Peter's letters to his kinsfolk Author:John Gibson Lockhart Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which is a very ancient, and a tolerably productive one, W feels himself perfectly at liberty to pursue whatever mode of life is most agreeable to his fancy. ... more »He has travelled a good deal on the continent of Europe, and even penetrated into Asia Minor and Egypt, as far up as the Pyramids. These journies, however, could only have been undertaken for the purpose of gratifying some very ardent curiosity, in regard to a few particular points connected with his former devotedness to classical learning; and he now declares, that, unless he should be tempted to visit Spain for the sake of her cathedrals, he will never again leave the white cliffs behind him. He makes an annual or biennial trip to London ; but, with this exception, he is always to be found either at his old castle in Berwickshire, or here in Edinburgh, where he has a very snug house, although by no means in a fashionable part of the town. From a feeling of respect for his ancestors, he refuses to quit the old family- residence, which is no other than a lodging up five pair of stairs, in one of those huge aerial edifices of the Old Town—edifices which sometimes contain beneath a single roof a population, layer above layer, household above household, more numerous than that of many a street inmany a city south of the " ideal line." Here W—— still sits in the same enormously stuffed and prodigiously backed elbow-chair, and still reposes beneath the same antediluvian testers which served his grandfather, his great grandfather, and all his generations back, for aught I know, to the days of Queen Mary ; it being on many occasions his most chosen boast, that the degradation which affects, in other houses, the blood of the race, has touched in his house no thing but their furniture, and has not totally destroyed even that. W...« less