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sufficient to establish our immense. superiority over our brethren in the South, even were we not entitled to point, as we now humbly do, to the superior delicacy, grace, elegance, and refinement of our manners, to say nothing of the unapproachable, and indeed perfect purity of our morals. All this being the case, it would be absurd, nay impious, to suppose for a single instant, that the soil, and consequently the scenery, where this superior race flourish, could be otherwise than superior to the soil, and consequently the nery, where the inferior race, as it were, comparatively speaking, merely vegetate. Accordingly, the superiority is manifest to the dimmest eye and the meanest capacity. England, on the whole, is a flat country -and Scotland, on the whole, quite the reverse; and as we mean at present to confine ourselves to rivers, we have already said more than enough to prove the impossibility, in the very nature of things, of England competing with Scotland, in rivers, with the smallest chance of success. There, for instance, is the Thames, as it is called, a very respectable river in its way, and at London more than respectable, imposing; but it is a river of very hum ble origin. We forget the number of locks between Oxford and Windsor; but the fall from source to sea is nothing to that of the Spey or the Dee, and a hundred other rivers in Scotland of high birth. The north of England, to be sure, is tolerably mountainous, which it owes entirely to its vicinity to Scotland; but then, the streams-rivers there are none. -have very short courses, and before they can gather great bulk, are drowned in lakes. On issuing from them, which some do in good condition for a race, in about some halfdozen or dozen miles, they are worse off than ever, and are lost in the sea. Floods, therefore, in the flat districts of England, are too diffusive to be forcible, and seldom carry off any objects capable of offering a stouter resistance than haycocks; while, in the hilly or mountainous districts, their style is too concise, and after much rumbling among stones, "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,"

We must not anticipate any of the many admirable things about Rivers in Spate, with which it will be at once our duty and our delight to adorn the body of this article, but content ourselves for the present, with remarking, in an enlightened spirit of nationality, how immeasurably superior are our rivers in Scotland to those in England. The truth is, that the scenery of this the northern part of the Island, is almost as much finer than that of the southern, as the character of its inhabitants is finer than that of those people unfortunately born on the other side of the Tweed. England, with the exception of Sir Isaac Newton, and some score or so of first-rate mathematicians and astronomers, has produced few men of eminence in physical science, whereas Scotland has produced such numbers, that were we to write down all their names, the illustrious list would be as long as a Petition to Parliament. In Mental philosophy again, if you except Bacon, Locke, and about a dozen others, England would have some difficulty, we suspect, in pointing to a single great name; while Scotland could easily put her finger on a shoal of writers who have all swam in the depths of metaphysics. In Poetry, setting aside. Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and others, England is poor indeed; while Scotland, it is acknowledged by her bitterest enemies, can shew a Poet in every year of her history, each month indeed down to the present continuing to add a star to the constellation. All the great orators, statesmen, and warriors of Britain, with a few exceptions, have, in like manner, been Scotchmen. These

we dream ourselves away into the heart of that choral anthem. Woe to the "wee bourracks o' houses," bigged on the holm-lands! Bridges! that have felt the ice-flaws of a thousand winters rebounding from your abutments, as from cliff to cliff you spanned the racing thunder, this night will be your last! Your key-stones shall be loosened, and your arches, as at the springing of a mine, heaved up into the air by the resistless waters. There is no shrieking of kelpies. That was but a passionless superstition. But there is shrieking-of widows and of orphans-and of love strong as death, stifled and strangled in the flood that all night long is sweeping corpses and carcasses to the sea.

But it is high time to shut our ears and our eyes to this description. It is getting painfully pathetic; and we had intended, and do still intend, that this shall be an amusing article. To secure its being so, we turn to Sir Thomas Lauder Dick without further preface. Sir Thomas is a man of taste and feeling-nay, of genius and science-and is well known, or at least deserves to be so, both in the scientific and literary world, by various works of very great merit. His paper, in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on the Parallel Roads in Glenroy, is most ingenious and satisfactory; and his two romances, "Lochandu," and the " Wolf of Badenoch," are full of excellent character, incident, and description. But neither the one nor the other is to us nearly so interesting as the volume which we now introduce to the public. It is worth a gross of fashionable novels, and twenty Tours. Sir Thomas tells a pathetic, or a hu morous story admirably, and many such are scattered over these 400 pages. He looks at nature with a painter's and a poet's eye, and de scribes her well both with pen and pencil. His heart, too, is as warm as his imagination; and as the scenes of suffering he brings before us were real, he awakens all our most tender and generous sympathies, by the earnestness and sincerity of his own; so that his book, we doubt not, will inspire many of his readers to contribute by their charity to the relief of the distress brought on many hundred poor people by the floods that swept away their "little all," and left them

nothing but endurance and resignation. But we are in danger of falling again into the pathetic-the sin, indeed, which most easily besets us, but which, in this case, may, we trust, be forgiven for sake of our subscription. Reader! gentle and generous! perhaps, after reading our article, you will unclasp with your slight fair fingers that pretty silk purse (not made out of a sow's ear,) and set apart a coin-mayhap a sovereign-or be it but a crown-sweet sister of charity-for behoof of some aged crone now sitting blind in her shieling, or some bright-eyed lassie singing in the sunshine at the door, built now on some knoll safe from the river that, last autumn, made the one a widow, and the other an orphan.

Many of our readers, we dare say, read accounts in the newspapers of Great Floods during August last year in the Province of Moray. But newspaper accounts of calamities are generally considered apocryphal, except they record the bite of a mad dog-each strange tale of hydrophobia being held devoutly true by the Reading Public. Sir Thomas Lauder Dick has spared no pains in collecting all the most interesting circumstances of that unexampled Flood, many of them bordering so closely upon the marvellous, that he acknowledges he might have felt some difficulty in reporting them, had they not, in every instance, been well vouched. The extent of ground carried off or destroyed in particular places, the various items of miscelfaneous damage, and the sums of money at which the various losses are estimated, are stated from returns made after the survey by able and responsible men, whose valuations were exclusive of all such injuries as might affect mere taste, or any thing not usually measured by money. The sums specified, Sir Thomas says, are rather under than above the truth. For no surveyor could expect to gain favour in the eyes of his employer by exaggerating his misfortunes; and no proprietor would consider it his interest to promulgate an extravagant account of the deterioration of his estate; while, on the other hand, very potent reasons may exist for country gentlemen putting the best possible face

on the state of their affairs. As the limited nature of his work necessarily compelled him to pass over all the lesser, though more numerous items of destruction, nothing approaching to any just estimate of the grand total can possibly be formed. But when we consider that the injuries done to the estates of Lord Seaforth are estimated at thirty thousand pounds, to those of Mr Macpherson Grant at eight thousand,-to those of Mr Cumming Gordon at five thousand, to those of Sir Thomas Dick at twelve hundred, (we think,) and to the estates of many other gentlemen in like proportion; to which is to be added all the loss of crops and steadings-along so many strathsthe sum-total of the loss must indeed have been enormous.

The deluge of rain that produced the flood of the 3d and 4th of August, 1829, fell chiefly on the Monadhleadh mountains, rising between the south-eastern parts of Lochness, and Kingussie in Badenoch, and on that part of the Grampian range forming the somewhat independent group of the Cairngorums. The heat in the province of Moray, during the months of May, June, and July, had been unusually great; and in the earlier part of that period, the drought so excessive, as to kill many of the recently planted shrubs and trees. As the season advanced, the fluctuations of the barometer became very remarkable; but they were not followed by the usual alternations of weather. It often followed that the results were precisely the reverse of its prognostications, and observers of the instrument began to lose all confidence in it. These apparent derangements arose, Sir Thomas Dick remarks, from electrical changes in the atmosphere. The Aurora Borealis appeared with uncommon brilliancy about the beginning of July, and was frequently seen afterwards, being generally accompanied by windy and unsteady weather, the continued drought having been sometimes interrupted during the previous months by sudden falls of rain partaking of the character of waterspouts. One of these occurred on Sunday the 12th of July, at Keanlochluichart, a little Highland hamlet at the head of the lake of that name, in the parish of Contin, in Ross-shire. A man, who had taken shelter under a

bridge, suddenly beheld a moving mountain of soil, stones, and trees coming down the deep course of the stream. He had just time to leave his stance before it reached the bridge, overthrew it in a moment, and devastated the plain bordering the lake. All the grown-up people of the hamlet were at church, but the children, who were playing at home, were miraculously preserved by escaping to a hillock before the river reached the spot. The people coming from church were, by the fall of the bridges, caught between two impassable torrents, and had barely time to save their lives by crowding to an elevated spot, where they remained till the waters subsided. The whole fury of the flood rushed directly against their devoted houses; and these, and every thing they contained, were at once annihilated, as well as their crops, together with the very soil they grew on; and after the debacle had passed away, the course of the river ran through the ruined hearths of this so recently happy a community. This waterspout did not extend beyond two miles on each side of the village, which led, continues Sir Thomas, these simple people to consider their calamity as a visitation of Providence for their landlord's vote in Parliament in favour of Catholic Emancipation.

Sir Thomas has a very plausible theory to account for the great floods of the 3d and 4th of August. The previous prevalence of westerly winds had produced a gradual accumulation of vapour somewhere to the north of our island, and the column being suddenly impelled by a strong north-easterly blast, it was driven towards the southwest, its right flank almost sweeping the Caithness and Sunderland coasts, until, rushing up and across the Moray Frith, it was attracted by the lofty mountains of the Monadh-leadh range, and discharged its torrents into the Nairn, the Findhorn, the Spey, the Lossie, the Deveron, the Don, and the Dee, and their various tributaries. Certain it is, that these and other rivers were all more or less affected by the flood exactly in proportion as they were more or less connected with those mountains. That part of the Spey which is above the line marked by Sir Thomas was hardly swollen at all; while below Kingussie,

it and all its tributaries were elevated to an unexampled height. Some persons could not believe, looking at the floods, that they could have been produced by merely twenty-four hours' rain. But sure, such rains were never seen; for Mr Murdoch,gardener to the Duke of Gordon, at Huntly Lodge, ascertained that 33 inches of rain fell between five o'clock of the morning of the 3d, and five o'clock of the morning of the 4th of August; that is to say, that, taking the average of the years from 1821 to 1828 inclusive, about one-sixth part of our annual allowance of rain fell within those twenty-four hours! This, too, was at a great distance from the mountains-so that among them the rain must have been like one of the floods, which was described by one of the sufferers, from its fury, as "just perfeckly ridiculous."

On the 27th of July, there was what Sir Thomas calls 66 an appendix flood," Each of the four principal rivers, the Nairn, the Findhorn, the Spey, and the Dee, had an appendix flood. But these appendices did not, like those of Dr Parr to his Spital sermon-to his sermon on education —and to the character of Fox by Philopatris Varvicencis, transcend in magnitude the very original performances to which they severally were appended. The Nairn seems to have been more ambitious in his appendix than any of his brethren. The Findhorn had so completely exhausted the subject in his first discourse, that he had but little new matter to bring forward on the 27th. The Spey had so triumphantly removed all obstacles in his great appearance on the 4th, that on the 27th it was comparatively plain sailing; and as for the Dee, there was little left for him to do, but to sweep away the bridge and harbour of Aberdeen, which would have been not only very wicked, but foolish, and little better than cutting his own throat. We shall therefore have small and seldom occasion to refer to the appendices, and shall confine ourselves to the main current of the great body of the discourses.

The united line of the rivers, whose devastations Sir Thomas undertakes to describe, cannot be less in extent than from 500 to 600 miles. Having visited the greater part of the flood

ed districts in person, he writes about them very much from his own observation, aided by the ample oral and written information obtained from persons of intelligence; and often he brings forward the witnesses to tell in their own words their own story. The narrative, therefore, is often enlivened by dramatic scenes, equal in interest to the best in Sir Walter's novels.

Let us begin with the river NAIRN, and dismiss him in not many words. He is, in his upper story, of a fine bold Highland character, and runs through a straight line of country, of somewhat more than 30 miles in extent, but of much longer course in its sinuosities; and he drains off the waters from a small part of the Monadh-leadh group. He rushed from his mountains, with his tail, on the morning of the 4th, and being armed with stones and gravel, committed sad havoc on many farms, especially on that of the Mains of Aberarder. Seven hands were able to reap, in one day, all that remained there of a crop, for which L.150 of rent was payable. He then swept away the fulling-mill of Faillie, with all its heavy machinery, down to Cantray, nine miles below, whence it was with much labour brought back to its Highland home; but the Nairn, in the flood of the 27th, bore it away on a second expedition, and landed it at Kilravoch, after a voyage of eleven miles. Our friend then amused himself with sweeping away two bridges on the parliamentary line of road, one at Dunmaglass, and the other of two arches over the burn of Aultranagh. He then fell foul of the mill of Clara, which he utterly demolished. But it was rebuilt with all possible expedition, so as to be ready for him on the 27th, when he again came down in great fury, and swept it off, we suppose, to the sea. On the estate of Cantray, the villain did damage to the tune of L.1200inundating the garden of the mansion-house, ruining utterly the houses of the gardener and miller, and sweeping away about fifteen acres of valuable land. He then attacked the bridge of Holm, and so shook the handsome arch of 55 feet span, that on the 27th he had but to give it a shove with his shoulder, and down it went like a sack. Here the Nairų