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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Edinburgh, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Edinburgh
+ Picturesque Notes
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 5, 2010 [eBook #382]
+[This file was first posted on February 12, 1995]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDINBURGH***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1903 Seeley & Co. Ltd. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+ EDINBURGH
+
+
+ _Picturesque Notes_
+ _by_
+ Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ _People’s Edition_.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ LONDON
+ SEELEY & CO. LTD., 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
+ 1903
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
+
+
+The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
+estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
+more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for
+noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
+far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
+at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into
+the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
+you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
+
+But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
+climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
+that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of
+the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from
+the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty
+and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the
+spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds
+and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.
+For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark
+weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be
+found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire
+angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles
+are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New
+Town with the Old—that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern
+temple of the winds—and watch the trains smoking out from under them and
+vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the
+passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the
+last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And yet the
+place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will,
+they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take
+a pride in their old home.
+
+[Picture: Gate of Holyrood] Venice, it has been said, differs from
+another cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The rest may have
+admirers; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. And,
+indeed, even by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a
+similar sense. These like her for many reasons, not any one of which is
+satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically, if you will, and
+somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is
+romantic in the narrowest meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she
+is not so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic,
+and all the more so since she has set herself off with some Greek airs,
+and erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, and above all, she
+is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth
+of Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a workman’s quarter and among
+breweries and gas works. It is a house of many memories. Great people
+of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their
+stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing
+has lasted deep into the night,—murder has been done in its chambers.
+There Prince Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant
+manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these
+things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king’s crown itself is
+shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these
+charges. For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for
+tourists and a museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold
+the palace reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a
+kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
+clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are
+lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own
+houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
+a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
+Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
+metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
+whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
+flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
+and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
+citadel overhead; you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade;
+and at night after the early winter even-fall, and in the morning before
+the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound
+of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the
+scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps the
+trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
+citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser
+below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic
+by-standers. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets
+with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of
+Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
+before two-score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile
+every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the
+streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going,
+fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the springtime—or say
+one morning rather, at the peep of day—late folk may hear voices of many
+men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High
+Street; and a little after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many
+men singing a psalm in unison from another church on the opposite side of
+the way. There will be something in the words above the dew of Hermon,
+and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the
+late folk will tell themselves that all this singing denotes the
+conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments—the parliaments of
+Churches which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially
+like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
+
+Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
+between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
+places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
+In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature—a
+Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains,
+carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its war-like
+shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
+From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
+the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
+themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
+beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
+with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the breeze at
+its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
+architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
+busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
+the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
+globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
+are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
+all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur’s Seat look
+down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
+Nature may look down the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
+indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a
+strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
+capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight
+clothe the eternal rock and yesterday’s imitation portico; and as the
+soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
+distinctness—or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all
+these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along
+the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across the
+valley—the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of nature in
+the most intimate sense; that this profusion of eccentricities, this
+dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a
+city in the world of every-day reality, connected by railway and
+telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens
+of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and have sold
+their immortal portion to a daily paper. By all the canons of romance,
+the place demands to be half deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we
+might admit in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few
+gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these citizens with their
+cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key.
+Chartered tourists, they make free with historic localities, and rear
+their young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human
+indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and
+conscious moral rectitude, and with a little air of possession that
+verges on the absurd, is not the least striking feature of the place.
+{10}
+
+And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
+centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in
+the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a
+beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles,
+not only on Greenside, or by the King’s Stables, where set tournaments
+were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal
+presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in
+the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated
+with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace
+John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern democracy. In the
+town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows’ nests
+among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James
+VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
+goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the
+Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal
+fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat
+day and night with ‘tearful psalmns’ to see Edinburgh consumed with fire
+from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There, in the Grass-market,
+stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, offered up the often unnecessary, but
+not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell
+to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the
+roll of drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his
+thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses’
+tails—a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the
+head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered
+Scotland to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There
+Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few
+years afterwards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed
+and well-reputed citizen; and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns
+came from the plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief and
+artificial letters. There, when the great exodus was made across the
+valley, and the New Town began to spread abroad its draughty
+parallelograms, and rear its long frontage on the opposing hill, there
+was such a flitting, such a change of domicile and dweller, as was never
+excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler succeeded the earl; the
+beggar ensconced himself by the judge’s chimney; what had been a palace
+was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions were so parcelled out
+among the least and lowest in society, that the hearthstone of the old
+proprietor was thought large enough to be partitioned off into a bedroom
+by the new.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. OLD TOWN—THE LANDS.
+
+
+The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
+picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
+most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
+adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
+whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
+upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
+on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
+situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
+somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
+bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
+Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
+city; for there the two re-act in a picturesque sense, and the one is the
+making of the other.
+
+The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
+protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
+fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
+towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and more
+gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle over-tops the whole
+city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on
+every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet
+country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
+battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
+subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
+from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
+Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
+after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
+building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
+it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same
+field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
+expressed in these two words.
+
+ [Picture: Cowfeeder Row and Head of West Port]
+
+Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
+though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
+sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
+regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in
+extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
+wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
+thorough—fares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
+story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour’s shoulder, as in some Black
+Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
+a vertical direction. The tallest of these _lands_, as they are locally
+termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
+uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
+building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
+natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
+gazer’s head, planted on the steep hill-side; as for the garret, all the
+furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to
+the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
+Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
+shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
+broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
+spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
+reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea or of
+flowering lilacs in the spring.
+
+It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
+improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a
+conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
+qualities we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
+through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
+away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
+slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
+what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
+and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
+hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
+pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
+from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you see
+a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few
+crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court where the
+children are at play and the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and
+perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs. Here, in the
+narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still erect, with
+some insignia of its former state—some scutcheon, some holy or courageous
+motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and
+well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head
+of a slatternly woman from the countess’s window. The Bedouins camp
+within Pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the
+rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were
+plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even
+in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the windows, and the
+pavements are encumbered with loiterers.
+
+ [Picture: Old Bow-Head, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh]
+
+These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
+workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
+and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
+different order—skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot children;
+big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel
+petticoat and short tartan shawl; among these, a few surpervising
+constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
+higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
+brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
+mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
+under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
+Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
+is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
+heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
+accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
+some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
+before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure
+in broad-cloth of the best. For three years he kept falling—grease
+coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing
+and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant and
+grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was standing
+at the mouth of an entry with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk,
+and his old black raiment daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear
+him laugh. There was something heart-breaking in this gradual declension
+at so advanced an age; you would have thought a man of sixty out of the
+reach of these calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by
+that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and
+honourably into the grave.
+
+One of the earliest marks of these _dégringolades_ is, that the victim
+begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
+High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
+type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
+door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window.
+The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played
+the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave him so
+pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
+
+[Picture: High Street] It is true that the over-population was at least
+as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-days some
+customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately
+pretermitted. But an aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an
+aggregation of the reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and
+divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the
+past—perhaps the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china
+punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks’ feathers
+on the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight.
+That is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
+repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
+room; the _land_ would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
+In one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together; and, perhaps,
+not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
+given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
+everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
+sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
+death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
+Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
+to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
+a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
+hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
+the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
+such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
+circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
+Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
+Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
+there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
+way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
+the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
+grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
+the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
+from another in the twinkling of an eye.
+
+One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the
+policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
+upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
+light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
+seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
+interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on
+their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself
+faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to
+the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its timepieces,
+like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy
+altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an
+imaginative measure of the disproportion between the quantity of living
+flesh and the trifling walls that separated and contained it.
+
+There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
+and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in the High Street. The building
+had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up
+so that the scavenger’s barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations
+sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human
+bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair; some
+had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them
+again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a
+Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar
+and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock was felt
+far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid
+into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more dismally over
+Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest, and,
+like Samson, by pulling down one roof, destroyed many a home. None who
+saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered,
+there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the
+hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted
+over the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life
+of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The
+_land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much! Far in the country,
+people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between
+the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in
+Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim
+with truth: ‘The house that I was born in fell last night!’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.
+
+
+Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precincts of St.
+Giles’s Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
+be unrecognisable; the _Krames_ are all gone, not a shop is left to
+shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
+architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and
+pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles’s must have had in former days a
+rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was
+bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most
+overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a
+free fair-way left along the High Street with an open space on either
+side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the
+_lands_, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.
+
+[Picture: The Spire of St. Giles’s] There is a silly story of a
+subterranean passage between the Castle and Holyrood, and a bold Highland
+piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made his entrance by
+the upper end, playing a strathspey; the curious footed it after him down
+the street, following his descent by the sound of the chanter from below;
+until all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles’s, the music came
+abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault with
+hands uplifted. Whether he was choked with gases, or perished in a quag,
+or was removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt; but the
+piper has never again been seen or heard of from that day to this.
+Perhaps he wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some
+day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit
+upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance
+besides St. Giles’s, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending
+from the bowels of the earth below their horses’ feet.
+
+But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of masonry
+has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the shape
+of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the
+Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book.
+The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more _squalor carceris_
+for merry debtors, no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker;
+but the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail.
+Nor is this the only memorial that the pavement keeps of former days.
+The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles’s Church,
+running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of the present
+Parliament House. It has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the
+Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its history, I know only one
+token that remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily underfoot by
+advocates, two letters and a date mark the resting-place of the man who
+made Scotland over again in his own image, the indefatigable,
+undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the church that so
+often echoed to his preaching.
+
+Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made
+of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his backed
+turned, and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
+dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone
+in the Close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
+one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the
+Parliament House, enclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe
+their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles’s
+buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley
+passengers; but the stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the
+Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a
+patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit,
+some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you
+would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The
+fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon trial
+for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the gallery was
+found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there
+will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. Once in a while,
+too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant nods,
+sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent; and at certain
+regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.
+
+The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish
+history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in
+1688, ‘all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood
+in a cloud in the Parliament Close:’ poor episcopal personages who were
+done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians
+standing by, who would have ‘rejoiced more than in great sums’ to be at
+their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads
+together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but
+one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the _boots_, and they
+had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the ‘woeful
+Union,’ it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from
+the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as
+Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing
+stones at the author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as he looked out of window.
+
+ [Picture: John Knox’s House in the High Street]
+
+One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his _trials_
+(examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament
+Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small
+wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable
+to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
+civilisation than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all
+uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
+fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this
+low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles’s bell told
+the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the
+strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
+sick at heart.
+
+A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof, hung
+with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows of
+painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This is the _Salle des
+pas perdus_ of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom, idle
+youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or in
+pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum of
+talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh cause
+and call upon the names of those concerned. Intelligent men have been
+walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of business or a
+shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps be made the
+Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory.
+There is nothing required, you would say, but a little patience and a
+taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed
+the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a
+glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a
+man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest
+of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem
+so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the
+experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most
+arduous form of idleness.
+
+More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges of the First Appeal
+sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by three or
+four. Here, you may see Scott’s place within the bar, where he wrote
+many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial proceeding. You
+will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their Lordships do not
+altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. The
+broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but the courts
+still retain a certain national flavour. We have a solemn enjoyable way
+of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and relish and
+digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must be
+rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after judge must utter
+forth his _obiter dicta_ to delighted brethren.
+
+Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than
+three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean,
+full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most studious-looking
+wigs fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the very place where the
+old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the Parliament House is built
+upon a slope, although it presents only one story to the north, it
+measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after range of
+vaults extend below the libraries. Few places are more characteristic of
+this hilly capital. You descend one stone stair after another, and
+wander, by the flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars. Now,
+you pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, the
+interminable pattering of legal feet. Now, you come upon a strong door
+with a wicket: on the other side are the cells of the police office and
+the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the Justiciary Court.
+Many a foot that has gone up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in
+the descent. Many a man’s life has been argued away from him during long
+hours in the court above. But just now that tragic stage is empty and
+silent like a church on a week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and
+nothing moving but the sunbeams on the wall. A little farther and you
+strike upon a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with
+_productions_ from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons,
+poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a shot-hole through the panel,
+behind which a man fell dead. I cannot fancy why they should preserve
+them unless it were against the Judgment Day. At length, as you continue
+to descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight and hear a jostling,
+whispering noise ahead; next moment you turn a corner, and there, in a
+whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt industriously turning on its
+wheels. You would think the engine had grown there of its own accord,
+like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults
+from end to end with its mysterious labours. In truth, it is only some
+gear of the steam ventilator; and you will find the engineers at hand,
+and may step out of their door into the sunlight. For all this while,
+you have not been descending towards the earth’s centre, but only to the
+bottom of the hill and the foundations of the Parliament House; low down,
+to be sure, but still under the open heaven and in a field of grass. The
+daylight shines garishly on the back windows of the Irish quarter; on
+broken shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a
+crumbling human pig-sty fit for human pigs. There are few signs of life,
+besides a scanty washing or a face at a window: the dwellers are abroad,
+but they will return at night and stagger to their pallets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. LEGENDS.
+
+
+The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its
+associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has
+happened amongst congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
+places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property of
+their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
+seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
+call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with
+propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the _Lady of the Lake_
+for Ben Venue, the _Heart of Midlothian_ for Edinburgh, and the _Pirate_,
+so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for the desolate
+islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run of mankind
+have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as delicate as
+that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only forget what is
+unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest, a body of
+tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and high-flying
+garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages in the town’s
+adventures, and chill their marrow with winter’s tales about the fire:
+tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic, not only of the
+old life, but of the very constitution of built nature in that part, and
+singularly well qualified to add horror to horror, when the wind pipes
+around the tall _lands_, and hoots adown arched passages, and the
+far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering and flaring in the
+gusts.
+
+[Picture: The Canongate] Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter,
+stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his blood within a step or
+two of the crowded High Street. There, people hush their voices over
+Burke and Hare; over drugs and violated graves, and the resurrection-men
+smothering their victims with their knees. Here, again, the fame of
+Deacon Brodie is kept piously fresh. A great man in his day was the
+Deacon; well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a
+cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song with taste. Many a citizen
+was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper, and dismissed him with regret
+at a timeous hour, who would have been vastly disconcerted had he known
+how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned. Many stories are told
+of this redoubtable Edinburgh burglar, but the one I have in my mind most
+vividly gives the key of all the rest. A friend of Brodie’s, nested some
+way towards heaven in one of these great _lands_, had told him of a
+projected visit to the country, and afterwards, detained by some affairs,
+put it off and stayed the night in town. The good man had lain some time
+awake; it was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly
+there came a creak, a jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed
+and up to a false window which looked upon another room, and there, by
+the glimmer of a thieves’ lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a
+mask. It is characteristic of the town and the town’s manners that this
+little episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
+elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
+cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
+into the air off his own greatly-improved gallows drop, brought the
+career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind’s eye,
+he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
+from a magistrate’s supper-room to a thieves’ ken, and pickeering among
+the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
+
+ [Picture: Planestones Close, Canongate]
+
+Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
+great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
+memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
+and sudden, and what we now call ‘stamping out contagion’ was carried on
+with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
+St. Andrew’s cross on back and breast, and a white cloth carried before
+them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man’s
+justice to the fear of God’s visitation. The dead they buried on the
+Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if
+they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged
+and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed,
+furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of
+the story is about such houses. Two generations back they still stood
+dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
+schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off; for within, it
+was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
+forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
+next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
+would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
+a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
+neglect.
+
+And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
+demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
+and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
+marvellous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
+among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. ‘He was a tall,
+black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
+and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
+never went without his staff.’ How it came about that Angelical Thomas
+was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
+hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
+furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world
+shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our intention. At
+least, it is suitable enough that out of this superstitious city some
+such example should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower of
+dark and vehement religion. And at least the facts struck the public
+fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of myths. It would appear
+that the Major’s staff went upon his errands, and even ran before him
+with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females, ‘stentoriously laughing
+and gaping with tehees of laughter’ at unseasonable hours of night and
+morning, haunted the purlieus of his abode. His house fell under such a
+load of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until municipal
+improvement levelled the structure to the ground. And my father has
+often been told in the nursery how the devil’s coach, drawn by six
+coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the West
+Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major through the glasses.
+
+Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
+it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
+something worse—a mere yesterday’s fiction. But it is a story of some
+vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
+inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been double-bedded;
+and it may have been of some dimensions: but when all is said, it was a
+single room. Here our two spinsters fell out—on some point of
+controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that there was
+never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that day forward.
+You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether from lack of
+means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep house
+together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor separated
+their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace, so that
+each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating the
+territory of the other. So, for years, they coexisted in a hateful
+silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
+to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
+hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
+uglier spectacle than these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is
+a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture—he had a
+Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
+horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
+hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud
+for each other’s penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted
+petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous evening; now
+sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping
+far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths where they had
+wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon them and
+prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and their
+heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in enmity with
+years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach of
+death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be overstepped for
+ever.
+
+Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race—the most
+perverse and melancholy in man’s annals—this will seem only a figure of
+much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
+Forth—a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for a
+caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience sake up here
+in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments
+of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear each other
+singing psalms across the street. There is but a street between them in
+space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet there they sit,
+enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other’s growth in
+grace. It would be well if there were no more than two; but the sects in
+Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly
+drawn, and run through the midst of many private homes. Edinburgh is a
+city of churches, as though it were a place of pilgrimage. You will see
+four within a stone-cast at the head of the West Bow. Some are crowded
+to the doors; some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find
+new ones in the building. Hence that surprising clamour of church bells
+that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath morning from Trinity and the
+sea-skirts to Morningside on the borders of the hills. I have heard the
+chimes of Oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning, and
+beautiful it was to hear. But in Edinburgh all manner of loud bells
+join, or rather disjoin, in one swelling, brutal babblement of noise.
+Now one overtakes another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all
+strike on the pained tympanum at the same punctual instant of time, and
+make together a dismal chord of discord; and now for a second all seem to
+have conspired to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars
+in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a
+harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies,
+calling on every separate conventicler to put up a protest, each in his
+own synagogue, against ‘right-hand extremes and left-hand defections.’
+And surely there are few worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and
+few more deplorable defections than this disloyalty to Christian love.
+Shakespeare wrote a comedy of ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ The Scottish
+nation made a fantastic tragedy on the same subject. And it is for the
+success of this remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every
+Sabbath morning on the hills above the Forth. How many of them might
+rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be
+demolished and turned once more into useful building material, if people
+who think almost exactly the same thoughts about religion would
+condescend to worship God under the same roof! But there are the chalk
+lines. And which is to pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. GREYFRIARS.
+
+
+It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
+and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an antiquity
+in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must
+have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their gardens were
+situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the tallest of the castle
+crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of
+view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how
+strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is of an irregular
+shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars stands on the level at
+the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there, and the ground falls by
+terrace and steep slope towards the north. The open shows many slabs and
+table tombstones; and all round the margin, the place is girt by an array
+of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned.
+
+Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong to the heroic order of
+graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the
+matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake
+the emblems of time and the great change; and even around country
+churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls, and crossbones,
+and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. Every
+mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death, and
+loved to put its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was
+brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer was seized
+upon to be a text. The classical examples of this art are in Greyfriars.
+In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of a
+very elegant proportion by contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is
+not so apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look with a
+smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes—some crawling endwise up the
+shaft of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels’ trumpets—on the
+emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all
+the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth
+their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it
+is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by
+the merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the
+original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of them in
+this quiet enclosure, is serious to the point of melancholy.
+
+Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their
+backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the
+dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb;
+there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a
+chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
+vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way
+into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale
+goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of
+the enclosure, which lies apart from the town’s traffic, serves to
+accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children
+scattering crumbs to feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or
+washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a
+clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips
+over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing
+else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the
+attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place.
+
+ [Picture: Greyfriars]
+
+Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as
+many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the Master
+Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed
+upon strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with the saints, as we may
+hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I confess the
+spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and
+raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the
+spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the
+colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from
+a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world’s beauty
+relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
+
+I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day; the grass
+was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging out
+their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
+weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-digger, and a
+friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after
+another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the
+wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood. In
+one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very
+realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and
+holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
+pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct,
+like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new
+dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain
+dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire
+indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a
+vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and
+cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered thigh
+bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family with
+whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
+acquaintances. ‘This’ll be Miss Marg’et’s,’ said he, giving the bone a
+friendly kick. ‘The auld ---!’ I have always an uncomfortable feeling
+in a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best
+forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
+People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a
+melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in
+the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
+to think, is the cynical jeer, _cras tibi_. That, if anything, will stop
+the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the war
+triumphantly into the enemy’s camp.
+
+Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
+house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
+the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the resurrection
+man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a-head, used to sit
+thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the
+green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly
+finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken refuge in
+a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted mausoleum
+of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the
+Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
+toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot’s Hospital boy once
+harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
+Greyfriars—a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder’s Day, you
+may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
+Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
+the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
+food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
+abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
+and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
+emulating him in courage. When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his
+body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; some time or other
+the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments
+of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the
+Lord Advocate’s mausoleum and challenge him to appear. ‘Bluidy
+Mackingie, come oot if ye dar’!’ sang the fool-hardy urchins. But Sir
+George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
+toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
+intolerantly helped to slay.
+
+[Picture: The Grassmarket] For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in
+one of its own inscriptions—an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed
+a critical eye—is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom
+Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the
+Covenant was signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the
+church-yard that extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell
+Bridge—fed on bread and water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant
+marksmen—lay five months looking for the scaffold or the plantations.
+And while the good work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in
+Greyfriars might have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned
+the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner
+farthest from Sir George, there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth
+Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There
+is no moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co’monell; there
+is not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so
+much as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American
+plantations; but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such
+things interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on
+earth as well as Julius Cæsar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I
+know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn
+how some of them—or some part of some of them—found their way at length
+to such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
+their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
+the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but
+leave the rest in Patrick Walker’s language and orthography:—
+
+ ‘The never to be forgotten Mr. _James Renwick_ told me, that he was
+ Witness to their Public Murder at the _Gallowlee_, between _Leith_
+ and _Edinburgh_, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
+ Five Heads, with _Patrick Foreman’s_ Right Hand: Their Bodies were
+ all buried at the Gallows Foot; their Heads, with _Patrick’s_ Hand,
+ were brought and put upon five Pikes on the _Pleasaunce-Port_. . . .
+ Mr. _Renwick_ told me also that it was the first public Action that
+ his Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies,
+ and carried them to the West Churchyard of _Edinburgh_,’—not
+ Greyfriars, this time,—‘and buried them there. Then they came about
+ the City . . . . and took down these Five Heads and that Hand; and
+ Day being come, they went quickly up the _Pleasaunce_; and when they
+ came to _Lauristoun_ Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
+ durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with
+ their Bodies, which they designed; it being present Death, if any of
+ them had been found. _Alexander Tweedie_, a Friend, being with them,
+ who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them
+ in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45
+ Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of _October_ 1681,
+ and found the 7th Day of October 1726. That Piece of Ground lay for
+ some Years unlaboured; and trenching it, the Gardner found them,
+ which affrighted him the Box was consumed. Mr. _Schaw_, the Owner of
+ these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
+ Summer-house: Mr. _Schaw’s_ mother was so kind, as to cut out a
+ Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all
+ had Access to see them. _Alexander Tweedie_, the foresaid Gardner,
+ said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither
+ Gold nor Silver. _Daniel Tweedie_, his Son, came along with me to
+ that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush
+ above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were
+ more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard. . . . Many came’—to
+ see the heads—‘out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many
+ concerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
+ There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day
+ of _October_ 1726, and every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day
+ and Hour, being _Wednesday_, the Day of the Week on which most of
+ them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the Hour
+ that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make a
+ compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the
+ way that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly we kept
+ the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half
+ of it below them, their nether jaws being parted from their Heads;
+ but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the
+ Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his
+ Hammer; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the
+ Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and
+ stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the
+ chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this we
+ refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such
+ Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of
+ such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation: But took the
+ ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east
+ the Back of the Wall, and in at _Bristo-Port_, and down the Way to
+ the Head of the _Cowgate_, and turned up to the Church-yard, where
+ they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest
+ Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and
+ others, that ever I saw together.’
+
+And so there they were at last, in ‘their resting graves.’ So long as
+men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will
+be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
+martyrs’ monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
+in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we
+temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
+ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
+his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us
+walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs’ monument is a
+wholesome, heartsome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon
+it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
+their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker’s, got ‘cleanly
+off the stage.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. NEW TOWN—TOWN AND COUNTRY.
+
+
+It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the
+Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as
+the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be
+said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the
+unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the
+New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly
+picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the
+sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion for
+Paradise: ‘The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind a matter of a point
+free.’ He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are promised
+pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly somewhat
+higher. But there are bright and temperate days—with soft air coming
+from the inland hills, military music sounding bravely from the hollow of
+the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes Street—when I
+have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands in sentiment
+with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has been much tumbled
+round Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more agreeable to witness?
+On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air of festival. It seems
+(I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if it were a trifle too
+good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It has the scenic
+quality that would best set off a life of unthinking, open-air diversion.
+It was meant by nature for the realisation of the society of comic
+operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but towardly, how all
+the world and his wife would flock into these gardens in the cool of the
+evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant drinks, to see the moon
+rise from behind Arthur’s Seat and shine upon the spires and monuments
+and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas! and the next morning the
+rain is splashing on the windows, and the passengers flee along Princes
+Street before the galloping squalls.
+
+ [Picture: The Royal Institution]
+
+It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and
+short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the
+situation. The architect was essentially a town bird, and he laid out
+the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
+alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never lifted his
+eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern
+slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and
+beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the
+houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on
+what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost
+in the ranks; and, in a word, it is too often only from attic-windows, or
+here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond the city
+upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more
+surprising, to come suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a mile
+or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue
+arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.
+
+Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns’s model, once saw a butterfly at the
+Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This
+painted country man, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in
+such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what moral considerations
+a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a fanciful sort of
+way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city does the sight
+of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall
+certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place
+is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch,
+you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you
+turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane:—and behold! you
+are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner,
+and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills. You look down
+an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.
+
+For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one thing;
+it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to overlook
+the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life;
+it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature’s unconcern: that
+he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the Spring
+green brightens in the wood or the field grows black under a moving
+ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connexion, to deplore the
+slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice,
+its dull cars, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people
+are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a
+superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects of vision, not
+only a few yards, but a few miles from where you stand:—think how
+agreeably your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts
+would be diversified, as you walked the Edinburgh streets! For you might
+pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst of the city traffic, and
+perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon a
+heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in
+a country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed and
+rustic visage; or a fisher racing seawards, with the tiller under his
+elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind, would fling you a salutation
+from between Anst’er and the May.
+
+To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque; nor because the Old
+Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town
+shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious
+how much description would apply commonly to either. The same sudden
+accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the
+same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to be
+observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach to Princes Street
+from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap over
+the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet, you
+look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street;
+and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the
+New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to speak,
+over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human race. But
+at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel order.
+The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between
+gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most
+commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a handsome
+bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private
+carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card-cases pass to and fro
+about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
+its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern
+improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the extended
+city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer
+retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its
+growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it is strange to
+see one still surviving—and to see it some hundreds of feet below your
+path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried Herculaneum?
+Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines upon the roofs of
+Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its chimneys; the dusty miller
+comes to his door, looks at the gurgling water, hearkens to the turning
+wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps whistles an air of his
+own to enrich the symphony—for all the world as if Edinburgh were still
+the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quietest of
+hamlets buried a mile or so in the green country.
+
+ [Picture: In the Village of Dean]
+
+It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
+his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode in
+a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) known as
+Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may
+harry a bird’s nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places
+that still smell of the plough in memory’s nostrils. Here, one had heard
+a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on summer evenings to
+eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the
+site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but
+partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on many an
+escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs full of piping
+birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were neither town nor
+country; and I think that both for my companions and myself, there was a
+special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment as of foreign
+travel, when we hit in our excursions on the butt-end of some former
+hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and
+squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the
+trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake,
+the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open
+thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressiveness to
+a young mind. It was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore
+than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth’s novels; and these two words,
+‘subterreanean passage,’ were in themselves an irresistible attraction,
+and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and the
+black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle Rock
+from West Princes Street Gardens, and lay a triumphal hand against the
+rampart itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And
+there are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my mind under a
+very strong illumination of remembered pleasure. But the effect of not
+one of them all will compare with the discoverer’s joy, and the sense of
+old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with which I
+explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, or the nugget of
+cottages at Broughton Market. They were more rural than the open
+country, and gave a greater impression of antiquity than the oldest
+_land_ upon the High Street. They too, like Fergusson’s butterfly, had a
+quaint air of having wandered far from their own place; they looked
+abashed and homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their
+outside stairs and running mill-streams; there were corners that smelt
+like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils; and the
+people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in
+Colinton or Cramond.
+
+In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of
+the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the
+workmen’s quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can
+cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we
+can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may
+forget the stories and the playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some
+possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
+abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
+cataclysm of nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
+all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
+and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
+windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully stained to represent a
+landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorns begin to
+flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
+our streets, the country hilltops find out a young man’s eyes, and set
+his heart beating for travel and pure air.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE VILLA QUARTERS.
+
+
+Mr. Ruskin’s denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I
+have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.
+Many however find a grand air and something settled and imposing in the
+better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles
+induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of
+our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with
+Mr. Ruskin’s, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his large
+declamatory and controversial eloquence.
+
+Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to
+another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismallest structures
+keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with
+them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying
+chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
+character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view
+to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me,
+fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for
+you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in
+clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style of
+art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.
+
+Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the
+windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there
+any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy
+builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
+plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green
+timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and
+there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so
+situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is a
+noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of Lucifer.
+There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
+being contemptible; and we know that ‘fools rush in where angels fear to
+tread.’ But to aim at making a common-place villa, and to make it
+insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the homeliest
+achievement, and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
+theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip all
+competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent deformity;
+and to do all this in what is, by nature, one of the most agreeable
+neighbourhoods in Britain:—what are we to say, but that this also is a
+distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?
+
+Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things offend
+the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the
+town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have ever
+the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the country
+air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous body, it
+would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the builders
+and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of yore,
+with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the other; and
+as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
+right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
+once.
+
+Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
+asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
+delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect they
+were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world to
+point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa, not his own design; and
+let them reproduce that model to satiety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE CALTON HILL.
+
+
+The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
+elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
+of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
+the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find
+yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of
+situation and architecture; Burns is memorialised lower down upon a spur;
+Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the
+Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and yet, in both
+cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butter-churn; comparisons
+apart, it ranks among the vilest of men’s handiworks. But the chief
+feature is an unfinished range of columns, ‘the Modern Ruin’ as it has
+been called, an imposing object from far and near, and giving Edinburgh,
+even from the sea, that false air; of a Modern Athens which has earned
+for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a National
+Monument; and its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
+national characteristics. The old Observatory—a quaint brown building on
+the edge of the steep—and the new Observatory—a classical edifice with a
+dome—occupy the central portion of the summit. All these are scattered
+on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.
+
+ [Picture: The Calton Hill]
+
+The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man’s injustice to the
+dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than
+Burns. Immediately below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert
+Fergusson, Burns’s master in his art, who died insane while yet a
+stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously
+acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously
+forgotten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
+Scotland and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly suppress
+all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse and, up to
+the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in his manner
+and the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged his debt
+in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a tomb over the grave in
+Canongate churchyard. This was worthy of an artist, but it was done in
+vain; and although I think I have read nearly all the biographies of
+Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of nature was not
+violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the credit of his
+follower’s originality. There is a kind of gaping admiration that would
+fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape
+at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all
+others. They are indeed mistaken if they think to please the great
+originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better
+than dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns, who will be the best
+delighted of the dead.
+
+ [Picture: Queen Mary’s Bath]
+
+Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you
+can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur’s Seat,
+which you cannot see from Arthur’s Seat. It is the place to stroll on
+one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in our
+more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a little
+of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which
+is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse
+to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a faint, floating haze, a
+cunning decolourizer, although not thick enough to obscure outlines near
+at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to windward at the far end of
+Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the
+hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
+
+[Picture: Arthur’s Seat] Immediately underneath upon the south, you
+command the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts of the
+new Jail—a large place, castellated to the extent of folly, standing by
+itself on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by
+tourists as the Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners
+taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running
+at play and their shadows keeping step with them. From the bottom of the
+valley, a gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller
+and a shapelier edifice than Nelson’s Monument. Look a little farther,
+and there is Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey,
+and the red sentry pacing smartly too and fro before the door like a
+mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single
+out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio’s murderers made
+their escape and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
+white wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the
+Queen’s Park, from Muschat’s Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret’s Loch,
+and the long wall of Salisbury Crags: and thence, by knoll and rocky
+bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur’s Seat,
+a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon
+your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb
+one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged
+crown of bastions on the western sky.—Perhaps it is now one in the
+afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of
+Nelson’s flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke followed
+by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the Castle. This is the
+time-gun by which people set their watches, as far as the sea coast or in
+hill farms upon the Pentlands.—To complete the view, the eye enfilades
+Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a broad look over the valley
+between the Old Town and the New: here, full of railway trains and
+stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there,
+green with trees and gardens.
+
+ [Picture: Back of Greenside]
+
+On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it
+so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking
+prospect. A gully separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside,
+where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that
+almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first, as
+they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tesselated with
+sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets
+is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith
+camps on the seaside with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of
+ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith
+Island; the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the
+towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the
+opposite coast; and the hills enclose the view, except to the farthest
+east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies
+the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots
+Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour, from
+whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland.
+
+ ‘O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
+ Wi’ their fans into their hand,
+ Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
+ Come sailing to the land!’
+
+The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and
+sea disaster. The sailors’ wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of
+Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail
+of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for
+brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their
+last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude
+have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London
+smack went ashore and wreckers cut the rings from ladies’ fingers; and a
+few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance;
+and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape, is that Forfarshire coast
+where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.
+
+These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are
+all tilted by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in
+delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun
+and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person
+on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind together
+in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a prospect, to be
+full of change and of things moving. The multiplicity embarrasses the
+eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow absorbed with
+single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a
+country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by
+distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a
+glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note
+ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another,
+and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the
+innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the multitude
+of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and
+scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and loud, to
+tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the housetops,
+like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the meantime, on this
+pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by monumental
+buildings.
+
+Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost
+in the air, and only a star or two set sparsedly in the vault of heaven;
+and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the
+Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient astronomer, flat on his
+back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven’s secrets, is your only
+neighbour; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of the
+city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle of
+carriages and the continuous keen jingle of the tramway bells. An hour
+or so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in
+every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed forth
+into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and darkling on
+her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far and near
+along the pavements and upon the high facades. Moving lights of the
+railway pass and repass below the stationary lights upon the bridge.
+Lights burn in the jail. Lights burn high up in the tall _lands_ and on
+the Castle turrets, they burn low down in Greenside or along the Park.
+They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk in a
+procession down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier. Thus,
+the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground of
+blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and exposes
+it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high
+station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she proceeds to
+illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to complete the
+scheme—or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend to
+the adjacent sea and country—half-way over to Fife, there is an outpost
+of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another on the May.
+
+And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and
+bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the
+sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and
+melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding
+in the labours of the day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR.
+
+
+The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the
+winter wind. _Snell_, _blae_, _nirly_, and _scowthering_, are four of
+these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with
+them; and for my part, as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
+persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland
+and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and as
+I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even in
+the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound; and I
+remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame and
+Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their inhabitants.
+The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the language of Scotland
+with words, has also largely modified the spirit of its poetry. Both
+poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of the hearth and the
+sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own right, inclines a
+poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all our singers have a
+stave or two for blazing fires and stout potations:—to get indoors out of
+the wind and to swallow something hot to the stomach, are benefits so
+easily appreciated where they dwelt!
+
+And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must wade
+in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere
+more apparently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet,
+Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from
+the robustious winter to an inn fire-side. Love was absent from his
+life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least
+serious of Burns’s amourettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there
+is nothing to temper the sentiment of indoor revelry which pervades the
+poor boy’s verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and
+the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps done
+something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party
+pleasantry with something akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of
+the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in itself.
+The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the revelry
+of lawyers’ clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of a rich
+existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that kept
+Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic
+temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature into
+the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is a
+man to do in this dog’s weather?
+
+To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body, can
+the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winter be brought home. For
+some constitutions there is something almost physically disgusting in the
+bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly sky
+depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the aspect of
+the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid mists. The
+days are so short that a man does much of his business, and certainly all
+his pleasure, by the haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy
+as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed that I have
+often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And meantime the
+wind whistles through the town as if it were an open meadow; and if you
+lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving overhead with a
+noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word, life is so
+unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in a man’s
+inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm, fire-lit
+study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long struggling with
+the seas.
+
+As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for
+Edinburgh people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile
+of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may
+still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good blood.
+People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into two
+divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom
+Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year’s
+fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping
+through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember,
+triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish.
+‘Well,’ would be his jovial salutation, ‘here’s a sneezer!’ And the look
+of these warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping
+fellow-townsmen. There is yet another class who do not depend on
+corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and
+merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too
+high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to
+enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies
+were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as
+much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were
+miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
+one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along
+waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music.
+The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the
+moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and
+which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.
+
+At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping
+country, are sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours,
+nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some
+commanding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked
+upon earth’s face. ‘A’ the hills are covered wi’ snaw,’ they sing, ‘and
+Winter’s noo come fairly!’ And the children, marvelling at the silence
+and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the
+words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and
+brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and
+glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke, and
+here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a
+shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump
+across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. And the
+effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets are
+soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you have
+only to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An
+indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the city; and the well-fed
+heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the—bosom. It is New-year’s
+weather.
+
+New-year’s Day, the great national festival, is a time of family
+expansions and of deep carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stoke of fate for
+this Calvinistic people, the year’s anniversary fails upon a Sunday, when
+the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even whistling
+is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper feels
+called upon to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two
+loyalties, the Scotch have to decide many nice cases of conscience, and
+ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance.
+A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
+suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten
+o’clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments:
+and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open,
+his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark
+the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the twelfth
+stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had launced forth
+into a secular bravura.
+
+Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-holds. For weeks before
+the great morning, confectioners display stacks of Scotch bun—a dense,
+black substance, inimical to life—and full moons of shortbread adorned
+with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour of the season and the
+family affections. ‘Frae Auld Reekie,’ ‘A guid New Year to ye a’,’ ‘For
+the Auld Folk at Hame,’ are among the most favoured of these devices.
+Can you not see the carrier, after half-a-day’s journey on pinching
+hill-roads, draw up before a cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor
+Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with moist
+eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this season, on
+the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn conflict, men feel
+a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they reckon the number
+of their friends, like allies before a war; and the prayers grow longer
+in the morning as the absent are recommended by name into God’s keeping.
+
+On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns,
+toyshops, and other holiday magazines, keep open doors. Every one looks
+for his handsel. The postman and the lamplighters have left, at every
+house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
+thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these
+verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail or sentiment and a
+measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see
+comforter’d schoolboys hasting to squander their half-crowns. There are
+an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street, except
+the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all sides;
+Auld Lang Syne is much in people’s mouths; and whisky and shortbread are
+staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a stranger will be
+impressed by the number of drunken men; and by afternoon drunkenness has
+spread to the women. With some classes of society, it is as much a
+matter of duty to drink hard on New-year’s Day as to go to church on
+Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for perhaps a month to do the
+season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in their pocket, which they
+will press with embarrassing effusion on a perfect stranger. It is
+inexpedient to risk one’s body in a cab, or not, at least, until after a
+prolonged study of the driver. The streets, which are thronged from end
+to end, become a place for delicate pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some
+speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go
+meandering in and out and cannoning one against another; and now and
+again, one falls and lies as he has fallen. Before night, so many have
+gone to bed or the police office, that the streets seem almost clearer.
+And as _guisards_ and _first-footers_ are now not much seen except in
+country places, when once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at
+the Tron railings, the festivities begin to find their way indoors and
+something like quiet returns upon the town. But think, in these piled
+_lands_, of all the senseless snorers, all the broken heads and empty
+pockets!
+
+Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and one
+riot obtained the epic honours of military intervention. But the great
+generation, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own college
+days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding, on the other
+hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a creature of the
+national genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The patriotism that
+leads a man to eat Scotch bun will scarce desert him at the curling-pond.
+Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the proper home of sliders;
+many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to school; and the profession
+of errand-boy is transformed into a holiday amusement. As for skating,
+there is scarce any city so handsomely provided. Duddingstone Loch lies
+under the abrupt southern side of Arthur’s Seat; in summer a shield of
+blue, with swans sailing from the reeds; in winter, a field of ringing
+ice. The village church sits above it on a green promontory; and the
+village smoke rises from among goodly trees. At the church gates, is the
+historical _joug_; a place of penance for the neck of detected sinners,
+and the historical _louping-on stane_, from which Dutch-built lairds and
+farmers climbed into the saddle. Here Prince Charlie slept before the
+battle of Prestonpans; and here Deacon Brodie, or one of his gang, stole
+a plough coulter before the burglary in Chessel’s Court. On the opposite
+side of the loch, the ground rises to Craigmillar Castle, a place
+friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is worth a climb, even in summer, to
+look down upon the loch from Arthur’s Seat; but it is tenfold more so on
+a day of skating. The surface is thick with people moving easily and
+swiftly and leaning over at a thousand graceful inclinations; the crowd
+opens and closes, and keeps moving through itself like water; and the ice
+rings to half a mile away, with the flying steel. As night draws on, the
+single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir, and coming
+and going of black clusters, is visible upon the loch. A little longer,
+and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice
+in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and
+another, until the whole field is full of skimming lights.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS.
+
+
+On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city,
+here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the
+mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising until
+it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on Arthur’s Seat. The
+character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of
+hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of
+timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile
+and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith or
+Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from almost
+every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack of
+variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and the
+southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and a
+wide view.
+
+From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden,
+the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which and just as it is
+preparing to mount upon the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues
+at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are
+being antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are tinkling
+on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured beyond
+the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to career in
+these fresh pastures like a herd of colts turned loose. As Lord
+Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a man,
+looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the
+builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to
+preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately
+enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies
+hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the
+roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy
+were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never
+dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had only stolen
+fourpence between them.
+
+For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer
+time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the
+toll of Fairmilehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and
+aspect. The hills are close by across a valley: Kirk Yetton, with its
+long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on
+this side with wood and tilled field running high upon their borders, and
+haunches all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated
+with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills,
+pure from the elevation and rustically scented by the upland plants; and
+even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At
+certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the birds
+of sea and mountain hunt and scream together in the same field by
+Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the
+sea-birds skim the tree-tops and fish among the furrows of the plough.
+These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they
+cruise in their own element; and, like sailors, ask but food and water
+from the shores they coast.
+
+Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but
+once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century,
+that the distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting
+officer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition, and
+a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of
+Edinburgh to measure the distiller’s stock; and although it was agreeable
+to find his business lead him in a friend’s direction, it was unfortunate
+that the friend should be a loser by his visits. Accordingly, when he
+got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger would take his flute,
+without which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it together, and
+set manfully to playing, as if for his own delectation and inspired by
+the beauty of the scene. His favourite air, it seems, was ‘Over the
+hills and far away.’ At the first note, the distiller pricked his ears.
+A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing ‘Over the hills and far away?’ This
+must be his friendly enemy, the gauger. Instantly horses were harnessed,
+and sundry barrels of whisky were got upon a cart, driven at a gallop
+round Hill End, and buried in the mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the
+same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the
+whitest napery prepared for the back parlour. A little after, the
+gauger, having had his fill of music for the moment, came strolling down
+with the most innocent air imaginable, and found the good people at Bow
+Bridge taken entirely unawares by his arrival, but none the less glad to
+see him. The distiller’s liquor and the gauger’s flute would combine to
+speed the moments of digestion; and when both were somewhat mellow, they
+would wind up the evening with ‘Over the hills and far away’ to an
+accompaniment of knowing glances. And at least, there is a smuggling
+story, with original and half-idyllic features.
+
+A little further, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a
+field. The country people call it General Kay’s monument. According to
+them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some
+indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date is
+reassuring; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General’s
+exploits. But the stone is connected with one of those remarkable
+tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism.
+Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor is
+held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a flourish
+according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily for a
+respectable family, crowned heads have no great business in the Pentland
+Hills. But the story lends a character of comicality to the stone; and
+the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.
+
+The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of
+Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, ‘with the most
+beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet,’ who looked upon him in a very
+ghastly manner and then vanished; and just in front is the Hunters’
+Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in
+person. Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the
+four corners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors
+and windows, overthrew crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and
+danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
+was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh
+and prayed by the hour; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise
+of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the
+hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the
+Hunters’ Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
+What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation,
+the neighbourhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths; and
+without exactly casting in one’s lot with that disenchanting school of
+writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in the
+last story. ‘That nicht,’ says Burns, in one of his happiest moments,—
+
+ ‘_That nicht a child might understand_
+ _The deil had business on his hand_.’
+
+And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles
+and tremulous psalms, they will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish
+noises in the world; the wind will beat on doors and dance upon roofs for
+them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a clamour like
+the judgment-day.
+
+The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to
+scale the main slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands
+round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke
+rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills
+climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of
+lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be
+awakened, in the grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog
+or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet
+lying behind unseen, is Swanston.
+
+The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago,
+this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the
+sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built
+their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the
+place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial
+magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment;
+and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell
+was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the
+plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They
+brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles’s which they were then
+restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and about
+the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building
+material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So
+much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature comfort, they made a
+capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn
+stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the
+cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a thicket.
+There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit of
+municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and in
+and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciphering upon the
+path; and at night, from high upon the hills, a shepherd saw lighted
+windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city dignitaries
+raised in song.
+
+The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and
+inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into
+the hands of a true-blue Protestant family. During the covenanting
+troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm
+doors stood hospitably open till the morning; the dresser was laden with
+cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshippers kept slipping
+down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the
+supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some
+foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie’s army fell upon Swanston in the
+dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little child;
+him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he
+remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth
+speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they
+made their brose in high delight. ‘It was braw brose,’ said one of them.
+At last they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston
+Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not
+know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs
+low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private
+tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the
+garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
+flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and moss
+and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of broad
+foliage.
+
+The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and
+consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a
+strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds
+adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates,
+the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipe-clay, and the very
+kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in
+country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street
+sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage
+interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife folds
+her hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the wind
+may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the world.
+The city might be a thousand miles away, and yet it was from close by
+that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been
+engraved for this collection; and you have only to look at the etching,
+{118} to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not
+easily sophisticated; and if you walk out here on a summer Sunday, it is
+as like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an
+unmoved countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts
+are in the right place, and they will only bark and sprawl about you on
+the grass, unmindful of their master’s excitations.
+
+Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range; thence, the
+Pentlands trend off to south and west. From the summit you look over a
+great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea, and behold a large variety
+of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the
+Lammermoors and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more or
+less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field of
+wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that side
+the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or
+Applecross. To turn to the other is like a piece of travel. Far out in
+the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear days
+and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises darkly in
+the midst, and close by, Arthur’s Seat makes a bold figure in the
+landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking
+villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the
+land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships
+are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as
+a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and
+standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the landscape.
+So you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, and look down from afar upon men’s
+life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
+thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
+The sea-surf, the cries of ploughmen, the streams and the mill-wheels,
+the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
+from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
+and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of a
+train, the world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of town
+and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat
+of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
+interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the
+whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
+pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable city,
+ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight highways,
+tell visibly of man’s active and comfortable ways; and you may be never
+so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is something in the
+view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful
+labour.
+
+Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney,
+where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging
+wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the
+story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and
+fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain air,
+and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind ‘Over the hills
+and far away’ to distant countries; and you have a vision of Edinburgh
+not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a
+boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for her
+surroundings. For every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways
+radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not
+more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a man sitting at
+home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city sends abroad an
+influence and a portrait of herself. There is no Edinburgh emigrant, far
+or near, from China to Peru, but he or she carries some lively pictures
+of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle cliffs, some snow scene, some
+maze of city lamps, indelible in the memory and delightful to study in
+the intervals of toil. For any such, if this book fall in their way,
+here are a few more home pictures. It would be pleasant, if they should
+recognise a house where they had dwelt, or a walk that they had taken.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ LONDON
+ Printed by STRANGEWAYS and Sons, Tower St. Cambridge Circus, W.C.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{10} These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, and
+a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news
+caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded
+fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small
+blame to them if they keep ledgers: ’tis an excellent business habit.
+Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency of
+linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one
+of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault it the city calls
+for something more specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat
+looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of
+a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them console
+themselves—they do as well as anybody else; the population of (let us
+say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic
+stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of
+gold; _I have not yet written a book about Glasgow_.
+
+{118} One of the illustrations of the First Edition.
+
+
+
+
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