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true. Drummond, it is said, on seeing Ben approaching the house, went out, like a good landlord, to the outside of his gate, in order to bid him welcome, according to form, under the shade of this tree. As he shook the dramatist by the hand, he exclaimed in mock-heroic style

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"Welcome, welcome, royal Ben."

To which Jonfon immediately answered in fuch a way as to make up a Hudibraftic couplet :

"Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden !”

"The two poets enjoyed the pleasure of each other's converfation for a confiderable time; and the stranger will scarcely vifit without confiderable emotion the place where, in the words of Collins

"Jonfon fat in Drummond's claffic fhade."

"It is melancholy to add, that the vifit of Jonson to Drummond resulted in a violent quarrel and estrangement. Jonson during his fojourn at Hawthornden, opened his heart to the poet, and talked freely of his contemporaries in London. All this was in the confidence of friendship, but it was greedily drunk in by Drummond, and daily or nightly carefully written down. Some time after, Jonfon, to his great aftonishment and indignation, found the whole given to the world by his treacherous hoft in his notorious Converfations." The anger and reproaches of Ben were as pungent and unsparing as they were justly merited by the false country poet. We wish we could say that this habit of noting down confidential conversations, and confiding them to the whole world through the press, were confined to the time of Jonfon and the laird of Hawthornden; and that fome ready penmen of the present day would be able to cast a stone at Drummond with a clear confcience.

"Several detached curiofities are shown to ftrangers in the infide of Hawthornden House: as, for inftance, the walkingcane of the celebrated Duchefs of Lauderdale, a stately old piece of timber with a pike at one end and a crook at the other, communicating—unless fancy has strangely deceived the present writer-a striking idea of the personal bearing of that most fingular lady. There are also a number of family portraits, including a fine queen Mary.

'In the face of the precipice upon which Hawthornden is reared, the stranger, in traverfing the glen, fees a number of holes. These are the orifices of a fingular suite of caverns which penetrate the rock beneath the house. No stranger omits seeing this fingular curiofity. In the court-yard he is first shown a well of prodigious depth, which communicates with the caves. He then defcends a narrow ftair to a long fubterranean paffage, on each side of which there are small apartments, much after the fashion of a fuite of bed-rooms in an old house. Below this there is what may be called a lower story, which also contains rooms, and, the passage of which looks out upon the glen at one of the holes mentioned. The shaft of the well communicates with another end of this passage; so that the inmates of these caves could not only draw up their own water when they pleased, but also be supplied with food by their friends above, by means of a bucket.

“Without adverting to the circumftance that these caverns must have been originally formed by the early Britons, whofe molelike preference of darkness to light in their fortified refidences is a fact very well known to antiquaries; it may be mentioned that, by the invariable tradition of the country, they afforded shelter to the diftreffed friends of Bruce, if not to that hero himself, at a time when they dared not fhow their faces. above-ground. In one of the apartments a recess is shown, which is faid to have contained the bed ufed by the heroic

Edward Bruce, brother to the king, during his refidence here. In the fucceeding age they are faid to have been used for the fame purpose by Sir Alexander Ramsay, the knight who flew man and horse, and broke the pavement-ftone in Candle-maker Row, and by his hardy band of compatriots, who nightly fallied forth from this hiding-place to annoy their enemies, and who thus invariably escaped detection."

The poetry of Drummond, though much praised in his time, is not of a character to please ours. Much of it confifts of occafional verses "On a Parrot," or "To his Mistress's Eyebrow," or, at least, verses of that stamp. Others are well worded, but deftitute of living fentiment; while some are extremely obscene. In fact, the bulk of his compofitions resemble a vast mass of others ftored in our libraries, which would be better in bonfires to make room for better things. His His poems of devotion, the best part of his writings, do not warm us: they will not do after Herbert, Cowper, Keble, and Montgomery. This fonnet is the only thing bearing any reference to Hawthornden, where he spent so much of his life, and wrote moft of his verse :

SONNET.

"Dear wood, and you, fweet folitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estrangèd live,
Contented more with what your fhades me give,
Than if I had what Thetis doth embrace;
What fnaky eye, grown jealous of my peace,
Now from your filent horrors would me drive,

When fun, progressing in his glorious race

Beyond the Twins, doth near our pole arrive?
What sweet delight a quiet life affords,

And what it is to be of bondage free,

Far from the madding worldling's hoarfe difcords,
Sweet flowery place, I first did learn of thee:
Ah! if I were mine own, your dear reforts

I would not change with princes' ftately courts."

We are sorry to hear that there is a process of so-called renovating going on in this beautiful chapel, by sharpening up its sculptures. We must say that we prefer the original cutting, though it may be fomewhat worn by time, and have a natural shrinking at the idea of touching up what we prefer seeing to be old, rather than to be vainly perfuaded by modern chisels that it is new.

Elgin Cathedral.

Time hath not wronged her, nor hath ruin fought
Rudely her fplendid structures to destroy,
Save in those recent days, with evil fraught,
When mutability, in drunken joy

Triumphant, and from all restraint released,
Let loose her fierce and many-headed beast.

SOUTHEY.

HE ancient capital of Morayshire stretches along its level fite a few miles from where the Spey falls into the ocean, in a grey and stately antiquity that speaks of better days. Changes of life and manners have

led away the landed gentry to southern cities, and their old abodes ftand, bearing on their venerable fronts their names, and the dates of their erection, but now devolved to more plebeian occupation. Changes of faith have also rent down that noble fane, once the nobleft of all Scotland. The cathedral was originally built in the early part of the thirteenth century, a period at which arose so many of the ecclesiastical fabrics of both England and Scotland. But this first church was destroyed by fire in 1390, by one of the most rude and fierce of Scotland's old ariftocracy. Alexander Stuart, the fon of Robert II., king of Scotland, a man properly

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