632 YONGE STEEET AND DUNDAS STREET. 



Dimira, in the County of Pertli. In these titles the name of " Ditn- 

 das," in which we are chiefly concerned, henceforward merges and 

 is lost. On his elevation to the peerage, the Lord Provost and Town 

 f /ouncii of Edinburgh presented him with an address, in which they 

 expressed their attachment to him and his family, their admiration 

 of his talents, and their gratitude for the many services he had 

 rendered to the country, and in particular to the City of Edinburgh. 

 The new lord appeared in person before the Council and delivered a 

 speech in reply, in which, among other topics, he dwelt on the prac- 

 tical blessings of the British Constitution, of which his own career, 

 he said, aiforded a striking example. " While we therefore continue 

 to resist the fanatic principles of ideal equality, incompatible with 

 the government of the world and the just order of human society, 

 let lis, he exhorted his hearera, rejoice in those substantial blessings, 

 the results of i-eal freedom and equal laws, which open to the fair 

 ambition of every British subject the means of pursuing with success 

 those objects of honour, and those situations of power — the attain- 

 ment of which, in other countries, rests solely upon a partial partici- 

 pation of personal favour, and the enjoyment of which rests upon 

 the precarious tenure of arbitrary power." While the civic authori- 

 ties of Edinburgh, in the presence of Viscount Melville, are yet 

 before our mind's eye, it will perhaps be of some interest to hear 

 w^bat Lord Gockburn, a contemporary, says of them, and their place 

 of meeting, in the " Memorials of His Times." We must of course 

 make allowance for the Whiggish bias of his pen. " In this Pande- 

 monium," he says [namely, in what he had just before described as 

 " a low, dark, blackguard-looking room, entering from a covered pas- 

 sage which connected the-north-w^t comer of the Parliament Square 

 with the Lawnmarket"], "sat the Town Council of Edinburgh, 

 omnipotent, corrupt, impenetrable. Nothing was beyond its grasp ; 

 no variety of opinion disturbed its unanimity, for the pleasure of 

 Dundas was .the sole rule for every one of them. Reporters, the 

 fruit of free discussion, did not exist j and though they had existed 

 would not have dared to disclose the proceedings. Silent, powerful, 

 submissive, mysterioiis and irresponsible, they might have been sitting 

 in Venice. Certain of the support of the Proconsul, whom they no 

 more thought of thwarting than of thwarting Providence, timidity 

 was not one of their vices." A curious picture, surely ; of which, 

 let us be thankful, no exact counterpart can be found in any city or 

 town in the Empire at the present day. 



