Lake, which are laid here with a minuteness of local description and allusion characteristic of Scott.

According to our guide book, one might find there the visible counterpart of every thing which he has woven into his beautiful fiction — "the Lady's Rock, which rang to the applause of the multitude; "the Franciscan steeple, which pealed the merry festival;" "the sad and fatal mound," apostrophized by Douglas,

the room in the castle, where " a Douglas by his sovereign bled;" and not far off the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey. One could not but think of the old days Scott has described.

"The castle gates were open flung,

The quivering drawbridge rocked and rung,
And echoed loud the flinty street
Beneath the coursers' clattering feet,
As slowly down the steep descent
Fair Scotland's king and nobles went,
While all along the crowded way
Was jubilee and loud huzza."

The place has been long deserted as a palace; but it is one of the four fortresses, which, by the articles of union between Scotland and England, are always to be kept in repair.

We passed by the town of Perth, the scene of the "Fair Maid's" adventures. We had received an invitation to visit it, but for want of time were obliged to defer it till our return to Scotland.

Somewhere along here Mr. S. was quite excited by our

proximity to Scone, the old crowning-place of the Scottish kings; however, the old castle is entirely demolished, and superseded by a modern mansion, the seat of the Earl of Mansfield.

Still farther on, surrounded by dark and solemn woods, stands Glamis Castle, the scene of the tragedy in Macbeth. We could see but a glimpse of it from the road, but the very sound of the name was enough to stimulate our imagination. It is still an inhabited dwelling, though much to the regret of antiquarians and lovers of the picturesque, the characteristic outworks and defences of the feudal ages, which surrounded it, have been levelled, and velvet lawns and gravel walks carried to the very door. Scott, who passed a night there in 1793, while it was yet in its pristine condition, comments on the change mournfully, as undoubtedly a true lover of the past would. Albeit the grass plats and the gravel walks, to the eye of sense, are undoubtedly much more agreeable and convenient. Scott says in his Demonology, that he never came any where near to being overcome with a superstitious feeling, except twice in his life, and one was on the night when he slept in Glamis Castle. The poetical and the practical elements in Scott's mind ran together, side by side, without mixing, as evidently as the waters of the Alleghany and Monongahela at Pittsburg. Scarcely ever a man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to start the dullest imagination.

On this occasion Scott says, "After a very hospitable reception from the late Peter Proctor, seneschal of the castle, I

was conducted to my apartment in a distant part of the building. I must own, that when I heard door after door shut, after my conductor had retired, I began to consider myself as too far from the living, and somewhat too near the dead. We had passed through what is called 'the King's Room,' a vaulted apartment, garnished with stags' antlers and similar trophies of the chase, and said by tradition to be the spot of Malcolm's murder, and I had an idea of the vicinity of the castle chapel. In spite of the truth of history, the whole night scene in Macbeth's castle rushed at once upon my mind, and struck my imagination more forcibly than even when I have seen its terrors represented by the late John Kemble and his inimitable sister. In a word, I experienced sensations which, though not remarkable either for timidity or superstition, did not fail to affect me to the point of being disagreeable, while they were mingled at the same time with a strange and indescribable kind of pleasure.”

Externally, the building is quaint and singular enough; tall and gaunt, crested with innumerable little pepper box turrets and conical towers, like an old French chateau.

Besides the tragedy of Macbeth, another story of still more melancholy interest is connected with it, which a pen like that of Hawthorne, might work up with gloomy power.

In 1537 the young and beautiful Lady Glamis of this place was actually tried and executed for witchcraft. Only think, now! what capabilities in this old castle, with its gloomy pine shades, quaint architecture, and weird associations, with this bit of historic verity to start upon.

Walter Scott says, there is in the castle a secret chamber; the entrance to which, by the law of the family, can be known only to three persons at once -the lord of the castle, his heir

take into their confidence.

See, now, the materials which the past gives to the novelist or poet in these old countries. These ancient castles are standing romances, made to the author's hands. The castle started a talk upon Shakspeare, and how much of the tragedy he made up, and how much he found ready to his hand in tradition and history. It seems the story is all told in Holingshed's Chronicles; but his fertile mind has added some of the most thrilling touches, such as the sleep walking of Lady Macbeth. It always seemed to me that this tragedy had more of the melancholy majesty

The

and power of the Greek than any thing modern. striking difference is, that while fate was the radical element of those, free will is not less distinctly the basis of this. Strangely enough, while it commences with a supernatural oracle, there is not, a trace of fatalism in it; but through all, a clear, distinct recognition of moral responsibility, of the power to resist evil, and the guilt of yielding to it. The theology of Shakspeare is as remarkable as his poetry. A strong and clear sense of man's moral responsibility and free agency, and of certain future retribution, runs through all his plays.

I enjoyed this ride to Aberdeen more than any thing we had seen yet, the country is so wild and singular. In the afternoon we came in sight of the German Ocean. The free, bracing air from the sea, and the thought that it actually was the German Ocean, and that over the other side was Norway, within a day's sail of us, gave it a strange, romantic charm.

"Suppose we just run over to Norway," said one of us; and then came the idea, what we should do if we got over there, seeing none of us understood Norse.

The whole coast along here is wild and rock-bound; occasionally long points jut into the sea; the blue waves sparkle and dash against them in little jets of foam, and the sea birds dive and scream around them.

On one of these points, near the town of Stonehaven, are still seen the ruins of Dunottar Castle, bare and desolate, surrounded on all sides by the restless, moaning waves; a place justly held accursed as the scene of cruelties to the Covenanters, so appalling and brutal as to make the blood boil in the recital, even in this late day.

During the reigns of Charles and James, sovereigns whom