"A Scotch Presbyterian" asks us to admit another long letter
on the sub- ject of Lord Palmerston's reply to the Presbytery of Edinburgh. The re- quest is unreasonable. Besides the very considerable demand on a limited space, never sufficient for current claims upon it, there are special reasons why a retrospective controversy of the kind is peculiarly inconvenient. While the subject demands calm and consecutive reasoning, the reader inevitably forgets the bearing of arguments upon a question raised more than a month past. One fact noted by our correspondent, at the starting of his elaborate exposition, it is but fair to admit. "The application to Lord Palmerston from the Presbytery of Edinburgh, was not a request to Government to ap- point P day of fast on account of cholera, but a request to know whether Government intended to appoint one." In another note, our correspondent combats the notion that Edinburgh, or Scotland generally, is remark- able above the rest of the United Kingdom for impurity. In London and Newcastle, the Scotch Presbyterian has himself seen "matter in the wrong place." In a London hotel at the West-end, he has found the water of the bath, and in the water-jug for washing, intolerable for its stench, and peopled with a shrimp-like inhabitant of much vivacity ; while Edinburgh has water that London might envy. It is true that we do associate with the shrimp at our ahlutions„—a consorting with improper com- pany from which we are trying to escape ; but we don't associate with pigs In our basement story; nor are there many towns in England, Newcastle not excepted, that could vie with some Scotch towns in the reports of the Health Inspector. But we are all beginning to learn better on these subjects, and it is wiser to cooperate in reform than to bicker about relative sin.
A history of the auction-room would comprise many quaint tales of English life. That which makes a good catalogue for the curious pur- chaser indicates materials for the curious biographer. The reflection is suggested by the catalogue of a sale announced by Messrs. Leigh Sotheby and Wilkinson for the week before Christmas—the library of the late Mr. John Hugh Smyth-Pigott, of Brockley Half. An English country gentleman employed an active and tasteful leisure in collecting all kinds of books that fell in his way, rare or otherwise and a more multi- farious collection country gentleman never got together—from old MSS. to "the Great Necropolis," from natural history to astrology, from philo- sophy to cookery, from divinity to Voltaire's autograph,—including heraldry and history, erotic literature and morals, law and jest-books, art and music, physiology and poetry, with the magic speculum used by Dr. Dee the astro- loger. How ninny strange thoughts, grave or quaint, accompanied the pur- suit of that collection—now to be dispersed, and to be reformed perhaps 111 other collections not less strangely shaped !
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