Spirit of Chambers's Journal

By the recommendation of a number of their friends and agents, MESSRS CHAMBERS have been induced to reprint a selection of the principal original articles of their JOURNAL; in o...

Such are the excuses which love suggests to reason, and which the reason of lovers easily accepts; while those who are neither youthful nor in love wonder at the hallucination o...

At sight of our heroine, most of these gallants stood still in admiration, and one of them, with the trained assurance of a rake, observing her to be beautiful, a stranger, and...

Bruntfield left a widow and three infant sons. The lady of Craighouse had been an intimate of the unfortunate Mary from her early years; was educated with her in France, in the...

The appearance of the city, on this dreadful afternoon, was very remarkable, and such as we hope it will never again exhibit. All the streets to the west of St Giles’s were crow...

That fine old spacious alley was found to be, on the present occasion, as splendid as it was possible for any close in Auld Reekie to be, under the double advantages of fashion...

During the spring months which elapse before the day of removal, you live in a state of dreamy bliss respecting your new house. Almost every fine morning you rise about seven fo...

The existence of a _victim_ is the most precarious thing, perhaps, in the world. He is a man with no continuing dinner-place. He dines, as the poor old Earl of Findlater used to...

The difficulty of starting subjects of conversation, as well as the difficulty of sustaining them, is often as observable when two acquaintances meet on the street, as when a ro...

For a girl of ten years of age, Margaret Swinton was possessed of much good sense and solidity of character. She heard herself doomed to a solitary confinement of six hours with...

“No, never, my angel!” cried he, “can I forget that I have seen and loved you. I might sleep for ages; and, if I awakened at all, it would be with your image imprinted as strong...

The fortune of Miss Farney was not exactly of the kind that suited Mr Dempster’s views. It was only payable after the death of her father. Mr Dempster, therefore, saw it to be n...

In the course of a ramble through the western part of Fife, I descended one evening upon the ancient burgh of Culross, which is situated on a low stripe of land beside the sea-s...

In forming this purpose, Bruce felt entirely like a doomed man. He recollected the prediction of the old woman at Culross Abbey, which had always appeared to him, somehow, as im...

Nothing is more common in the middle ranks of life than to find housewives taking what may be called _fits of thrift_. Though sensible women in their way, excellent advisers and...

This revolution was at first productive of a great increase of comfort in the village, without materially altering the primeval virtues of its inhabitants. Old men began to lay...

Amidst the public calamity, one of a most grievous nature overtook the father of our heroine. The affairs of the laird, which had long been desperately out of order, and for som...

Before three in the afternoon, the whole of your furniture, broken and whole, has been thrust, higglety-pigglety, into your new house, where you find all things in the most chao...

Mrs Smiles, a respectable widow, lived with her five daughters in a third floor in —— Street. Thither we marched, with a hope, undiminished by the two preceding disappointments,...

My _second_ fact is more hypothetical, but not less obvious to our understanding. It is an old proverbial expression, that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Now, in this s...

After all, as in every matter arising from the affairs of this world, a great deal of our happiness, so far as it is concerned by the system of recognition, lies with ourselves....

The first night was spent in a very uncomfortable manner. To a day of intense heat succeeded a cold dewy night, which struck the limbs of the unprotected settlers with such seve...

It will always be remembered that there are different kinds of tea, and that some are more salutary than others. Green tea ought by all means to be avoided by persons of weak ne...

In the same way, almost all of us have kinsfolk a little higher in the scale than ourselves, or whom we think so—it is all one. Now, it is quite amazing how accurate our genealo...

There is hardly any thing more common in the country than to hear men spoken of who originally, or at some period of their lives, were rich, but were ruined by “_security_”—that...

SELF-DENIAL.—Perhaps among all the qualifications which, in a combined form, lead to fortune, none is more absolutely indispensable than this. A man may have talent, may have ap...

The rival of this unsuccessful solicitor of custom was a short, squat man, fair-haired and ruddy. He came in with a hearty salutation, and set down his pack in some corner, wher...

The population of a large town is perpetually receiving accessions from the country—not for the purpose of increasing the aggregate of inhabitants, but to supply the waste of ex...

“There! I declare—there!” cried the owner of the missing property; “my trunk is still lying down yonder upon the sands. Don’t you see it? The sea, I declare, is just about reach...