me to marry and settle; a matter which had as yet not much occupied my thoughts. I promised him, however, that I would take it into my consideration. Pooh! nonsense about consideration,' cried he; 'do it at once. Never procrastinate. Do as I did.' And, by-the-by, I must let you know how that was, said Lascelles.

My grandmother was a fine woman, a sensible woman, a strong-minded woman, and when my grandfather proposed to her she rejected him. He knew that (so he used to say) to be all stuff, and he prepared for his wedding just as though everything had been satisfactorily arranged between himself and her. He fixed the day, furnished his house, invited his friends, engaged the parson, and the rumour of his projected marriage spread abroad. The lady heard of it, and was perhaps a little piqued to find (as she supposed) that another had so soon supplanted her in the colonel's affections. When she saw him again, she congratulated him upon his prospects, and inquired upon whom his choice had fallen.

"Eh?' said my grandfather-and he was really a handsome, soldier-like man- the lady? Why, I am going to marry you, to be sure.'

'I am sure you are not,' said she.

'I will marry nobody else, madam; you may depend upon that,' said my grandfather. This very day week we shall be man and wife.'

The next evening she again met the colonel at a party. Washington himself happened to be present. 'Introduce me to your intended wife, Lascelles,' said the general; and my grandfather led him to the lady in question. She wondered at his impudence, and presently asked him how he dare circulate a report of the kind.

a large family, but, like the bottles of choice old port I before alluded to, they have dropped away one by one, and I alone am left-the last scion of an illustrious house. The colonel, who has not long been dead-for he lived to an extraordinary age-was a choleric old gentleman, with a spirit compared to which that of a lion (the common simile in such cases) was absolutely contemptible; and when once he had taken a thing into his head, nothing would turn him. While he was yet a lieutenant, Wash ington one day sent him to reduce a fort which had occasioned the American army some annoyance. He was repulsed six times; his troops fought well, but the greater part were shot down-some were bayoneted, others pitched neck and crop from their scaling-ladders, a few were blown to pieces, and a large number tomahawked by a party of Indians, who sallied out upon them, and returned laden with scalps. That very sally, however, won my grandfather the victory, for, as they ran out, he, with his few surviving comrades, ran in, laid about him furiously, left two swords in the body of the commandant, pistolled a captain, spitted a serjeant, thumped a corporal, and soundly pommelled several privates; then turned the guns upon them, hauled down the enemy's flag, and hoisted his own. I merely mention this little occurrence to you by way of proof that my grandfather was not a man to be trifled with. As he grew older, too, he grew fiercer, and more obstinate and determined to carry his point. Another little incident to prove my words. One afternoon within the last ten years, as his coachman was driving him out, the latter had occasion to go through a very narrow street, where there was not room for two carrriages to pass each other. It happened to be a gay day in the city, and a grand concourse of citizens, headed by a band of musicians and a party of horsemen carrying regalia and banners, were proceeding up the street as my grandfather was jogging down it. 'Make way, make way there 'I shall carry you in some way or other, madam, I in front!' cried the advanced guard of the mob. Ride make small doubt,' said the colonel, smoothing his mousthem down, if they don't move.' This note of defiance tache; and to the lady's great astonishment, on the very put the old gentleman instantly on his mettle. He had morning that my grandfather had fixed for the wedding, intended to wheel about when he saw that the carriage a carriage drew up at her door, the colonel alighted, walked was an obstacle to their progress, but, like fat John Fal- in, offered her his arm, walked out again, ordered the staff, he would do nothing on compulsion, and he refused coachman (no other than the trusty serjeant) to drive to to budge an inch. There was a great uproar, as you will the church, made her his wife, and lived with her very suppose, and they threatened to turn the horses' heads. comfortably for upwards of forty years afterwards. In Do if you dare,' said my grandfather, and he dragged an fact, my grandfather never appeared to think anything old horse-pistol (he always carried one with him in case of impossible. If he had coveted a slice from the moon, or accidents) from under the carriage cushion, and cocked it the tail of a young comet, I verily believe he would have in their faces. Louder and louder grew the din, but there found some means of accomplishing its capture. sat my grandfather in the carriage, and the coachman on I shall never get on with my story. I told you that my the dickey. The coachman was a grim old serjeant of grandfather wished me to marry. begged him to make the colonel's, and knew the smell of powder. 'Are you choice of a wife for me. going to move?' roared the party of horsemen.--' No!' 'What do you think of Kate Flodden?' said he; 'the bellowed my grandfather in return; I told you that be- old barrister's niece at the next door but one.' fore; and he looked to his priming and flint. You will 'I should like her very well.' not go back?'-'I will not.'-'Then you shall not advance.' -Very good,' said my grandfather, 'I am in no hurry;' and, drawing a newspaper from under another cushion, he began to read.

In about ten minutes, as he was turning the sheet and commencing the perusal of a fresh column, the mob held a council of war, the musicians struck up 'Yankee doodle,' and the procession faced about. Then the colonel, shutting up the newspaper, deliberately gave the serjeant the word to advance. Now, it so happened that my grandfather's two horses were particularly vicious ones, and growing restive, I suppose, at the bad music, they bit one or two of the flag-carriers, and caught up between them the chief trumpeter by the waistband of his small-clothes; whereupon his brother musicians called upon those in front to move quicker, and pressed so upon their heels, that the party of cavalry were thrown into confusion, a complete panic seized the crowd, and presently my grandfather drove them all, like a conquered enemy leaving a sacked city, helter-skelter before him. But this is a digression; I am not getting on with my tale.

My grandfather, I told you, was getting old, and as I was the last of the line, the Uncas of his race, he wished

'Truth will out, madam,' said the veteran. 'You think to carry me by storm,' replied the colonel's intended, but you will not do it, sir.'

My grandfather seized his hat at once, and was about to leave the house. I inquired whither he was going. To get her for you,' he replied.

'Stay; the affair grows serious,' said I. 'The uncle is a proud old man, and

Pooh!' cried the colonel; 'when you set about a thing, go to it with a will. To a man of resolution there is nothing impracticable. If you wont let me go, go yourself.' 'Well, perhaps you had better undertake the matter-I could not speak in my own praise.'

And he went, but returned quickly, with his eye flashing, and his whiskers standing on end.

Is it all right?' I asked.

'Quite-quite satisfactory, Laurence,' was the response; the garrison refuses to surrender, and must be reduced in the regular way. Kate must be yours, and, if one drop of the true Lascelles blood runs in your veins

'I will have her-that's flat,' cried I; and I began to form my plans of attack. I had already danced with Kate on one or two occasions, and we had often promenaded the Battery Gardens together. I was on speaking terms, too, with her old curmudgeon of an uncle, who shuns the society of all his neighbours. But at this stage of the

had you to clamber stealthily over the garden wall tonight?'

'O, that query is soon solved. For the very same reason that induced the renowned Dr Johnson once, when he was upwards of eighty years of age, suddenly to quit a friend's arm and jump over a post, in the neighbourhood of his native Lichfield. He had often performed the feat when he was a boy, and he had an incontrollable desire to accomplish it again. Are you satisfied?' asked Lascelles. 'O, perfectly,' said I, rising to leave the arbour.

ART COLLECTIONS.

D. O. HILL'S LAND OF BURNS.'

Ir history may throw any light on the fact, it seems difficult for individuals or nations to embrace more than one thing fully. Egypt has its pyramids; Greece its sculpture and temples; Italy its pictures. France is great in social economy and amusements; Germany in music and philosophy; England in politics and literature. Scotland wavers doubtfully between the extremes of religious activity and debasing drinking customs. Each of them, no doubt, has had its glimpses and impressions of all these things; but all so thwarted and broken, so deficient in fulness and harmony, as to modify in no perceptible de gree the fact that few countries rise out of the one development which characterises them.

Naturally, as Scotsmen, Scotland is the dearest to us, and this after having visited most of the great European capitals; and we do not hesitate to say that Scottish Christianity, with its depth and earnestness, its clear outcome in purity and elevation of common life, may, despite all the bigotry which is, truly or falsely, said to mix with it, be fairly suffered to stand over against the whole body of national accomplishments which distinguish other countries. But there is no reason for being exclusively one thing or another. It is good to be religious: it is of the utmost, the most awful importance; the possession of a genuine faith in Christ and the glories of a future life transfuses a dignity into the character, which no occupation, however humble, can dim, no general weakness of intellect can render pitiful, and which, moreover, no gifts of genius or learned acquisition can ever once rival. But it is the blessedness of religious faith to reconcile us once more to that God who has furnished us with so many faculties of knowledge and enjoyment, and placed us in a world offering every appropriate object. Nor is it, in fact, religious to be indifferent to these, to treat them with contempt as beneath our notice. If the nose be capable of appreciating grateful odours, it is but poor praise which we render to our Creator to despise the gales of fragrance blown off some meadow; or into our rooms from a flower-window. Still more so, if the eye, so rich and magnificent in its powers, is used for none but the lower purposes of vision.

stimulate the fancy, and unite with other considerations in giving to any proposal for enlarging the means of popular education a very special claim to general attention.

In these aspects of our country's dangers and necessities, we hail with cordial satisfaction the proposition made to form the rich, and on the whole, very noble and beautiful series of Mr Hill's paintings associated with Burns, into one collection, and place it, so to say, as a small national gallery for visiters to the west, in the midst of the scenes which form the chief subjects of the collection. For some weeks past, we have carefully and repeatedly examined these pictures, while exhibiting in Edinburgh, happily enriching many a vacant leisure hour, and becoming more and more impressed with the advantage of having so valuable a group hung together in some central place of public resort associated with their subjects. It may be worth while to fix one's impressions of these pictures, and examine, in a few sentences, their special use for purposes of popular education.

As an artist, Mr Hill, considering the point from which he started, has had a more remarkable artistic history than any other painter of modern times. Most others of note have broken into their characteristic manner at the first, improving in that manner, and adding to their stores of power and experience; but the author of Fotheringay (a picture of exquisite beauty and depth of feeling, the latest work from the studio of Mr Hill) is only beginning to exhibit his highest powers, and to enter the more aspiring field in which his genius, indeed, seems to be most naturally fitted to move. We say most naturally, for, unless in the necessities of popular taste and mercantile demand, we cannot well explain how an inferior landscape is every now and then slipping from this artist's brush, lying farther below his best manner than the inequalities of genius and circumstance serve to render intelligible. The chief evil of this is, that his more select works are confounded with those beneath his average level; and, like a stream of cold air passing at intervals into the warmest chamber, the lower depress his general reputation. But in the picture above mentioned there is a noble selfrestraint, which has completely lifted the artist out of his occasional tendency to arrange too much, and to crowd with details of secondary interest, a purity and loftiness of religious feeling, a flush of lovely natural life, and a fulness of conception seen against the aforesaid depth of restraint, that will eminently endear him to the friends of art and education.

All these qualities, in some fair measure, together with others not admissible into such a subject, are found in the group to which we are calling attention. But the most conspicuous feature in these paintings is, their broad nationality, their hearty and cheery representation of Scottish character, high and low, their embodiment of the romance of Scottish lake and mountain scenery, and the spirit of truth, simplicity, and native independence, so chapre-racteristic of humble Scottish life, which runs through, in varying degree, the whole collection. Mr Hill, when yet comparatively a young man, vented his first love in these works: strong in the simplicity and earnestness of his tastes, with a rolling tide of enthusiasm, he had become touched and possessed with all that was noble in our national poet; and, instinctively suffering the dross of the poet's history to drop out of view, rather than rudely dismissing it, he fixed his youthful passion in these beautiful forms. Nothing, indeed, in the collection has impressed us with more respect and admiration for the artist than the moral skill with which he has disentangled the mottled threads of his hero's history; and with wonderful tact, ignoring the refuse, has gathered up everything truly grand, ennobling, and imperishable, for investment with the charms of pictorial representation. The variety, too, of the scenes communicates to them a wide interest. In the multiform subjects and styles of execution which they embrace, every one, from the man of travel and education down to the village bumpkin on his first trip from home, boarding-school miss in course of finishing, and milkmaid let loose, my little man and my little lady spending their

But, true as this is, it is not the whole, nor, in the sent state of the country, the most important part of the truth. Of late years the means of travel have immensely increased, while pleasure-trains have brought up to our great towns crowds from the field, and stimulated luxury and the gratification of the senses in every possible direction. What all this new experience must turn to if not regulated, it is by no means difficult to see. The town acts on the country population that pours into it, and the country on the town population which its hamlets and groups of villages receive in return. Gratification is awakening the senses to increased activity; and such is the effect of enjoyment and sympathy, acting on the appetites, that, unless there be pure sources opened up for their exercise, they will only too readily overflow in vice, and render still more fatal the elements for mischief already at work in the very bowels of society. Increased intercourse with the Continent is finding the means, even to the humblest serials, of diffusing foreign ideas among our families. The novelty of this feature, as well as the often questionable character of the images thereby introduced into the minds of young people of both sexes, inordinately

BRUIN AT COLLEGE.

hoarded pennies of a holiday-all will find something to fall in with their tastes and designs. It would be difficult to classify satisfactorily so wide a range as seventy-two ON a certain memorable day in 18-, a large hamper pieces, the number of the collection. But one principle of reached Oxford, per Great Western Railway, and was in division might rank first, the pictures of larger scope, such due time delivered, according to its direction, at Christas Ayr from Broun Carrick Hill, which brings a cluster of church, consigned to Francis Buckland, Esq., a gentleobjects, striking for their natural beauty, or for undying man well known in the university for his fondness for naassociations, into one sweep of canvass; Burns's Monument, tural history. He opened the hamper, and the moment Alloway Kirk, Bridge of Doon, Cottage of the Poet's Birth, the lid was removed, out jumped a creature about the size Castles of Newark and Greenan, with the Hills of Arran, of an English sheep-dog, covered with long shaggy hair, the Cumbrays, and the Frith of Clyde filling up the dis- of a brownish colour. This was a young bear, born on tance; secondly, the same views broken up into separate Mount Lebanon, in Syria, a few months before, who had patches of interest, and each object enlarged on its own now arrived, to receive his education at our learned unispecial patch; thirdly, all the rest, consisting of coast and versity. The moment that he was released from his irkinland views, picked up wherever the poet had signalised some attitude in the hamper, he made the most of his any place by his presence or song. Among these, we have liberty, and the door of the room being open, he rushed the Fairy Coves and Castle of Colzeen-a first-rate sunset off down the cloisters. Service was going on in the chapel, scene, with moon in crescent, gloriously bold and feudal. and, attracted by the pealing organ, or some other motive, Then, Foyers from above the Fall, in a finer and more he made at once for the chapel. Just as he arrived at thoughtful style. We have Edinburgh Castle, from the Grey- the door, the stout verger happened to come thither from friars' Churchyard, full of historical reference and signifi- within, and the moment he saw the impish-looking creacance. Interspersed with the graver views, are glimpses ture that was running into his domain, he made a tremenof busy market life, with the delightful hum of industry dous flourish with his silver wand, and, darting into the seemingly sounding forth from the quaint groups. Some chapel, ensconced himself in a tall pew, the door of which of the pieces burst into poetry, as the Scene on the Lugar, he bolted. Tiglath Pileser (as the bear was now called) near the old castle of Auchinleck, which gives us an aged being scared by the wand, turned from the chapel, and minstrel, accompanied by his dog, sitting, with whitened scampered frantically about the large quadrangle, putting locks and hand resting on his harp, by the familiar stream, to flight the numerous parties of dogs who in those days as if it were the only permanent thing of the scene. But made that spot their afternoon rendezvous. After a sharp we merely meant to indicate in some general way the cha-chase, a gown was thrown over Tig, and he was with diffiracter of the collection, not to offer any criticism in detail. culty secured. During the struggle, he got one of the Now, in considering the proposal to gather these into a fingers of his new master into his mouth, and did he sort of national gallery for the west, one cannot fail to see, bite it off? no, poor thing! but began vigorously sucking at first view, how valuable for general purposes would be it, with that peculiar mumbling noise for which bears are & collection of paintings, so popular in their subjects, so remarkable. Thus was he led back to Mr Buckland's pure, fresh, and exciting in the spirit of their treatment, rooms, walking all the way on his hind legs, and sucking So sweet and enlarging in their suggestions, and yet held the finger with all his might. A collar was put round his together by the unity of the principal figure around which neck, and Tig became a prisoner. His good nature and they are all grouped, especially if the collection were amusing tricks soon made him a prime favourite with the placed, as it is proposed to place it, in the midst of the dis-under-graduates; a cap and gown were made, attired in trict most famous in its associations. Glasgow, on every which (to the great scandal of the dons) he accompanied holiday, heaves forth its population in mighty volume, part his master to breakfasts and wine-parties, where he condown its majestic river, and part in railway pleasure tripstributed greatly to the amusement of the company, and to the Land of Burns. So does Edinburgh, and Dundee, partook of good things; his favourite viands being muffins and Perth; while tens of thousands from the south, north, and ices. He was in general of an amiable disposition, east, and west, every year in increasing swarms, haunt the but subject to fits of rage, during which his violence was rivers and valleys consecrated by the strong, and plaintive, extreme; but a kind word and a finger to suck soon and spirit-stirring song which our poet poured over these brought him round. He was most impatient of solitude, charming scenes. It is of the utmost importance that plea- and would cry for hours when left alone, particularly if it sure parties should have something more than mere natu- was dark. It was this unfortunate propensity which ral objects to examine; if these are fixed and elevated on brought him into especial disfavour with the Dean of canvass by the artist's magic, a new source of interest is Christ-church, whose Greek quantities and hours of rest opened, a stream of human sympathy breaks in upon the were sadly disturbed by Tig's lamentations. scenery, and the intellect and whole mental powers receive refreshment. Even as a means of educating the eye, and teaching the general masses to group scenery for themselves, to select the salient and characteristic points of a landscape, such a gallery would be popular and useful. It might serve as a choice guide to the best points of view, for those who might visit it before visiting the scenes themselves; and, for those whom it might receive after the pleasant rambles of the day were over, it would be available for arranging their impressions, for relieving the mind from the fatigues of broken images, picked up at random, by piecing these into wholes, and filling up what had been missed. Most of all, however, would the collection be serviceable in mitigating the atrocities of low tavern-drinking and other gross perversions of the senses, if it did not entirely prevent them, in affording agreeable relief to the distractions of desultory walking, and in suggesting additional topics of innocent and instructive conversation to such young people as want of education or hard daily work may have prevented earlier gathering for themselves. For every reason, indeed, which might guide a legislature, or a magistracy, or a body of philanthropists, in choosing some method of general good, would we recommend the collection of these popular and thoughtful pictures.

At the commencement of the long vacation, Tig, with the other members of the university, retired into the country; and was daily taken out for a walk round the village, to the great astonishment of the bumpkins. There was a little shop, kept by an old dame, who sold whipcord, sugar-candy, and other matters; and here, on one occasion, Tig was treated to sugar-candy. Soon afterwards he got loose, and at once made off for the shop, into which he burst, to the unutterable terror of the spectacled and high-capped old lady, who was knitting stockings behind the counter. The moment she saw his shaggy head and heard the appalling clatter of his chain, she rushed up-stairs in a delirium of terror. When assistance arrived, the offender was discovered seated on the counter, helping himself most liberally to brown sugar; and it was with some difficulty, and after much resistance, that he was dragged away. When term recommenced, Tiglath Pileser returned to the university much altered in appearance, for, being of the family of silver bears of Syria, his coat had become almost white; he was much bigger and stronger, and his teeth had made their appearance, so that he was rather more difficult to manage: the only way to restrain him when in a rage was to hold him by the ears; but on one occasion, having lost his temper, he tore his