THE situation of the Cathedral of Glasgow has been so exquisitely described in Rob Roy, that it would be quite useless to do anything more than refer you to it—only the fine pine trees which, in the novel, are represented as covering the whole of the opposite bank of the ravine, and extending their funereal shade quite to the back of the cemetery—these (miserabile dictu!) have been sacrificed to the auri sacra fames, and that bank is now bare and green, as if black pine had never grown there. The burial-ground, with which the Cathedral is on all sides surrounded, is certainly one of the largest and one of the most impressive I have ever visited. The long and flat grave-stones, in their endless lines, seem to form a complete pavement to the whole surface—making it a perfect street of the dead—the few knots of tall wiry grass and clustering nettles, which find room to shoot from between the layers of stonework, being enough to increase the dreariness, but not to disturb the uniformity of the scene. The building stands on the declivity of a slight hill, at the bottom of which a brawling rivulet tumbles along with a desolate roar of scanty waters—but it would seem the ground had been dug up originally, so as to give the Cathedral an uniform and even line of foundations. Yet—such in many succeeding centuries has been the enormous accumulation of the dead, that their graves have literally choked up the one end of the church altogether—so that of a tier of windows which are seen entire at the east, at the west the tops only can be traced, sculptured and ornamented like the rest, just peering above the surface of the encroaching tombs.

The feelings one has in visiting a Gothic cathedral, are always abundantly melancholy, but the grand and elevating accompaniments by which this melancholy is tempered in a Catholic, and even in an English cathedral, are amissing—sadly amissing—in the case of a cathedral that has fallen into the hands of the Presbyterians.