DEAR AUNT,

HOWEVER composed and arranged, the routs and balls of this place are, during their season, piled upon each other with quite as much bustle and pomp as those even of London. Every night, some half a dozen ladies are at home, and every thing that is in the wheel of fashion, is carried round, and thrown out in due course at the door of each of them. There is at least one regular ball every evening, and besides this, half of the routs are in their waning hours transformed into carpet-dances, wherein quadrilles are performed in a very penseroso method to the music of the piano-forte. Upon the whole, however, I am inclined to be of opinion, that even those who most assiduously frequent these miscellaneous assemblages are soon sickened, if they durst but confess the truth, of the eternal repetition of the same identical crowd displaying its noise and pressure under so many different roofs. Far be it from me to suspect, that there are not some faces, of which no eye can grow weary; but, in spite of all their loveliness, I am certainly of opinion, that the impression made by the belles of Edinburgh would be more powerful, were it less frequently reiterated. Among the hundred young ladies, whose faces are exhibited in these parties, a very small proportion, of course, can have any claims to that higher kind of beauty, which, like the beauty of painting or sculpture, must be gazed on for months or years before the whole of its charm is understood and felt as it ought to be. To see every evening, for months in succession, the same merely pretty, or merely pleasing faces, is at the best a fatiguing business. One must soon become as familiar with the contour of every cheek, and the sweep of every ringlet, as one is with the beauties or defects of one's own near relatives. And if it be true, that defects in this way come to be less disagreeable, it is no less true, per contra, that beauties come to have less of the natural power of their fascination.