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ecstacies by the perusal of your ingenious and good tempered satire. There was not a bailie in the town who did not suspect himself to be typified in my grandfather, nor a bailie's wife who did not chuckle when she read the compliment you paid to the trim ankle of Matty. There were many candidates for the characters of "Bailie Graham," and "Sandy Steenson in the Trades Land." The beadles fell out, after a funeral, about "the grave-looking person;" but the keenest rivalry was excited by your truly enviable description of the "Barony Laigh Kirk" preacher. If you had only thought of sending me a sight of your proof sheets, I could easily have informed you, that though we have both a Barony Kirk and a Laigh Kirk, Glasgow never possessed any place of worship which could lay claim to the compound designation in your text. The minister of the Barony Kirk (here commonly pronounced the Baronry), and he of the Laigh (otherwise, and more fashionably, styled the Tron), seemed undoubtedly to have a fair subject for competition; but as it was soon discovered that the one had never been "metaphysical," and the other is not yet "old," the public voice decided in favour of a common friend of both, one who certainly adorns a very venerable "age" with "most ingenious reasoning," and "the real savour o' doctrine." It was commonly alleged that you had gone a little too closely to work, when, by your minuteness of localities,—"the main entrance," &c. you left so little room for conjecture as to the "cauldrife law-work gaun on yonder—carnal moralities as dowed and fusionless as rue leaves at Yule;" and most people suspected that the anachronism of "that gude gospel-kirk of St Enochs" had not been brought in for nothing. I mention these merely as instances. The mania of interpretation went much farther than I could very easily make you understand. Nothing else was heard of for some weeks; and at that festive season (the book just reached us on Hogmanay), the walls of every club-room, the Geggers, the Odd Fellows, the Board of Green Cloth, the Stall, the Face, the What-you-please, and Archy Cameron's, resounded with peals of laughter, provoked by the wit of Rob.—Your arrows had perhaps been shot at a venture; but, as it is said of one of the heroes in the Arabian Nights, that a genie was always at hand to shove on his dart to its destination, so there was no want of wicked wags to guide each shaft from your quiver home to the sides of some innocent citizen, against whose "leathern coat," "stretched almost to bursting," I am persuaded you had not intended any hostility.

As, notwithstanding the title of your novel, Rob Roy is a hero of whose adventures you can scarcely be said to have as yet made any use, I think a few hints from one more familiar with the west country than you can be, may not be at all amiss, in case you think of reviving Rob, and giving us other three volumes of Blackmail and Loch Cathrine. In the first place, my dear Sir, you must know, that in the days of Rob Roy the Provost of Glasgow was a person of much greater importance than he commonly is now-a-days.—In the year when you have chosen to bring your hero to visit my ancestor in the Salt-market, he was no less a person than Campbell of Shawfield, the member for our district of boroughs. What a fine opportunity you might have of representing a totally new, unbroken, virgin character,—a compound, made up in equal proportions of statesmanship, lairdship, and bailieship? The military propensities of the magistrate at Fairport were not, I am convinced, a better subject for your imagination, than the political career of such a Glasgow Provost might afford.

Hint the second.—I wish you would, in "Rob Roy continued," give us a little insight into that mysterious character of whom you and Mr Blackwood's "Dicaledon" sometimes speak, "the chief of the Macgregors." Who was this? And who is his descendant and representative? There are two shopkeepers of my acquaintance in this town, who regularly quarrel every time they get bouzy together about this, each pretending that he is the true legitimate chieftain of Gregarich, and insisting upon "homage due" from the other. Paisley also boasts of a chief of the Macgregors—a warper; and I have myself seen the proud blazon of that clan—trees an' supporters an' a'—framed and glazed, in the back parlour of a little innkeeper