At Keswick we went to see a model of the Lake country which gives an excellent idea of the relative positions of all objects.  Its maker had given six years to the necessary surveys and drawings.  He said that he had first become acquainted with the country from his taste for fishing, but had learned to love its beauty, till the thought arose of making this model; that while engaged in it, he visited almost every spot amid the hills, and commonly saw both sunrise and sunset upon them; that he was happy all the time, but almost too happy when he saw one section of his model coming out quite right, and felt sure at last that he should be quite successful in representing to others the home of his thoughts.  I looked upon him as indeed an enviable man, to have a profession so congenial with his feelings, in which he had been so naturally led to do what would be useful and pleasant for others.

Passing from Keswick through a pleasant and cultivated country, we paused at “fair Carlisle,” not voluntarily, but because we could not get the means of proceeding farther that day.  So, as it was one in which

  “The sun shone fair on Carlisle wall,”

we visited its Cathedral and Castle, and trod, for the first time, in some of the footsteps of the unfortunate Queen of Scots.

Passing next day the Border, we found the mosses all drained, and the very existence of sometime moss-troopers would have seemed problematical, but for the remains of Gilnockie,—­the tower of Johnnie Armstrong, so pathetically recalled in one of the finest of the Scottish ballads.  Its size, as well as that of other keeps, towers, and castles, whose ruins are reverentially preserved in Scotland, gives a lively sense of the time when population was so scanty, and individual manhood grew to such force.  Ten men in Gilnockie were stronger then in proportion to the whole, and probably had in them more of intelligence, resource, and genuine manly power, than ten regiments now of red-coats drilled to act out manoeuvres they do not understand, and use artillery which needs of them no more than the match to go off and do its hideous message.

Farther on we saw Branxholm, and the water in crossing which the Goblin Page was obliged to resume his proper shape and fly, crying, “Lost, lost, lost!” Verily these things seem more like home than one’s own nursery, whose toys and furniture could not in actual presence engage the thoughts like these pictures, made familiar as household words by the most generous, kindly genius that ever blessed this earth.

On the coach with us was a gentleman coming from London to make his yearly visit to the neighborhood of Burns, in which he was born.  “I can now,” said he, “go but once a year; when a boy, I never let a week pass without visiting the house of Burns.”  He afterward observed, as every step woke us to fresh recollections of Walter Scott, that Scott, with all his vast range of talent, knowledge, and activity,