So easily affected are such

individuals of the other sex. persons, that they cannot even bear the odour of the most pleasant flowers without suffering." It is to be remarked, that it is not disagreeable odours which produce such effects on the nervous system, but the more delicate, and, to northern nations, agreeable odours of flowers, also vegetable and other perfumes. Hysteric headaches and numerous nervous affections are produced by such odours. The Roman physicians cannot fix upon any other circumstance to which this malady can be fairly attributed, except the indolent manner of life of the Romans, which favours, especially in such a climate, the relaxation and sensibility of the system. Such was most likely the principal source of this idiosyncrasy, and this no doubt still tends to maintain it; while the morbid sensibility of the nervous system once acquired, is doubtless, in some degree, transmitted from parent to child. But though much may depend on the effeminate and indolent manner of living at Rome, the climate, I believe, has some specific effect in inducing this state of the nervous system. The habits of the Romans differ little, I think, from those of the inhabitants of the other large towns in Italy-for instance, Naples, Florence, Genoa, &c.—and yet this morbidly sensitive state of the nervous system does not exist by any means in the same degree in those places. Even a temporary residence of some duration at Rome produces a degree of the same morbid sensibility, and in cases where the Roman mode of living cannot be adduced as the cause. Something depends also, I believe, on the moral education, though it must not be forgotten that the sensibility of the nervous system in all warm climates is naturally more exalted than in the colder, and the influence of the passions far greater in producing and modifying bodily disease. This is particularly the case with the Romans; and, in tracing the chronic diseases of such of them as came within my observation, I was struck with the general reference of their origin to violent mental emotions.'

THE STOLEN PRESIDENT.

THE custom of stealing away voters, so as to balk the election of a particular member of parliament, and which was, until recent times, of no very rare occurrence, meets with a parallel in early periods of our history in the abduction of persons of considerable influence in the state or on the bench. An incident of this nature, illustrative of the former unsettled state of Scotland, may here be related for the amusement of our readers.

In the reign of Charles I., when the moss-trooping practices were not entirely discontinued, the tower of Gilnockie, in the parish of Cannoby, was occupied by William or Willie Armstrong, a lineal descendant of the famous John Armstrong of Gilnockie, executed by James V. The hereditary love of plunder had descended to this person with the family mansion; and upon some marauding party, he was seized and imprisoned in the tolbooth of Jedburgh. The Earl of Traquair, Lord High Treasurer, happening to visit Jedburgh, and knowing this border moss-trooper, inquired the cause of his confinement. Willie replied he was imprisoned for stealing two tethers (halters); but, upon being more closely interrogated, acknowledged there were two delicate colts at the end of them. The joke, such as it was, amused the earl, who exerted his interest, and succeeded in releasing Willie from bondage. Some time afterwards, a lawsuit of importance to Lord Traquair was to be decided in the Court of Session, and there was every reason to believe that the judgment would turn upon the voice of the presiding judge, who has a casting vote in case of an equal division among his brethren. opinion of the president was unfavourable to Lord Traquair; and the point was, therefore, to keep him out of the way when the question should be tried. In this dilemma, the earl had recourse to Willie Armstrong, who at once offered his service to kidnap the president.

The

Upon due scrutiny, he found it was the judge's practice frequently to take the air on horseback on the sands of Leith without an attendant. In one of these excursions, Willie, who had long watched his opportunity, ventured to accost the president, and engage him in conversation. His address and language were so amusing, that he decoyed the president into an unfrequented and furzy common, called the Figgate Whins, where, riding suddenly up to him, he pulled him from his horse, muffled him in a large cloak which he had provided, and rode off with the luckless judge trussed up behind him. Will crossed the country with great expedition, by paths known only to persons of his description, and deposited his weary and terrified burden in an old castle in Annandale, called the Tower of Graham. The judge's horse being found, it was concluded he had thrown his rider into the sea; his friends went into mourning, and a successor was appointed to his office. Meanwhile, the poor president spent a heavy time in the vault of the castle. He was imprisoned, and solitary; received his food through an aperture in the wall, and never hearing the sound of a human voice, save when a shepherd called his dog by the name of Batty, and when a female domestic called upon Maudge, the cat. These, he concluded, were invocations of spirits, for he held himself to be in the dungeon of a sorcerer. At length, after three months had elapsed, the lawsuit was decided in favour of Lord Traquair, and Will was directed to set the president at liberty. Accordingly, he entered the vault at the dead of night, seized the president, muffled him once more into the cloak, without speaking a single word; and using the same mode of transportation, conveyed him to Leith sands, and set down the astonished judge on the very spot where he had taken him up. The joy of his friends, and the less agreeable surprise of his successor, may be easily conceived, when he appeared in court to reclaim his office and honours. All embraced his own persuasion, that he had been spirited away by witchcraft; nor could he himself be convinced of the contrary, until, many years

afterwards, happening to travel in Annandale, his cars were saluted once more with the sounds of Maudge and Batty, the only notes which had solaced his long confinement. This led to a discovery of the whole story; but in these disorderly times, it was only laughed at as a fair ruse de guerre. Wild and strange as this tradition may seem, there is little doubt of its foundation in fact. The judge upon whose person this extraordinary stratagem was practised, was Sir Alexander Gibson, Lord Durie, collector of the reports well known in the Scottish law under the title of Durie's Decisions. He was advanced to the station of an Ordinary Lord of Session, 10th July 1621, and died at his own house of Duric, July 1646.

A TALE OF THE PLAGUE IN EDINBURGH. In several parts of Scotland, such things are to be found as tales of the plague. Amidst so much human suffering as the events of a pestilence necessarily involved, it is of course to be supposed that occasionally circumstances would occur of a peculiarly disastrous and affecting description that many loving hearts would be torn asunder, or laid side by side in the grave-many orphans left desolate, and patriarchs bereft of all their descendants-and that cases of so painful a sort as called forth greater compassion at the time, would be remembered after much of the ordinary details was generally forgotten. The celebrated story of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray is a case in point. So romantic, so mournful a tale, appealing as it does to every bosom, could not fail to be commemorated, even though it had been destitute of the great charm of locality. In the course of our researches, we have likewise picked up a few extraordinary circumstances connected with the last visit paid by the plague to Edinburgh, which, improbable as they may perhaps appear, we believe to be, to a certain

extent, allied to truth, and shall now submit them to our readers.

When Edinburgh was afflicted, for the last time, with the pestilence, such was its effect upon the energies of the citizens, and so long was its continuance, that the grass grew on the principal street, and even at the Cross, though that Scottish Rialto was then perhaps the most crowded thoroughfare in Britain. Silence, more than that of the stillest midnight, pervaded the streets during the day. The sunlight fell upon the quiet houses as it falls on a line of sombre and neglected tombstones in some sequestered church-yard - gilding, but not altering their desolate features. The area of the High Street, on being entered by a stranger, might have been contemplated with feelings similar to those with which Christian, in the Pilgrim's Progress, viewed the awful court-yard of Giant Despair; for in that well-imagined scene, the very ground bore the marks of wildness and desolation; every window around, like the loopholes of the dungeons in Doubting Castle, seemed to tell its tale of misery within; and the whole seemed to lie prostrate and powerless under the dominion of an unseen demon, which fancy might have conceived as stalking around in a bodily form, leisurely dooming its subjects to successive execution.

When the pestilence was at its greatest height, a strange perplexity began, and not without reason, to take possession of the few physicians and nurses who attended the sick. It was customary for the distempered to die, or, as the rare case happened, to recover, on a particular day after having first exhibited symptoms of illness. This was an understood rule of the plague, which had never been known to fail. All at once it began to appear that a good many people, especially those who were left alone in their houses by the death or desertion of friends, died before the arrival of the critical day. In some of these cases, not only was the rule of the disease broken, but what vexed the physicians more, the powers of medicine seemed to have been set at defiance; for several patients