Edinburgh Picturesque Notes

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.

Scanned and proofed by

David Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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©Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/edinn10.txt