ANDREW CAMPBELL'S VISIT ΤΟ HIS IRISH COUSINS. It was in the spring of last year that I set out to pay this visit. I had been very busily employed all the winter at my trade, and had, besides, walked two miles and back again, every evening, to attend the School of Arts in Edinburgh: for, ever since I can remember, nothing has delighted me like acquiring knowledge on any useful subject; and the lectures I heard from the gentlemen there, opened up many things to me in a most wonderful and pleasant manner. But this is not a matter I need enter upon, considering for whose sakes I mean to write the following pages; for little do they care about acquiring any kind of knowledge. Yet when I think back upon the time I spent among them -how pleasantly it passed-and how kind, how exceedingly kind they were to me-I never cease to wish that, in one way or other, I could make them some return. When I first came home again, the remembrance of that kindness, and, above all, the remembrance of our last parting, when upwards of a hundred men, women, and children came to see me, and another who was with me, on our way-and the weeping of the women and the young ones-and the sorrowfu} kindness of the men-continued to keep up such a sort of mournful regard for them in my heart, that I could not bear to hear any of my own people speak about them, nor would I answer their questions, many of which I thought very unkind; for the Irish are but little thought of in that part of Scotland where I live, which is about a mile and a half to the south of Edinburgh. The reason of this, I suppose, is, that most of the Irish who come to Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, instead of trying to get amongst those of us who are sober and welldoing people, to learn any thing we could teach them, and trying to gain a good character for themselves and their country in a strange place, that they might get employment and advance themselves,—instead of this, they all flock together to the most blackguard parts of the town and suburbs, and there they live among themselves, just as they would do in any wild out-ofthe-way corner of Ireland, spending all they gain in carousing, and what they call fun and merriment, but what respectable working people in |