Letter XXIV.

Glasgow.—­Ayr.—­Alloway.

Dublin, July 24, 1845.

I promised another letter concerning Scotland, but I had not time to write it until the Irish Channel lay between me and the Scottish coast.

When we reached Glasgow on the 18th of July, the streets were swarming with people.  I inquired the occasion, and was told that this was the annual fair.  The artizans were all out with their families, and great numbers of country people were sauntering about.  This fair was once, what its name imports, an annual market for the sale of merchandise; but it is now a mere holiday in which the principal sales, as it appeared to me, were of gingerbread and whisky.  I strolled the next morning to the Green, a spacious open ground that stretches along the Clyde.  One part of it was occupied with the booths and temporary theatres and wagons of showmen, around and among which a vast throng was assembled, who seemed to delight in being deafened with the cries of the showmen and the music of their instruments.  In one place a band was playing, in another a gong was thundering, and from one of the balconies a fellow in regal robes and a pasteboard crown, surrounded by several persons of both sexes in tawdry stage-dresses, who seemed to have just got out of bed and were yawning and rubbing their eyes, was vociferating to the crowd in praise of the entertainment which was shortly to be offered them, while not far off the stentor of a rival company, under a flag which announced a new pantomime for a penny, was declaiming with equal vehemence.  I made my way with difficulty through the crowd to the ancient street called the Salt Market, in which Scott places the habitation of Baillie Jarvie.  It was obstructed with little stalls, where toys and other inconsiderable articles were sold.  Here at the corner of one of the streets stands the old tower of the Tolbooth where Rob Roy was confined, a solid piece of ancient architecture.  The main building has been removed and a modern house supplies its place; the tower has been pierced below for a thoroughfare, and its clock still reports the time of day to the people of Glasgow.  The crowd through which I passed had that squalid appearance which marks extreme poverty and uncertain means of subsistence, and I was able to form some idea of the prodigious number of this class in a populous city of Great Britain like Glasgow.  For populous she is, and prosperous as a city, increasing with a rapidity almost equal to that of New York, and already she numbers, it is estimated, three hundred thousand inhabitants.  Of these it is said that full one-third are Irish by birth or born of Irish parents.