ROYAL PROGRESSES, RECENT AND REMOTE.

A BANQUET-HALL gay with lights and crowded with revellers, and the same banquet-hall lying silent in the dim gray of morning, the lights all extinguished, and the revellers all gone, such is the contrast which the Edinburgh of the present week presents to the Edinburgh of the last. The living tide is receding even more suddenly than it arose,-ebbing by its hundred outlets,-roads, canals, railways, and the sea; and already do our streets, in both the ancient and modern portions of the city, present the characteristic aspect of the season. In the older thoroughfares, long appropriated to trade and labour, the current flows languidly, save at the hours when warehouses and workshops pour out their numerous inmates. In the more fashionable streets and squares it has altogether ceased to flow; and as solitude ever seems deeper amid sunshiny lines of deserted buildings than among even rocks and woods, however lonely, in no parts of the city or its neighbourhood have the late scenes of noisy bustle and excitement been followed by scenes of more striking contrast than amid the more splendid streets of the New Town, with their few unemployed chairmen here and there sauntering about corners, or their single domestics here and there tripping leisurely along the pavement. Parade and pageantry seem over for the time; and the royal visit to Edinburgh has taken its place among other royal progresses of the past, as a thing of history,- -as an event to which future chroniclers will refer, agreeably to their character as writers, either as a trivial fact, deserving of but its single brief sentence, or as an interesting incident, suited, from its picturesque accompaniments, to relieve the dry narrative of contemporary

Occurrences.

Viewed in connection with the character of the respective ages to which they belong, these progresses form no uninte resting passages in our annals. We find them peculiarly impressed by the stamp of their time, and linked in most instances with the main events and more striking traits of the national history. We see a series of them rising in succession before us even now, like a series of pictures in a showbox. Shall we not just once or twice pull the string, and exhibit some of at least their more prominent features to our readers?

A youthful monarch wends his way northwards through a wild trackless country, surrounded by a band of cowled and shaven monks. His lay attendants have doffed the gay attire of the court, for dingy black or sober gray,—for the stole of coarse serge and the shirt of hair. The monarch himself is meanly wrapped in robes of the order of St Francis, bound with a girdle of rope, and with a huge belt of hammered iron pressing uneasily on his loins. In that lugubrious assemblage all is assumed heaviness and well-simulated sorrow not a trace of the splendour of royalty is visible. For the gratulatory shout, or the joyous burst of music, we hear only the sound of the whip plied in self-inflicted flagellation, or the chant of the penitential psalm. To what very distant age can this royal progress belong? Surely to the dark obscure of history,-to some uncertain era, at least a thousand years back. Not at all; not farther back than onethird of that period. That becowled and begirdled bigot is the grandfather of the royal lady whose progress we witnessed on Saturday last,-her grandfather just ten times removed. We see James IV. passing on his pilgrimage to the shrine of St Dothus, to do idle penance, in the far wilds of Ross, for the unnatural part taken by him, in well-nigh his childhood, against his unfortunate father at Bannockburn. Nor are the effects of the deplorable superstition which has stamped

its impress on that mean pageant less palpably evident in the uncultivated wildness of the surrounding country, or in the servile condition and savage ignorance of the inhabitants, than in the royal progress itself. Wherever superstition wakes, intellect and industry slumber. Popery, wherever it obtains, overlays the national mind like a nightmare, not only inducing sleep, but also rendering hideous the sleep which it induces. And what is the nature of the morality which grows up under its fostering influences? Look on that pageant. Could the repentance which bemoans itself in the confessional, and then expends itself in sore penances and long journeys, be in any instance more sincere. The haircloth, the whip, the iron belt, the shoeless foot, the weary pilgrimage, these are all realities. In a few brief days, however, the season of penance will be over, and that devout prince, laying down his repentance with his cowl, shall have engaged, undisturbed by a single compunctious qualm, in all the grosser debaucheries of an immoral and semi-barbarous And such is invariably the sort of connection which exists between the religion of penances, pilgrimages, and masses, and purity of life and conduct.

court.

The scene changes, and a lady, as now, has become the centre of the pageant. The rank dew lies heavy on grass and stone; a deep gloom hangs over the landscape,-a thick unwholesome fog, unstirred by the wind; but we can see the huge back of Arthur Seat faint and gray amid the haze, with the unaltered outline of the crags below; and yonder are the two western towers of Holyrood, and yonder the Abbey, with its stone-roof entire, and the hoar damps settling on its painted glass. The scene is that of the pageant of Saturday last, in all its more prominent features: nought has changed, save man and his puny labours. Nature seems to have no sympathy with the general joy. The sun has not shone for five days, nor the moon for five nights; the boom

of the cannon from the distant harbour, where the French galleys lie, falls dead and heavy on the ear, like the echoes of a sepulchral vault; the mingled shouts and music from the half-seen crowds sound drearily amid the chill and dripping damps, like tones of the winter wind in a ruin at midnight; and yonder comes the pageant of the day, enwrapped in fog, like a drifting vessel half-enveloped in the spray of a lee shore. Mark these gay and volatile strangers, the élite of the French Court. Yonder are the three Maries, and yonder the two Guises; and here comes the Queen herself, encircled by her iron barons. And who is that Queen?Mary, the gay, the fascinating, the exquisitely beautiful,-a true sovereign of the imagination,-a choice heroine of poetry and romance,- -a woman whose loveliness still exerts its influence over hearts,-a monarch whose misfortunes and sorrows still command tears; Mary,—the loose, the voluptuous, the unprincipled,-alike fitted to enchant a lover or to destroy a husband, the victim of her own unregulated passions, the canonized martyr of Popery,—in no degree less surely the martyr of adultery and murder. But none of the

darker traits yet appear; and with all the enthusiasm of the national character, the Scotch welcome their Queen. And yet motto and device speak to her in a strange language as she passes on the very signs that indicate the general joy at her arrival are fraught with unpalateable truth. Nor will she be left to guess merely at their meaning, when, after matins shall be sung and the Host elevated in yonder chapel, the echoes of that ancient High Church,—a building so peculiarly associated with all that is truly great in Scottish history, shall be awakened by the stormy indignation of Knox; nay, in the very presence-chamber shall the Sovereign be told that her reformed people have determined to brook no revival of the blood-stained idolatry of Rome. Mary's grandfather rode unquestioned on his pilgrimage, to

mumble unprofitable prayers over the bones of dead men, to prostrate himself before stone saints, and to worship flour wafers. And yet, though thus blind and ignorant himself, he possessed a power of controlling and prescribing the beliefs of his subjects. But a principle of tremendous energy has arisen among the masses,- -a principle destined to convulse empires and overthrow dynasties,—to curb the tyranny of rulers, and to spread wide among the people the blessings of freedom and the light of civilization. Kings are no longer to prescribe the beliefs of their subjects: subjects, on the contrary, are virtually to prescribe the beliefs of their kings. Monarchs are to profess the religion of their people, or to resign their thrones. Is the doctrine challenged? Mary might well challenge it; nor was she left long without the opportunity. It darkened her brief reign, and rendered the gloom of that dreary procession exactly what a few melancholy spirits had deemed it,-a gloom too significantly ominous of the long troubles which followed. It convulsed the country for more than a century, reddening many a battlefield, and staining many a scaffold, from the scaffold of the infatuated monarch who died at Whitehall, to that of our noble covenanting peasants and mechanics who suffered scarce two hundred yards from where we write, and whose honoured bones moulder in the neighbouring churchyard. But, whatever it might be in Mary's days, it is surely no disputable doctrine now. It is the doctrine of the "Protestant Succession," of the "Coronation Oath," of the "Revolution Settlement." Except for this doctrine, the royal personage whose progress through the city on Saturday drew together so vast an assemblage, would not now be the Queen of Great Britain. She could have come among us merely as a highborn, but not the less obscure, Continental lady, who, were she to be pointed out to some curious spectator, could only be pointed out as the niece of a German prince.