CHALMERS.
Edinburgh, September 22d, 1846.
The beautiful and stately aspect of this city has been the theme of admiration so general that I can only echo it.

We have seen it to the greatest advantage both from Calton Hill and Arthur's Seat, and our lodgings in Princess Street allow us a fine view of the Castle, always impressive, but peculiarly so in the moonlit evenings of our first week here, when a veil of mist added to its apparent size, and at the same time gave it the air with which Martin, in his illustrations of "Paradise Lost," has invested the palace which "rose like an exhalation." On this our second visit, after an absence of near a fortnight in the Highlands, we are at a hotel nearly facing the new monument to Scott, and the tallest buildings of the Old Town.

From my windows I see the famous Kirk, the spot where the old Tolbooth was, and can almost distinguish that where Porteous was done to death, and other objects described in the most dramatic part of "The Heart of Mid-Lothian." In one of these tall houses Hume wrote part of his History of England, and on this spot still nearer was the home of Allan Ramsay.

A thousand other interesting and pregnant associations present themselves every time I look out of the window.
In the open square between us and the Old Town is to be the terminus of the railroad, but as the building will be masked with trees, it is thought it will not mar the beauty of the place; yet Scott could hardly have looked without regret upon an object that marks so distinctly the conquest of the New over the Old, and, appropriately enough, his statue has its back turned that way.

The effect of the monument to Scott is pleasing, though without strict unity of thought or original beauty of design.