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street, then clanging with the voice of oyster-women and the bells of pyemen, for it had, as his guide assured him, just "chappit eight upon the Tron." It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry, and of licence, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groupes, offers, by night especially, a spectacle, which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect upon the imagination. The extraordinary height of the houses was marked by lights, which, glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended so high among the attics, that they seemed at length to twinkle in the middle sky. This coup d'œuil, which still subsists in a certain degree, was then more striking, owing to the uninterrupted range of buildings on each side, which, broken only at the space where the North Bridge joins the main street,