BUCK’S-HEAD, GLASGOW

I HAD a melancholy ride from Edinburgh—as every man of any sense or feeling must have who quits that beautiful and hospitable city, after a residence half so long as mine. When I had swallowed my solitary cup of coffee and bit of toast, and, wrapping myself in my great-coat, proceeded to the door of Oman’s—and saw there the patient Scrub, the lazy John, and the sober shandrydan, all prepared for the journey—I could not but feel a chillness creep over me at the now visible and tangible approach of my departure. I mounted, however, and seized the reins with a firmness worthy of myself, and soon found myself beyond sight of the obsequious bowings of Mr Oman and his lackeys—driving at a smart resolute pace along the glorious line of Prince's Street, which I had so often traversed on different errands, and in such different glee. There was a thick close mist, so that I scarcely saw more than a glimpse or two of some fragments of the Castle as I past—the church-domes and towers floated here and there like unsupported things in the heavens;—and Edinburgh, upon the whole, seemed to melt from before my retreating gaze, “like the baseless fabric of a vision.” It was not till I had got fairly out of the town, that the sun shone forth in his full splendour, gilding with his Judas beams the dead white masses of vapour that covered the ground before me—and, by degrees, affording me wider and richer glances of the whole of that variously magnificent champaign.

There is, indeed, a very fine tract of country, stretching for several miles westward from Edinburgh—its bosom richly cultivated and wooded, and its margin on either hand skirted by very picturesque, if not very majestic, ranges of mountains. After passing over these beautiful miles, however, the general character of the road to Glasgow is extremely monotonous and uninteresting—there being neither any level sufficient to give the impression of extent, or height sufficient to dignify the scene—but one unbroken series of bare bleak table-land, almost alike desolate-looking where cultivation has been commenced, as where the repose of the aboriginal heather has been left undisturbed.