stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade,
tabard above, heather-mixture trouser 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 twoscore 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 spring time--or say one morning rather, at
the peep of day--late folk may hear the 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 about 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 warlike 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 Prince's 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 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
upon 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 gypsies 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 historical 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.
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 psalms 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 honorable, 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...
The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and
more gentle hilltops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the whole
city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on
every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet
country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
battlements, and the smoke of the old town blowing abroad over the
subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
expressed in these two words.
Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim
and sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not
in extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
thoroughfares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
story, neighbor mounting upon neighbor's shoulder, as in some Black Hole
of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen feet deep in
a vertical direction.
The tallest of these _lands_, as they are locally termed, have long
since been burnt out; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or
ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent
over Waverley Bridge would still put many natural precipices to shame.
The cellars are already high above the gazer's head, planted on the
steep hill-side; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the
pawn-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland hills. The
poor man may roost up there in the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a
peep of the green country from his window; he shall see the quarters of
the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad squares and gardens;
he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants
of the city; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness,
and bring a smack of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring....
One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the
policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
light anywhere in the great bulk of the building; but as I stood there
it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring
on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made
itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its
quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its
time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more
than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time,
and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the
quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and
contained it.
There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in High Street. The building had
grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up,
so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations
sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old
human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair;
some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to
them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours
of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous
uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock
was felt far and near, and the moral shock travelled with the morning
milkmaid into all the suburbs.
The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that
gray forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest, and, like Samson, by
pulling down one roof destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have
forgotten the aspect of the gable: here it was plastered, there papered,
according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high
overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the
chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty
families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The _land_ had
fallen; and with the _land_ how much! Far in the country, people saw a
gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys
in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in
New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth,
"The house that I was born in fell last night!"
IN THE LAND OF ROB ROY.
NATHANIEL P. WILLIS.
[From Willis's "Famous Persons and Places" we select an
interesting description of some Scottish scenes which the works
of Scott have rendered famous, including the home of Rob Roy
and the lakes Lomond and Katrine, the latter the scene of the
"Lady of the Lake." Passing many famous places on his way
north, the traveller at length reached the "far-famed and
much-boasted valley of Glencoe," which he describes in the
chapter following.]
We passed the head of the valley near Tyndrum, where McDougal of Lorn
defeated the Bruce, and were half-way up the wild pass that makes its
southern outlet, when our Highland driver, with a shout of delight,
pointed out to us a red deer, standing on the very summit of the highest
mountain above us. It was an incredible distance to see any living
thing, but he stood clear against the sky, in a relief as strong as if
he had been suspended in the air, and with his head up, and his chest
towards us, seemed the true monarch of the wild.
At Invarenden, Donald McPhee begged for the discharge of himself and his
horse and cart from our service. He had come with us eighty miles, and
was afraid to venture farther on his travels, having never before been
twenty miles from the Highland village where he lived. It was amusing to
see the curiosity with which he looked about him, and the caution with
which he suffered the hostler at the inn to take the black mare out of
his sight. The responsibility of the horse and cart weighed heavily on
his mind, and he expressed his hope to "get her back safe," with an
apprehensive resolution that would have become a knight-errant girding
himself for his most perilous encounter. Poor Donald! how little he knew
how wide is the world, and how very like one part of it is to another!
Our host of Invarenden supplied us with another cart to take us down to
Tarbot, and having dined with a waterfall looking in at each of our two
opposite windows (the inn stands in a valley between two mountains), we
were committed to the care of his eldest boy, and jolted off for the
head of Loch Lomond.
I have never happened to see a traveller who had seen Loch Lomond in
perfectly good weather. My companion had been there every summer for
several years, and believes it always rained under Ben Lomond. As we
came in sight of the lake, however, the water looked like one sheet of
gold leaf, trembling, as if by the motion of fish below, but unruffled
by wind; and if paradise were made so fair, and had such waters in its
midst, I could better conceive than before the unhappiness of Adam
when driven forth. The sun was just setting, and the road descended
immediately to the shore, and kept along under precipitous rocks,
and slopes of alternate cultivation and heather, to the place of our
destination. And a lovely place it is! Send me to Tarbot when I would
retreat from the world. It is an inn buried in a grove at the foot of
hills, and set in a bend of the lake-shore, like a diamond upon an
"orbed brow;" and the light in its kitchen, as we approached in the
twilight, was as interesting as a ray of the "first water" from the
same. We had now reached the route of the cockney tourists, and while we
perceived it agreeably in the excellence of the hotel, we perceived it
disagreeably in the price of the wines, and the presence of what my
friend called "unmitigated vulgarisms" in the coffee-room. That is the
worst of England. The people are vulgar, but not vulgar enough. One
dances with the lazzaroni at Naples, when he would scarce think of
handing the newspaper to the "person" on a tour at Tarbot. Condescension
is the only agreeable virtue, I have made up my mind.
Well--it was moonlight. The wind was south and affectionate, and the
road in front of the hotel "fleck'd with silver," and my friend's wife,
and the corresponding object of interest to myself, being on the other
side of Ben Lomond and the Tweed, we had nothing for it after supper
but to walk up and down with one another, and talk of the past. In the
course of our ramble we walked through an open gate, and, ascending a
gravel walk, found a beautiful cottage, built between two mountain
streams, and ornamented with every device of taste and contrivance. The
mild pure torrents were led over falls and brought to the threshold of
bowers, and seats, and bridges, and winding paths were distributed up
the steep channels in a way that might make it a haunt for Titania. It
is the property, we found afterwards, of a Scotch gentleman, and a
great summer retreat of the celebrated Jeffrey, his friend. It was one
more place to which my heart clung in parting.
Loch Lomond sat still for its picture in the morning, and after an
early breakfast we took a row-boat, with a couple of Highlanders,
for Inversnade, and pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy
delightfulness in the scene and air which I had never before found out
of Italy. We overshot our destination a little to look into Rob Roy's
cave, a dark den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his
vocation; and then pulling back along the shore, we were landed, in the
spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by the boatman of this
Highland ferry. From this point across to Loch Katrine is some five
miles, and the scene of Scott's novel of Rob Roy. It has been "done"
so often by tourists that I leave all particular description of the
localities and the scenery to the well-hammered remembrance of readers
of magazines, and confine myself to my own private adventures.
The distance between the lakes is usually performed by ladies on
donkeys, and by gentlemen on foot, but being myself rather tender-toed
with the gout, my companion started off alone, and I lay down on the
grass at Inversnade to wait the return of the long-eared troop, who were
gone across with an earlier party. The waterfall and the cottage just
above the edge of the lake, a sharp hill behind, closely wooded with
beech and fir, and, on a greensward platform in the rear of the house,
two Highland lassies, and a laddie, treading down a stack of new hay,
were not bad circumstances in which to be left alone with the witcheries
of the great enchanter.
I must narrate here an adventure in which my own part was rather a
discomfiture, but which will show somewhat the manners of the people.
My companion had been gone half an hour, and I was lying at the foot
of a tree, listening to the waterfall and looking off on the lake, and
watching by fits the lad and lassies I have spoken of, who were building
a haystack between them, and chattering away most unceasingly in Gaelic.
The eldest of the girls was a tall, ill-favored damsel, merry as an
Oread, but as ugly as Donald Bean; and after a while I began to suspect,
by the looks of the boy below, that I had furnished her with a new
theme. She addressed some remark to me presently, and a skirmish of
banter ensued, which ended in a challenge to me to climb upon the stack.
It was about ten feet high, and shelving outward from the bottom, and my
Armida had drawn up the ladder. The stack was built, however, under a
high tree, and I was soon up the trunk, and, swinging off from a low
branch, dropped in the middle of the stack.
In the same instant I was raised in a grasp to which I could offer no
resistance, and, with a fling to which I should have believed the
strength of few men equal, thrown clear of the stack to the ground. I
alighted on my back, with a fall of perhaps twelve feet, and felt
seriously hurt. The next moment, however, my gentle friend had me in her
arms (I am six feet high in my stockings), and I was carried into the
cottage, and laid on a flock bed, before I could well decide whether my
back was broken or no. Whiskey was applied externally and internally,
and the old crone, who was the only inhabitant of the hovel, commenced a
lecture in Gaelic, as I stood once more sound upon my legs, which seemed
to take effect upon the penitent, though her victim was no wiser for it.
I took the opportunity to look at the frame which had proved itself of
such vigorous power, but, except arms of extraordinary length, she was
like any other equally ugly, middle-sized woman. In the remaining
half-hour before the donkeys arrived we became the best of friends, and
she set me off for Loch Katrine with a caution to the ass-driver to
take care of me, which that sandy-haired Highlander took as an excellent
joke, and no wonder!
The long mountain glen between these two lakes was the home of Rob Roy,
and the Highlanders point out various localities, all commemorated in
Scott's incomparable story. The house where Helen McGregor was born lies
a stone's throw off the road to the left, and Rob Roy's gun is shown by
an old woman who lives near by. He must have been rich in arms by the
same token, for, besides the well-authenticated one at Abbotsford, I
have seen some dozen guns and twice as many daggers and shot-pouches
which lay claim to the same honor. I paid my shilling to the old woman
not the less. She owed it to the pleasure I had received from Sir
Walter's novel.
The view of Loch Lomond back from the highest point of the pass is
incomparably fine; at least when I saw it, for sunshine and temperature
and the effect of the light vapors on the hills were at their loveliest
and most favorable. It looks more like the haunt of a robber and his
caterans, probably, in its more common garb of Scotch mist, but, to my
eye, it was a scene of the most Arcadian peace and serenity. I dawdled
along the five miles upon my donkey, with something of an ache in my
back, but a very healthful and sunny freedom from pain and impatience at
my heart. And so did _not_ Baillie Nicol Jarvie make the same memorable
journey.
The cottage inn at the head of Loch Katrine was tenanted by a woman, who
might have been a horse-guardsman in petticoats, and who kept her smiles
for other cattle than the Sassenach. We bought her whiskey and milk,
praised her butter, and were civil to the little Highlandman at her
breast; but neither mother nor child were to be mollified. The rocks
were bare around, we were too tired for a pull in the boat, and three
mortal hours lay between us and the nearest event in our history. I
first penetrated, in the absence of our Hecate, to the inner room of the
sheiling. On the wall hung a broadsword, two guns, a trophy or two of
deer's horns, and a Sunday suit of plaid, philibeg and short red coat,
surmounted by a gallant bonnet and feather. Four cribs, like the berths
in a ship, occupied the farther side of the chamber, each large enough
to contain two persons; a snow-white table stood between the windows; a
sixpenny glass, with an eagle's feather stuck in the frame, hung at such
a height that, "though tall of my hands," I could just see my nose; and
just under the ceiling on the left was a broad and capacious shelf, on
which reposed apparently the old clothes of a century,--a sort of place
where the gude-wife would have hidden Prince Charlie, or might rummage
for her grandmother's baby linen.
The heavy steps of the dame came over the threshold, and I began
to doubt from the look in her eyes whether I should get a blow
of her hairy arm or a "persuader" from the butt of a gun for
my intrusion. "What are ye wantin' here?" she _speered_ at me,
with a Helen-McGregor-to-Baillie-Nicol-Jarvie sort of an expression.
"I was looking for a potato to roast, my good woman."
"Is that a'? Ye'll find it ayont, then!" And pointing to a bag in the
corner, she stood while I subtracted the largest, and then followed
me to the general kitchen and receiving-room, where I buried my
_improvista_ dinner in the remains of a peat-fire, and congratulated
myself on my ready apology.
What to do while the potato was roasting! My English friend had already
cleaned his gun for amusement, and I had looked on. We had stoned the
pony till he had got beyond us in the morass (small thanks to us if
the dame knew it). We had tried to make a chicken swim ashore from the
boat, we had fired away all my friend's percussion-caps, and there was
nothing for it but to converse _a rigueur_. We lay on our backs till the
dame brought us the hot potato on a shovel, with oatcake and butter, and
with this Highland dinner the last hour came decently to its death.