The foundation was at length laid of that revolution which has ended
in making Edinburgh a kind of double city—_first_, an ancient and
picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes;
and _second_, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect,
and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of
society. The New Town, keeping pace with the growing prosperity of
the country, had, in 1790, been extended to Castle Street; in 1800
the necessity for a second plan of the same extent still farther to
the north had been felt, and this was after acted upon. Forty years
saw the Old Town thoroughly changed as respects population. One after
another, its nobles and gentry, its men of the robe, its ‘writers,’
and even its substantial burghers, had during that time deserted
their mansions in the High Street and Canongate, till few were left.
Even those modern districts connected with it, as St John Street, New
Street, George Square, &c., were beginning to be forsaken for the sake
of more elegantly circumstanced habitations beyond the North Loch. Into
the remote social consequences of this change it is not my purpose
to enter, beyond the bare remark that it was only too accordant with
that tendency of our present form of civilisation to separate the high
from the low, the intelligent from the ignorant—that dissociation,
in short, which would in itself run nigh to be a condemnation of
all progress, if we were not allowed to suppose that better forms
of civilisation are realisable. Enough that I mention the tangible
consequences of the revolution—a flooding in of the humbler trading
classes where gentles once had been; the houses of these classes,
again, filled with the vile and miserable. Now were to be seen
hundreds of instances of such changes as Provost Creech indicates in
1783: ‘The Lord Justice-Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French
teacher—Lord President Craigie’s house by a rouping-wife or salewoman
of old furniture—and Lord Drummore’s house left by a chairman for want
of accommodation.’ ‘The house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now
possessed by a wheelwright!’ To one who, like myself, was young in
the early part of the present century, it was scarcely possible, as
he permeated the streets and closes of ancient Edinburgh, to realise
the idea of a time when the great were housed therein. But many a
gentleman in middle life, then living perhaps in Queen Street or
Charlotte Square, could recollect the close or the common stair where
he had been born and spent his earliest years, now altogether given up
to a different portion of society. And when the younger perambulator
inquired more narrowly, he could discover traces of this former
population. Here and there a carved coat-armorial, with supporters,
perhaps even a coronet, arrested attention amidst the obscurities of
some _wynd_ or court. Did he ascend a stair and enter a floor, now
subdivided perhaps into four or five distinct dwellings, he might
readily perceive, in the massive wainscot of the lobby, a proof that
the refinements of life had once been there. Still more would this idea
be impressed upon him when, passing into one of the best rooms of the
old house, he would find not only a continuation of such wainscoting,
but perhaps a tolerable landscape by Norie on a panel above the
fireplace, or a ceiling decorated by De la Cour, a French artist,
who flourished in Edinburgh about 1740. Even yet he would discover a
very few relics of gentry maintaining their ground in the Old Town,
as if faintly to show what it had once been. These were generally old
people, who did not think it worth while to make any change till the
great one. There is a melancholy pleasure in recalling what I myself
found about 1820, when my researches for this work were commenced.
In that year I was in the house of Governor Fergusson, an ancient
gentleman of the Pitfour family, in a floor, one stair up, in the
Luckenbooths. About the same time I attended the book-sale of Dr Arrot,
a physician of good figure, newly deceased, in the Mint Close. For
several years later, any one ascending a now miserable-looking stair
in Blackfriars Wynd would have seen a door-plate inscribed with the
name MISS OLIPHANT, a member of the Gask family. Nay, so late as 1832,
I had the pleasure of breakfasting with Sir William Macleod Bannatyne
in Whiteford House, Canongate (afterwards a type-foundry), on which
occasion the venerable old gentleman talked as familiarly of the levees
of the _sous-ministre_ for Lord Bute in the old villa at the Abbey Hill
as I could have talked of the affairs of the Canning administration;
and even recalled, as a fresh picture of his memory, his father drawing
on his boots to go to make interest in London in behalf of some of the
men in trouble for the Forty-five, particularly his own brother-in-law,
the Clanranald of that day. Such were the connections recently existing
between the past system of things and the present. Now, alas! the sun
of Old-Town glory has set for ever. Nothing is left but the decaying
and rapidly diminishing masses of ancient masonry, and a handful of
traditionary recollections, which be it my humble but not unworthy task
to transmit to future generations.[5]
[Illustration: Carved Armorial, with Supporters.]