The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for
noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into
the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of
the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from
the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty
and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the
spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds
and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.
For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark
weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be
found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire
angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles
are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New
Town with the Old—that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern
temple of the winds—and watch the trains smoking out from under them and
vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the
passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the
last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And yet the
place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will,
they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take
a pride in their old home.
[Picture: Gate of Holyrood] Venice, it has been said, differs from
another cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The rest may have
admirers; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. And,
indeed, even by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a
similar sense. These like her for many reasons, not any one of which is
satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically, if you will, and
somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is
romantic in the narrowest meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she
is not so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic,
and all the more so since she has set herself off with some Greek airs,
and erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, and above all, she
is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth
of Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a workman’s quarter and among
breweries and gas works. It is a house of many memories. Great people
of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their
stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing
has lasted deep into the night,—murder has been done in its chambers.
There Prince Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant
manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these
things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king’s crown itself is
shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these
charges. For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for
tourists and a museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold
the palace reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a
kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are
lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own
houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
citadel overhead; you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade;
and at night after the early winter even-fall, and in the morning before
the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound
of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the
scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps the
trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser
below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic
by-standers. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets
with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of
Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
before two-score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile
every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the
streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going,
fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the springtime—or say
one morning rather, at the peep of day—late folk may hear voices of many
men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High
Street; and a little after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many
men singing a psalm in unison from another church on the opposite side of
the way. There will be something in the words above the dew of Hermon,
and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the
late folk will tell themselves that all this singing denotes the
conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments—the parliaments of
Churches which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially
like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature—a
Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its war-like
shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in the breeze at
its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur’s Seat look
down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
Nature may look down the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a
strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight
clothe the eternal rock and yesterday’s imitation portico; and as the
soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
distinctness—or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all
these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along
the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across the
valley—the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of nature in
the most intimate sense; that this profusion of eccentricities, this
dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a
city in the world of every-day reality, connected by railway and
telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens
of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and have sold
their immortal portion to a daily paper. By all the canons of romance,
the place demands to be half deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we
might admit in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few
gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these citizens with their
cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key.
Chartered tourists, they make free with historic localities, and rear
their young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human
indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and
conscious moral rectitude, and with a little air of possession that
verges on the absurd, is not the least striking feature of the place.
{10}
And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in
the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a
beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles,
not only on Greenside, or by the King’s Stables, where set tournaments
were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal
presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in
the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated
with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace
John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern democracy. In the
town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows’ nests
among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James
VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the
Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal
fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat
day and night with ‘tearful psalmns’ to see Edinburgh consumed with fire
from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There, in the Grass-market,
stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, offered up the often unnecessary, but
not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell
to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the
roll of drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his
thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses’
tails—a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the
head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered
Scotland to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There
Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few
years afterwards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed
and well-reputed citizen; and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns
came from the plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief and
artificial letters. There, when the great exodus was made across the
valley, and the New Town began to spread abroad its draughty
parallelograms, and rear its long frontage on the opposing hill, there
was such a flitting, such a change of domicile and dweller, as was never
excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler succeeded the earl; the
beggar ensconced himself by the judge’s chimney; what had been a palace
was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions were so parcelled out
among the least and lowest in society, that the hearthstone of the old
proprietor was thought large enough to be partitioned off into a bedroom
by the new.