On being introduced into society, our stranger might have discovered
cause for content with his lodging on finding how poorly off were the
first people with respect to domestic accommodations. I can imagine
him going to tea at Mr Bruce of Kennet’s, in Forrester’s Wynd—a
country gentleman and a lawyer (not long after raised to the bench),
yet happy to live with his wife and children in a house of fifteen
pounds of rent, in a region of profound darkness and mystery, now
no more. Had he got into familiar terms with the worthy lady of the
mansion, he might have ascertained that they had just three rooms and
a kitchen; one room, ‘my lady’s’—that is, the kind of parlour he was
sitting in; another, a consulting-room for the gentleman; the third,
a bedroom. The children, with their maid, had beds laid down for
them at night in their father’s room; the housemaid slept under the
kitchen dresser; and the one man-servant was turned at night out of the
house. Had our friend chanced to get amongst tradespeople, he might
have found Mr Kerr, the eminent goldsmith in the Parliament Square,
stowing his _ménage_ into a couple of small rooms above his booth-like
shop, plastered against the wall of St Giles’s Church; the nursery
and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the
street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.
But indeed everything was on a homely and narrow scale. The
College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves
great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College
Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail
was a narrow building, half-filling up the breadth of the street; the
public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes and dark
entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men
of rank, met as the _Poker Club_ in a tavern, the best of its day, but
only a dark house in a close, to which our stranger could scarcely have
made his way without a guide. In a similar situation across the way,
he would have found, at the proper season, the _Assembly_; that is, a
congregation of ladies met for dancing, and whom the gentlemen usually
joined rather late, and rather merry. The only theatre was also a poor
and obscure place in some indescribable part of the Canongate.
The town was, nevertheless, a funny, familiar, compact, and not
unlikable place. Gentle and semple living within the compass of a
single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest
in each other.[1] Acquaintances might not only be formed,
Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party-walls, but from window to
window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand
coming to hand, and even lip to lip. There was little elegance, but
a vast amount of cheap sociality. Provokingly comical clubs, founded
each upon one joke, were abundant. The ladies had tea-drinkings at the
primitive hour of six, from which they cruised home under the care
of a lantern-bearing, patten-shod lass; or perhaps, if a bad night,
in Saunders Macalpine’s sedan-chair. Every forenoon, for several
hours, the only clear space which the town presented—that around the
Cross—was crowded with loungers of all ranks, whom it had been an
amusement to the poet Gay to survey from the neighbouring windows of
Allan Ramsay’s shop. The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere.
Gentlemen and ladies paraded along in the stately attire of the period;
tradesmen chatted in groups, often bareheaded, at their shop-doors;
caddies whisked about, bearing messages, or attending to the affairs
of strangers; children filled the kennel with their noisy sports. Add
to all this, corduroyed men from Gilmerton, bawling coals or yellow
sand, and spending as much breath in a minute as could have served
poor asthmatic Hugo Arnot for a month; fishwomen crying their caller
haddies from Newhaven; whimsicals and idiots going along, each with
his or her crowd of listeners or tormentors; sootymen with their bags;
town-guardsmen with their antique Lochaber axes; water-carriers with
their dripping barrels; barbers with their hair-dressing materials;
and so forth—and our stranger would have been disposed to acknowledge
that, though a coarse and confused, it was a perfectly unique scene,
and one which, once contemplated, was not easily to be forgotten.
A change at length began. Our northern country had settled to sober
courses in the reign of George II., and the usual results of industry
were soon apparent. Edinburgh by-and-by felt much like a lady who,
after long being content with a small and inconvenient house, is
taught, by the money in her husband’s pockets, that such a place is no
longer to be put up with. There was a wish to expatiate over some of
the neighbouring grounds, so as to get more space and freer air; only
it was difficult to do, considering the physical circumstances of the
town, and the character of the existing outlets. Space, space!—air,
air! was, however, a strong and a general cry, and the old romantic
city did at length burst from its bounds, though not in a very regular
way, or for a time to much good purpose.
[Illustration: NEWHAVEN FISHWIFE.