DEAR WILLIAMS,

THE life I have led here has been such a strange mixture of all sorts of occupations, that were I to send you a literal diary of my transactions, I believe you would not fail to discover abundant room for doubting the authenticity of the M.S. I shall therefore reserve the full and entire history of this part of my existence, till I may have opportunity of communicating it to you viva voce over a bottle of Binn D, and proceed in the meantime, as I have been doing, to give you little glimpses and fragments of it, exactly in the order that pleases to suggest itself.

In Smollett's time, according to the inimitable and unquestionable authority of our cousin, Matthew Bramble, no stranger could sleep more than a single night in Edinburgh, with the preservation of any thing like an effectual incognito. In those days, as I have already told you, the people all inhabited in the Old Town of Edinburgh—packed together, family above family, for aught I know clan above clan, in little more than one street, the houses of which may, upon an average, be some dozen stories in height. The aerial elevation, at which an immense proportion of these people had fixed their abodes, rendered it a matter of no trifling moment to ascend to them; and a person in the least degree affected with asthma, might as soon have thought of mounting the Jungfrau, as of paying regular devoirs to any of the fair cynosures of these ὑπερτατα δωματα. The difficulty of access, which thus prevented many from undertaking any ascents of the kind, was sufficient to prevent all those who did undertake them, from entering rashly on their pilgrimages. No man thought of mounting one of those gigantic staircases, without previously ascertaining that the object of his intended visit was at home—unless it might be some Hannibal fresh from the Highlands, and accustomed, from his youth upwards, to dance all his minuets on Argyle's bowling-green.