do not remember ever to have seen an old monumental statue with the nose
entire. In all political or religious outbreaks, the mob's first impulse
is to hit the illustrious dead on their noses.

At the other end of the Abbey, near the high altar, is the vault where
the old Scottish kings used to be buried; but, looking in through the
window, I saw only a vacant space,--no skull, nor bone, nor the least
fragment of a coffin. In fact, I believe the royal dead were turned out
of their last home, on occasion of the Revolutionary movements, at the
accession of William III.



HIGH STREET AND THE GRASS-MARKET.


Quitting the Abbey and the Palace, we turned into the Canongate, and
passed thence into High Street, which, I think, is a continuation of the
Canongate; and being now in the old town of Edinburgh, we saw those
immensely tall houses, seven stories high, where the people live in
tiers, all the way from earth to middle air. They were not so quaint and
strange looking as I expected; but there were some houses of very antique
individuality, and among them that of John Knox, which looks still in
good repair. One thing did not in the least fall short of my
expectations,--the evil odor, for which Edinburgh has an immemorial
renown,--nor the dirt of the inhabitants, old and young. The town, to
say the truth, when you are in the midst of it, has a very sordid, grimy,
shabby, upswept, unwashen aspect, grievously at variance with all poetic
and romantic associations.