THE HEART OF SCOTLAND
"_The Heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye._"--BEN JONSON
Edinburgh, August 24, 1890.--A bright blue sky, across which many
masses of thin white cloud are borne swiftly on the cool western wind,
bends over the stately city, and all her miles of gray mansions and
spacious, cleanly streets sparkle beneath it in a flood of summer
sunshine. It is the Lord's Day, and most of the highways are deserted
and quiet. From the top of the Calton Hill you look down upon hundreds
of blue smoke-wreaths curling upward from the chimneys of the resting
and restful town, and in every direction the prospect is one of
opulence and peace. A thousand years of history are here crystallised
within the circuit of a single glance, and while you gaze upon one
of the grandest emblems that the world contains of a storied and
romantic past, you behold likewise a living and resplendent pageant
of the beauty of to-day. Nowhere else are the Past and the Present so
lovingly blended. There, in the centre, towers the great crown of St.
Giles. Hard by are the quaint slopes of the Canongate,--teeming with
illustrious, or picturesque, or terrible figures of Long Ago. Yonder
the glorious Castle Crag looks steadfastly westward,--its manifold,
wonderful colours continuously changing in the changeful daylight.
Down in the valley Holyrood, haunted by a myriad of memories and by
one resplendent face and entrancing presence, nestles at the foot of
the giant Salisbury Crag; while the dark, rivened peak of Arthur's
Seat rears itself supremely over the whole stupendous scene. Southward
and westward, in the distance, extends the bleak range of the Pentland
Hills; eastward the cone of Berwick Law and the desolate Bass Rock seem
to cleave the sea; and northward, beyond the glistening crystal of the
Forth,--with the white lines of embattled Inchkeith like a diamond on
its bosom,--the lovely Lomonds, the virginal mountain breasts of Fife,
are bared to the kiss of heaven. It is such a picture as words can but
faintly suggest; but when you look upon it you readily comprehend the
pride and the passion with which a Scotsman loves his native land.
[Illustration: _The Crown of St. Giles's._]
Dr. Johnson named Edinburgh as "a city too well known to admit
description." That judgment was proclaimed more than a hundred years
ago,--before yet Caledonia had bewitched the world's heart as the
haunted land of Robert Burns and Walter Scott,--and if it were true
then it is all the more true now. But while the reverent pilgrim along
the ancient highways of history may not wisely attempt description,
which would be superfluous, he perhaps may usefully indulge in brief
chronicle and impression,--for these sometimes prove suggestive to
minds that are kindred with his own. Hundreds of travellers visit
Edinburgh, but it is one thing to visit and another thing to see; and
every suggestion, surely, is of value that helps to clarify our vision.
This capital is not learned by driving about in a cab; for Edinburgh
to be truly seen and comprehended must be seen and comprehended as an
exponent of the colossal individuality of the Scottish character; and
therefore it must be observed with thought. Here is no echo and no
imitation. Many another provincial city of Britain is a miniature copy
of London; but the quality of Edinburgh is her own. Portions of her
architecture do indeed denote a reverence for ancient Italian models,
while certain other portions reveal the influence of the semi-classical
taste that prevailed in the time of the Regent, afterwards George
the Fourth. The democratic tendency of this period,--expressing
itself here precisely as it does everywhere else, in button-making
pettiness and vulgar commonplace,--is likewise sufficiently obvious.
Nevertheless, in every important detail of Edinburgh and of its life,
the reticent, resolute, formidable, impetuous, passionate character of
the Scottish race is conspicuous and predominant. Much has been said
against the Scottish spirit,--the tide of cavil purling on from Dr.
Johnson to Sydney Smith. Dignity has been denied to it, and so has
magnanimity, and so has humour; but there is no audience more quick
than the Scottish audience to respond either to pathos or to mirth;
there is no literature in the world so musically, tenderly, and weirdly
poetical as the Scottish literature; there is no place on earth where
the imaginative instinct of the national mind has resisted, as it has
resisted in Scotland, the encroachment of utility upon the domain
of romance; there is no people whose history has excelled that of
Scotland in the display of heroic, intellectual, and moral purpose,
combined with passionate sensibility; and no city could surpass the
physical fact of Edinburgh as a manifestation of broad ideas, unstinted
opulence, and grim and rugged grandeur. Whichever way you turn, and
whatever object you behold, that consciousness is always present
to your thought,--the consciousness of a race of beings intensely
original, individual, passionate, authoritative, and magnificent.
[Illustration: _Scott's House in Edinburgh._]
The capital of Scotland is not only beautiful but eloquent. The
present writer does not assume to describe it, or to instruct the
reader concerning it, but only to declare that at every step the
sensitive mind is impressed with the splendid intellect, the individual
force, and the romantic charm of the Scottish character, as it is
commemorated and displayed in this delightful place. What a wealth of
significance it possesses may be indicated by even the most meagre
record and the most superficial commentary upon the passing events of
a traveller's ordinary day. The greatest name in the literature of
Scotland is Walter Scott. He lived and laboured for twenty-four years
in the modest three-story, gray stone house which is No. 39 Castle
street. It has been my privilege to enter that house, and to stand in
the room in which Scott began the novel of _Waverley_. Many years roll
backward under the spell of such an experience, and the gray-haired
man is a boy again, with all the delights of the Waverley Novels
before him, health shining in his eyes, and joy beating in his heart,
as he looks onward through vistas of golden light into a paradise of
fadeless flowers and of happy dreams. The room that was Scott's study
is a small one, on the first floor, at the back, and is lighted by one
large window, opening eastward, through which you look upon the rear
walls of sombre, gray buildings, and upon a small slope of green lawn,
in which is the unmarked grave of one of Sir Walter's dogs. "The misery
of keeping a dog," he once wrote, "is his dying so soon; but, to be
sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of
me?" My attention was called to a peculiar fastening on the window of
the study,--invented and placed there by Scott himself,--so arranged
that the sash can be safely kept locked when raised a few inches from
the sill. On the south side of the room is the fireplace, facing which
he would sit as he wrote, and into which, of an evening, he has often
gazed, hearing meanwhile the moan of the winter wind, and conjuring
up, in the blazing brands, those figures of brave knights and gentle
ladies that were to live forever in the amber of his magical art. Next
to the study, on the same floor, is the larger apartment that was his
dining-room, where his portrait of Claverhouse, now at Abbotsford,
once hung above the mantel, and where so many of the famous people
of the past enjoyed his hospitality and his talk. On the south wall
of this room now hang two priceless autograph letters, one of them
in the handwriting of Scott, the other in that of Burns. Both rooms
are used for business offices now,--the house being tenanted by the
agency of the New Zealand Mortgage Company,--and both are furnished
with large presses, for the custody of deeds and family archives.
Nevertheless these rooms remain much as they were when Scott lived
in them, and his spirit seems to haunt the place. I was brought very
near to him that day, for in the same hour was placed in my hands the
original manuscript of his _Journal_, and I saw, in his handwriting,
the last words that ever fell from his pen. That _Journal_ is in two
quarto volumes. One of them is filled with writing; the other half
filled; and the lines in both are of a fine, small character, crowded
closely together. Toward the last the writing manifests only too well
the growing infirmity of the broken Minstrel,--the forecast of the
hallowed deathbed of Abbotsford and the venerable and glorious tomb
of Dryburgh. These are his last words: "We slept reasonably, but on
the next morning"--and so the _Journal_ abruptly ends. I can in no way
express the emotion with which I looked upon those feebly scrawled
syllables,--the last effort of the nerveless hand that once had been
strong enough to thrill the heart of all the world. The _Journal_ has
been lovingly and carefully edited by David Douglas, whose fine taste
and great gentleness of nature, together with his ample knowledge
of Scottish literature and society, eminently qualify him for the
performance of this sacred duty; and the world will possess this
treasure and feel the charm of its beauty and pathos,--which is the
charm of a great nature expressed in its perfect simplicity; but the
spell that is cast upon the heart and the imagination by a prospect of
the actual handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, in the last words that he
wrote, cannot be conveyed in print.
[Illustration: _The Maiden._]
From the house in Castle street I went to the rooms of the Royal
Society, where there is a portrait of Scott, by John Graham Gilbert,
more lifelike,--being representative of his soul as well as his face
and person,--than any other that is known. It hangs there, in company
with other paintings of former presidents of this institution,--notably
one of Sir David Brewster and one of James Watt,--in the hall in which
Sir Walter often sat, presiding over the deliberations and literary
exercises of his comrades in scholarship and art. In another hall I
saw a pulpit in which John Knox used to preach, in the old days of
what Dr. Johnson expressively called "The ruffians of Reformation," and
hard by was "The Maiden," the terrible Scottish guillotine, with its
great square knife, set in a thick weight of lead, by which the grim
Regent Morton was slain, in 1581, the Marquis of Argyle, in 1661, and
the gallant, magnanimous, devoted Earl of Argyle, in 1685,--one more
sacrifice to the insatiate House of Stuart. This monster has drunk
the blood of many a noble gentleman, and there is a weird, sinister
suggestion of gratified ferocity and furtive malignity in its rude,
grisly, uncanny fabric of blackened timbers. You may see, in the
quaint little panelled chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, in the Cowgate,
not distant from the present abode of the sanguinary Maiden,--brooding
over her hideous consummation of slaughter and misery,--the place
where the mangled body of the heroic Argyle was laid, in secret
sanctuary, for several nights after that scene of piteous sacrifice at
the old Market Cross; and when you walk in the solemn enclosure of the
Grayfriars church,--so fitly styled, by Sir Walter, The Westminster
Abbey of Scotland,--your glance will fall upon a sunken pillar, low
down upon the northern slope of that haunted, lamentable ground, which
bears the letters "I. M.," and which marks the grave of the baleful
Morton, whom the Maiden decapitated, for his share in the murder of
Rizzio. In these old cities there is no keeping away from sepulchres.
"The paths of glory," in every sense, "lead but to the grave." George
Buchanan and Allan Ramsay, poets whom no literary pilgrim will neglect,
rest in this churchyard, though the exact places of their interment are
not positively denoted, and here, likewise, rest the elegant historian
Robertson, and "the Addison of Scotland," Henry Mackenzie. The building
in the High street in which Allan Ramsay once had his abode and his
bookshop, and in which he wrote his pastoral of _The Gentle Shepherd_,
is occupied now by a barber; but, since he is one that scorns not
to proclaim over his door, in mighty letters, the poetic lineage of
his dwelling, it seems not amiss that this haunt of the Muses should
have fallen into such lowly hands. Of such a character, hallowed with
associations that pique the fancy and touch the heart, are the places
and the names that an itinerant continually encounters in his rambles
in Edinburgh.
[Illustration: _Grayfriars Church._]
[Illustration: _High Street--Allan Ramsay's Shop._]
The pilgrim could muse for many an hour over the little Venetian
mirror[50] that hangs in the bedroom of Mary Stuart, in Holyrood
Palace. What faces and what scenes it must have reflected! How often
her own beautiful countenance and person,--the dazzling eyes, the
snowy brow, the red gold hair, the alabaster bosom,--may have blazed
in its crystal depths, now tarnished and dim, like the record of her
own calamitous and wretched days! Did those lovely eyes look into
this mirror, and was their glance scared and tremulous, or fixed and
terrible, on that dismal February night, so many years ago, when the
fatal explosion in the Kirk o' Field resounded with an echo that has
never died away? Who can tell? This glass saw the gaunt and livid face
of Ruthven, when he led his comrades of murder into that royal chamber,
and it beheld Rizzio, screaming in mortal terror, as he was torn
from the skirts of his mistress and savagely slain before her eyes.
Perhaps, also, when that hideous episode was over and done with, it
saw Queen Mary and her despicable husband the next time they met, and
were alone together, in that ghastly room. "It shall be dear blood to
some of you," the queen had said, while the murder of Rizzio was doing.
Surely, having so injured a woman, any man with eyes to see might have
divined his fate, in the perfect calm of her heavenly face and the
smooth tones of her gentle voice, at such a moment as that. "At the
fireside tragedies are acted,"--and tragic enough must have been the
scene of that meeting, apart from human gaze, in the chamber of crime
and death. No other relic of Mary Stuart stirs the imagination as that
mirror does,--unless, perhaps, it be the little ebony crucifix, once
owned and reverenced by Sir Walter Scott and now piously treasured at
Abbotsford, which she held in her hands when she went to her death, in
the hall of Fotheringay Castle.
[Illustration: _The Canongate._]
Holyrood Palace, in Mary Stuart's time, was not of its present shape.
The tower containing her rooms was standing, and from that tower the
building extended eastward to the abbey, and then it veered to the
south. Much of the building was destroyed by fire in 1544, and again in
Cromwell's time, but both church and palace were rebuilt. The entire
south side, with its tower that looks directly towards the crag, was
added in the later period of Charles the Second. The furniture in Mary
Stuart's room is partly spurious, but the rooms are genuine. Musing
thus, and much striving to reconstruct those strange scenes of the
past, in which that beautiful, dangerous woman bore so great a part,
the pilgrim strolls away into the Canongate,--once clean and elegant,
now squalid and noisome,--and still the storied figures of history walk
by his side or come to meet him at every close and wynd. John Knox,
Robert Burns, Tobias Smollett, David Hume, Dugald Stuart, John Wilson,
Hugh Miller, Gay, led onward by the blithe and gracious Duchess of
Queensberry, and Dr. Johnson, escorted by the affectionate and faithful
James Boswell, the best biographer that ever lived,--these and many
more, the lettered worthies of long ago, throng into this haunted
street and glorify it with the rekindled splendours of other days. You
cannot be lonely here. This it is that makes the place so eloquent and
so precious. For what did those men live and labour? To what were their
shining talents and wonderful forces devoted? To the dissemination of
learning; to the emancipation of the human mind from the bondage of
error; to the ministry of the beautiful,--and thus to the advancement
of the human race in material comfort, in gentleness of thought, in
charity of conduct, in refinement of manners, and in that spiritual
exaltation by which, and only by which, the true progress of mankind is
at once accomplished and proclaimed.
[Illustration: HOLYROOD CASTLE
AND
ARTHUR'S SEAT]
But the dark has come, and this Edinburgh ramble shall end with the
picture that closed its own magnificent day. You are standing on the
rocky summit of Arthur's Seat. From that superb mountain peak your
gaze takes in the whole capital, together with the country in every
direction for many miles around. The evening is uncommonly clear. Only
in the west dense masses of black cloud are thickly piled upon each
other, through which the sun is sinking, red and sullen with menace of
the storm. Elsewhere and overhead the sky is crystal, and of a pale,
delicate blue. A cold wind blows briskly from the east and sweeps a
million streamers of white smoke in turbulent panic over the darkening
roofs of the city, far below. In the north the lovely Lomond Hills are
distinctly visible across the dusky level of the Forth, which stretches
away toward the ocean, one broad sheet of glimmering steel,--its margin
indented with many a graceful bay, and the little islands that adorn
it shining like stones of amethyst set in polished flint. A few brown
sails are visible, dotting the waters, and far to the east appears
the graceful outline of the Isle of May,--which was the shrine of the
martyred St. Adrian,--and the lonely, wave-beaten Bass Rock, with
its millions of seagulls and solan-geese. Busy Leith and picturesque
Newhaven and every little village on the coast is sharply defined
in the frosty light. At your feet is St. Leonards, with the tiny
cottage of Jeanie Deans. Yonder, in the south, are the gray ruins of
Craigmillar Castle, once the favourite summer home of the Queen of
Scots, now open to sun and rain, moss-grown and desolate, and swept
by every wind that blows. More eastward the eye lingers upon Carberry
Hill, where Mary surrendered herself to her nobles, just before the
romantic episode of Loch Leven Castle; and far beyond that height the
sombre fields, intersected by green hawthorn hedges and many-coloured
with the various hues of pasture and harvest, stretch away to the hills
of Lammermoor and the valleys of Tweed and Esk. Darker and darker grow
the gathering shadows of the gloaming. The lights begin to twinkle in
the city streets. The echoes of the rifles die away in the Hunter's
Bog. A piper far off is playing the plaintive music of _The Blue Bells
of Scotland_. And as your steps descend the crag, the rising moon, now
nearly at the full, shines through the gauzy mist and hangs above the
mountain like a shield of gold upon the towered citadel of night.
[Illustration: _St. Giles's, from the Lawn Market._]