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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Edinburgh Picturesque Notes**
+#13 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
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+by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+December, 1995  [Etext #382]
+
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+Edinburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson
+Scanned and proofed by
+David Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+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.
+
+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. *
+
+* 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 DEGRINGOLADES 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 Caesar 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, * 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.
+
+* One of the illustrations of the First Edition.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Edinburgh - 
+Picturesque Notes
+
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