Scotland." There is one very grand oil painting over the chimney-piece,
Fastcastle, by Thomson, alias the Wolf's Crag of the Bride of
Lammermoor, one of the most majestic and melancholy sea-pieces I ever
saw; and some large black and white drawings of the Vision of Don
Roderick, by Sir James Steuart of Allanbank (whose illustrations of
Marmion and Mazeppa you have seen or heard of), are at one end of the
parlour. The room is crammed with queer cabinets and boxes, and in a
niche there is a bust of old Henry Mackenzie, by Joseph of Edinburgh.
Returning towards the armoury, you have, on one side of a most religious
looking corridor, a small greenhouse, with a fountain playing before
it--the very fountain that in days of yore graced the cross of
Edinburgh, and used to flow with claret at the coronation of the
Stuarts--a pretty design, and a standing monument of the barbarity of
modern innovation. From the small armoury you pass, as I said before,
into the drawing-room, a large, lofty, and splendid _salon_, with
antique ebony furniture and crimson silk hangings, cabinets, china, and
mirrors _quantum suff_, and some portraits; among the rest glorious
John Dryden, by Sir Peter Lely, with his gray hairs floating about in a
most picturesque style, eyes full of wildness, presenting the old Bard,
I take it, in one of those "tremulous moods," in which we have it on
record he appeared when interrupted in the midst of his Alexander's
Feast. From this you pass into the largest of all the apartments, the
library, which, I must say, is really a noble room. It is an oblong of
some fifty feet by thirty, with a projection in the centre, opposite the
fireplace, terminating in a grand bow window, fitted up with books also,
and, in fact, constituting a sort of chapel to the church. The roof is
of carved oak again--a very rich pattern--I believe chiefly _a la_
Roslin, and the bookcases, which are also of richly carved oak, reach
high up the walls all round. The collection amounts, in this room, to
some fifteen or twenty thousand volumes, arranged according to their