“The young gudewife o’ Auchinblae,
She was a cannie woman;
She wiped her wi’ a wisp o’ strae,
When her gudeman was comin.”—Old Ballad.
The movements of a people of so much gusto, and grace, and gravity, as those who had interposed their thickening clouds between my vision and those municipal and mental glories which I had come to see, could not choose but do every thing according to the most approved canons of philosophy; and thus the mighty matter of the royal visitation had to be received in its beginning, its middle, and its end, before I could proceed in my legitimate and laudatory vocation. Besides the people who came, there were the preparations made and the deeds done,—each of which is well worthy of a chapter.
The rumour of the high honour came upon the Athens like the light of the morning,—beaming upon the most elevated points, while yet the general mass remained in shadow. The Lord President of the Court of Session, the Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, the Lord Advocate, Lady Macconochie, the very Reverend, and (by office and intuition,) very learned Principal Baird, the Sheriff of the County, Deacon Knox, of Radical-threshing renown, Mr. Archibald Campbell, and that fair dame who watches and wipes in Queen Mary’s apartments at the Holyrood, were the first upon whom the radiance broke; and, the summit of Ben Nevis gilded by the morning sun, looks not more proudly down upon the mists of Lochiel or the melancholy waste of Rannoch, than each and all of those high personages did upon the ungifted sons and daughters of Edinburgh. They were in a fidget of the first magnitude, as to what was to be done, and who was to do it. Long and deep were their deliberations; but, like the Areopagites of the Elder Athens, themselves and their deliberations were in the dark. Hence, as hope is the grand resource in such cases, they deputed the Lord President to seek aid from the Royal Society of Edinburgh,—a society which, composed of the wisest heads, and prosecuting the wisest subjects, always says and does the very wisest things in the very wisest manner.
Fortunately the Society was sitting,—doing its incubation, upon a refutation of Aristotle’s poetics by Sir George M’Kenzie, of Coul, Bart., and a proposal for lighting all the roads in Scotland with putrid fish-heads, by Sir John Sinclair. The Lord President opened his mouth and his case; and each learned head nodded with the solemnity of that of a Jupiter. The trumpet-call, blown through the nose by a bandana handkerchief, summoned to the charge the commodity of brains that each possessed; and each having returned the bandana to its place, looked as wise as the goddess of the Elder Athens, or even as her sacred bird. The general question propounded to them ran thus,—“What was to be done, and by whom?” and the deliverance of their wisdoms was, that “Every thing ought to be done, and every body ought to do it”—a response surpassing in profoundity any thing ever uttered by the Pythoness herself. The countenance of the dignified delegate was brought parallel to the ceiling; his eyes and mouth had a contest as to which could become the wider; and, he Macadamized the question by breaking it into smaller pieces: “What should they say to the King; what should they give him to eat; and how should they demean themselves?” It was resolved, as touching the first, that they should say very little, for fear of errors in propriety or in grammar; but that they should put in motion the addressing-machinery, of which official men in Scotland had so often felt the benefit, and give, in “change for a Sovereign” as it were, two hundred and forty of those copper coins, for their own benefit, and that of the royal closet. The second point was more puzzling: A king would not care for sheep’s-head or haggis, and as for French cookery, that would be no rarity. Some lamented that the Airthrie whale was petrified, and that Dr. Barclay’s elephant was nothing but bones; and Sir John Sinclair recommended three mermaids dressed entire,—of which he assured them there were plenty on the coast of Caithness. Upon this point there was a difference of opinion; and they resolved to board the King upon the enemy, by getting ten fat bucks from that notorious Whig the Honourable W. Maule, as his Grace of Montrose had only one to spare. Upon the third point their decision was equally summary and clear, “Every one was to do the best that he could.”