STIRLING.

FROM THE OLD PALACE.

THIS view is taken from the south front of the palace of James V., so as to place a portion of that building in the foreground, and include the more conspicuous features of the town, and the beautiful scenery towards the east, through which the Forth pursues its devious way.

Stirling and its castle are of great, but unknown antiquity. The latter was an important fortress in the days of Bruce, when it was besieged by Edward I. in person, and reduced with great difficulty. During the reigns of "the Jameses," it was the favourite seat of Scottish royalty. In a room which still exists, James II., in 1452, stabbed the Earl of Douglas with his own hand, from rage at his refusing to give up a league which he had formed against the government. James III. erected a parliament-hall, and a chapel-royal, the former of which still survives. James V. was reared in this castle, under the care of Sir David Lyndsey, and, in mature life, added to the former building the palace above alluded to. Queen Mary also spent a portion of her youthful years in Stirling castle. Her son, James VI., who was baptized here, resided in the same palace, with his preceptor, Buchanan, during the whole of his minority. Prince Henry was also born, baptized, and reared in Stirling castle.

The palace of James V., here judiciously fore-shortened, is a curious memorial of the taste of the age. The general style of the architecture is heavy, and that of the decora tive parts purely whimsical and grotesque. All round the building there is a series of oddly twisted buttresses or pilasters, bearing ungainly statues, chiefly of mythological personages, with much fantastic ornament besides. At least two of the images are not of the character stated, and one of these is the royal founder himself, a short, unprepossessing figure: another is an undressed female, usually recognised by the popular appellation of "the Modest Maid," and of whom it is related that she obtained this honourable and conspicuous situation in gratitude for her having once saved the royal family from being destroyed by a nocturnal conflagration, rushing to give the alarm in the condition in which she is here represented. There is not, as far as we are aware, anywhere in Scotland, any specimen of architecture in the same peculiar taste. Its inferiority is the more remarkable, as the parts of Holyroodhouse and Linlithgow erected by the same monarch, are very elegant.

The historical and antiquarian interest of Stirling Castle, great as it is, bears no proportion, in the eyes of most strangers, to the beauty of the views commanded from its battlements. Seated on a lofty mass of basalt, in the centre of a wide plain, with an ample river flowing beneath, and an amphitheatre of magnificent hills in the distance, Stirling Castle has an attraction for the lovers of the picturesque, such as few places in

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Scotland can boast of. Looking forth from the walls towards the north-west, the eye, sweeping round from south to north, commands in succession the rugged fells of Campsie, the grand mass of Ben Lomond, Ben Ledi, Ben Voirlich, and Ben More,-beyond which it loses itself over the turbid Land-Sea of the Grampians, melting away into the faint blue distance. On the eastern battlements, with Demyat, and the other Ochils on the left hand, we have the rich, alluvial vale of the Forth, marked with town and grange, and manor and tower, and leading the eye along in delighted gaze till it dimly catches the remote outline of lofty Edinburgh.

Amongst the tourists who visited Stirling in the autumn of 1787, was Robert Burns, then on a tour to the West Highlands. We are told that the poet's national feelings were, on this occasion, greatly excited on beholding the roofless state of the parliamenthall of the Stuarts. Under the influence of this excitement, and of his habitual Jacobitism, he wrote the following extraordinary lines on a pane in the inn

"Here Stuarts once in glory reign'd,
And laws for Scotia's weal ordain'd;
But now unroofed their palace stands,
Their sceptre's swayed by other hands:
The injured Stuart line is gone,

A race outlandish fills their throne

An idiot race, to honour lost,

Who know them best despise them most."

A friend immediately hinting to him the imprudence of the act he had just committed, he said, "Oh, I mean to reprove myself;" and then walking to the window, added the following

"Rash mortal and slanderous poet, thy name

Shall no longer appear in the records of fame;
Dost not know, that old Mansfield, who writes like the Bible,

Says, the more 'tis a truth, sir, the more 'tis a libel."

The original lines were certainly as strongly marked by an unworthy feeling towards the reigning, as by a generous affection towards the dethroned family; but the sin of writing them is unnecessarily aggravated by Mr Lockhart, when he says, "The last conflict," alluding, in the coarsest style, to the melancholy state of the good king's health at the time, “was indeed an outrage of which no political prejudice could have made a gentleman approve." The king was not seized by his celebrated indisposition till October in the ensuing year. In that couplet here, by the way, printed for the first time-Burns seems to have merely proceeded upon a prevailing impression of at least the Jacobite part of the community, respecting the intellectual character of the family of BrunswickLunenburg. How far the impression was from the truth, it would be ludicrous to advert to in serious terms; but it is curious now to perceive traces of the extent to which it animated a portion of British society in the past age. It appears that the impassioned peasant of Kyle was not, in the use of this rash and coarse expression, more guilty of lesemajesty, than another individual, who, though under the same political prepossessions, was certainly the last whom Mr Lockhart could have expected to be guilty of any such out