and now muchdespised street, the Cowgate of Edinburgh. Thomas Hamilton, who raised himself by his talents from the Scottish bar to the peerage, and became the founder of a great family, was perhaps the most remarkable public man of his age, next to Napier of Merchiston, and possibly one or two others; yet he is hardly known to the present generation. We happen to be able to remedy this defect to a very surprising degree; for circumstances have put us in possession of a number of traditionary and historical anecdotes respecting him, such as may bring him almost alive before the mind of a modern reader, in full connection with all contemporary circumstances. We may indeed be permitted to remark, that rarely can such a minute and faithfully-drawn picture as