THE LAIRD seeing that I had recovered a considerable measure of my vigour, insisted upon carrying me with him to make my bow at the levee of the Earl of Morton, who has come down as the King's Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of this year. Detesting, as he does, the Kirk—its Creed—and its practice—to wait in all due form upon the representative of Majesty, at this its great festival, is a thing which he would think it highly indecorous in him, or in the head and representative of any ancient Scottish family, to omit; and, indeed, he is of opinion, that no gentleman of any figure who happens to be in Scotland at the time, should fail to appear in the same manner. He was, besides, more than commonly anxious in his devoirs on this occasion, on account of his veneration for the blood of the old Earls of Douglas, whose true representative he says the Earl of Morton is. My curiosity came powerfully in back of his zeal, and I promised to be in all readiness next morning at the hour he appointed.

In the mean time, His Grace (for such is the style of the Commissioner) had already arrived at the Royal Hotel, where, more avito, the provost and bailies, in all the gallantry of furred cloaks and gold chains, were in readiness to receive him, and present the ancient silver keys, symbolical of the long-vanished gates of the Gude Town of Edinburgh. The style in which the whole of this mock royalty is got up, strikes me as being extremely absurd. In the first place, I hold it a plain matter, that, if the King's majesty is to send a representative to preside over the disputes of the Scottish ministers and elders, this representative should be lodged no-where but in the Palace of Holyrood, where he might hold his mimic state in the same halls and galleries which have been dignified by the feet of the real monarchs of Scotland.