THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE
Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St.
Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
be unrecognizable; 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 fairway 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 beside 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 name-father
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 back 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, inclose 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
civilization 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 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 lantern 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.