but on some business, and that he was much respected in his neighbourhood for the excellence of his character. Next morning I attended service in the cathedral; and being, I found, half an hour too early, spent the interval not unpleasantly in pacing the aisles and nave, and studying the stories so doubtfully recorded on the old painted glass. As I stood at the western door, and saw the noble stone roof stretching away, more than thirty yards overhead, in a long vista of five hundred feet, to the great eastern window, I again experienced the feeling of the previous evening. Never before had I seen so noble a cover. The ornate complexities of the groined vaulting-the giant columns, with their foliage-bound capitals, sweeping away in magnificent perspective-the coloured light that streamed through more than a hundred huge windows, and but faintly illumined the vast area after all the deep withdrawing aisles, with their streets of tombs-the great tower, under which a ship of the line might hoist top and topgallant-mast, and find ample room overhead for the play of her vane—the felt combination of great age and massive durability, that made the passing hour in the history of the edifice but a mere half-way point between the centuries of the past and the centuries of the future—all conspired to render the interior of York Minster one of the most impressive objects I had ever seen. Johnson singles out Congreve's description of a similar pile as one of the finest in the whole range of English poetry. It is at least description without exaggeration, in reference to buildings such as this cathedral. "Almeria.-It was a fancied noise: for all is hushed. Leonora.-It bore the accent of a human voice. Almeria.-It was thy fear, or else some transient wind We'll listen Leonora.-Hark! Almeria.-No, all is hushed and still as death: 'tis dreadful Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, To bear aloft its arched and ponderous roof, By its own weight made steadfast and immovable- And terror on the aching sight: the tombs Thy voice: my own affrights me with its echoes." But though I felt the poetry of the edifice, so little had my Presbyterian education led me to associate the not unelevated impulses of the feeling with the devotional spirit, that, certainly without intending any disrespect to either the national religion or one of the noblest ecclesiastical buildings of England, I had failed to uncover my head, and was quite unaware of the gross solecism I was committing, until two of the officials, who had just ranged themselves in front of the organ screen, to usher the dean and choristers into the choir, started forward, one from each side of the door, and, with no little gesticulatory emphasis, ordered me to take off my hat. "Off hat, sir! off hat!" angrily exclaimed the one. "Take off your hat, sir!" said the other, in a steady, energetic, determined tone, still less resistible. The peccant beaver at once sunk by my side, and I apologized. Ah, a Scotchman!" ejaculated the keener official of the two, his cheek meanwhile losing some of the hastily summoned red; "I thought as much." The officials had scarcely resumed their places beside the screen, when dean and sub-dean, the canons residentiary and the archdeacon, the prebendaries and the vicars choral, entered the building in their robes, and, with step slow and stately, disappeared through the richly-fretted entrance of the choir. A purple curtain fell over the opening behind them, as the last figure in the procession passed in: while a few lay saunterers, who had come to be edified by the great organ, found access by another door, which opened into one of the aisles. The presiding churchman on the occasion was Dean Cockburn -a tall, portly old man, fresh-complexioned and silvery-haired, and better fitted than most men to enact the part of an imposing figure in a piece of impressive ceremony. I looked at the dean with some little interest: he had been twice before the public during the previous five years-once as a dealer in church offices, for which grave offence he had been deprived by his ecclesiastical superior the archbishop, but reponed by the Queen-and once as a redoubtable assertor of what he deemed Bible cosmogony, against the facts of the geologists. The old blood-boltered barons who lived in the times of the Crusades used to make all square with Heaven, when particularly aggrieved in their consciences, by slaying a few scores of infidels a-piece ;-the dean had fallen, it would seem, in these latter days, on a similar mode of doing penance, and expiated the crime of making canons residentiary for a consideration, by demolishing a whole conclave of geologists. The cathedral service seemed rather a poor thing on the whole. The coldly-read or fantastically-chanted prayers, common-placed by the twice-a-day repetition of centuries-the mechanical responses—the correct inanity of the choristers, whọ had not even the life of music in them-the total want of lay attendance, for the loungers who had come in by the side-door went off en masse when the organ had performed its introductory part, and the prayers began the ranges of empty seats, which, huge as is the building which contains them, would scarce accommodate an average-sized Free Church congregation -all conspired to show that the cathedral service of the English Church does not represent a living devotion, but a devotion that perished centuries ago. It is a petrifaction-a fossilexisting, it is true, in a fine state of keeping, but still an exanimate stone. Many ages must have elapsed since it was the living devotion I had witnessed on the previous evening in the double-bedded room-if, indeed, it was ever so living a devotion, or aught, at best, save a mere painted image. Not even as a piece of ceremonial is it in keeping with the august edifice in which it is performed. The great organ does its part admirably, and is indisputably a noble machine; its thirty-two feet double-wood diapason pipe, cut into lengths, would make coffins for three Goliaths of Gath, brass armour and all: but the merely human part of the performance is redolent of none of the poetry which plays around the ancient walls, or streams through the old painted glass. It reminded me of the story told by the eastern traveller, who, in exploring a magnificent temple, passed through superb porticoes and noble halls, to find a monkey enthroned in a little dark sanctum, as the god of the whole. I had a long and very agreeable walk along the city ramparts. White watery clouds still hung in the sky; but the day was decidedly fine, and dank fields and glistening hedgerows steamed merrily in the bright warm sunshine. York, like all the greater towns of England, if we except the capital and some two or three others, stands on the New Red Sandstone; and the broad extent of level fertility which it commands is, to a Scotch eye, very striking. There is no extensive prospect in even the south of Scotland that does not include its wide ranges of waste, and its deep mountain sides, never furrowed by the plough; while in our more northern districts, one sees from every hill-top which commands the coast, a landscape coloured somewhat like a russet shawl with a flowered border; there is a mere selvedge of green cultivation on the edge of the land, and all within is brown heath and shaggy forest. In England, on the contrary, one often travels, stage after stage, through an unvarying expanse of flat fields laid out on the level formations, which, undisturbed by trappean or metamorphic rocks, stretch away at low angles for hundreds of miles together, forming blank tablets, on which man may write his works in whatever characters he pleases. Doubtless such a disposition of things adds greatly to the wealth and power of a country; the population of Yorkshire, at the last census, equalled that of Scotland in 1801. But I soon began to weary of an infinity of green enclosures, that lay spread out in undistinguishable sameness, like a net, on the flat face of the landscape, and to long for the wild free moors and bold natural features of my own poor country. One likes to know the place of one's birth by other than artificial marks—by some hoary mountain, severe yet kindly in its aspect, that one has learned to love as a friend-by some long withdrawing arm of the sea, sublimely guarded, where it opens to the ocean, by its magnificent portals of rock-by some wild range of precipitous coast, that rears high its ivy-bound pinnacles, and where the green wave ever rises and falls along dim resounding cavernsby some lonely glen, with its old pine-forests hanging dark on the slopes, and its deep brown river roaring over linn and shallow in its headlong course to the sea. Who could fight for a country without features-that one would scarce be sure of finding out on one's return from the battle, without the assistance of the mile-stones ? As I looked on either hand from the ancient ramparts, now down along the antique lanes and streets of the town, now over the broad level fields beyond, I was amused to think how entirely all my more vivid associations with York-town and country-had been derived from works of fiction. True, it was curious enough to remember, as a historical fact, that Christianity had been preached here to the pagan Saxons in the earlier years of the Heptarchy, by missionaries from Iona. And there are not a few other picturesque incidents, that, frosted over with the romance of history, glimmer with a sort of phosphoric radiance in the records of the place-from the times when King Edwyn of the Northumbrians demolished the heathen temple that stood where the Cathedral now stands, and erected in its room the wooden oratory in which he was baptized, down to the times when little crooked Leslie broke over the city walls at the head of his Covenanters, and held them against the monarch, in the name of the King. But the historical facts have vastly less of the vividness of truth about them than the facts of the makers. It was in this city of York that the famous Robinson Crusoe was born; and here, in this |