CHAPTER VI

SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS

Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair;

Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air;

Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld;

Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld.

Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been;

Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen!

Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun,

And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run.

_Scottish Ballad._[52]

When James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of

reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very

anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh

would make on these new friends of his--as anxious as he had been

twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of

Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are

richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the

street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to

the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the

hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the

Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time

and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James

in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and

wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle,

and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks

and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who

were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore

enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of

Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.

Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The

obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English

comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles

Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that

_Macbeth_ is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in

Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain

unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that

Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the

inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them.

The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor

the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the

same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was

spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid

his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral

drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on

Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the

poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment

Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and

the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends

he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but

Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to

Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the

freedom of the city.

Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to

Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many

a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh

of that day,--the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that

James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]

Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the

_Edinburgh Courant_. This must have been after his release from the

State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with

Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary

ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street

(so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of

it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere,

and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere

else,--especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it.

Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Walks

in Edinburgh_. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of

_one vast castle_.”

Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a

supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough

of native drollery to compose a comedy.”

Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came

in the cortège of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of

Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is

said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the

Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr.

Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an

alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr.

Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption

that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the

claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of

“Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s

circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburgh _literati_.

Here, during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a

pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of--

How happy could I be with either,

Were t’other dear charmer away!

who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of

ideas with the author of--

Wae’s me! For baith I canna get,

To ane by law we’re stented;

Then I’ll draw cuts, and take my fate,

And be with ane contented.

And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they

lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in

his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that

he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an

admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century Goldsmith was a medical student

in Edinburgh, living, it is said, in College Wynd, and writing amusing

accounts of the dulness and formality and drollery of the Assemblies. An

Edinburgh tailor’s account for the year 1753, found by the late Mr.

David Laing in the pages of an old ledger, allows one to imagine Goldie

gracing Edinburgh in a suit of sky-blue satin and black velvet, and a

“superfine small hatt” which bore “8s. worth of silver hatt lace.” Mr.

Filby the tailor charged the modest sum of £3:6:6 for a “superfine high

claret-coloured” cloth suit; but possibly he might have charged double

that amount or half that amount with equal profit to himself, for the

account was “carried over,” and no ledger remains to tell the tale.[54]

Tobias Smollett paid two visits to Edinburgh, the last in 1766, when he

stayed with his sister, Mrs. Telfer of Scotstoun, in St. John Street.

This street, then inhabited by some of the aristocracy of Edinburgh,

still retains a distinguished look; and much of the fine old

architecture remains, including Mrs. Telfer’s home, which was in the

first floor of the house over the great archway through which the street

is entered. This house, which was previously the residence of the Earl

of Hopetoun, attracts the eye immediately by its turnpike stair,

occupying the corner of the street, beside the arched entrance. Smollett

was introduced by Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk to Edinburgh literary

celebrities, among them Home, who had so scandalised his brother clergy

by writing a play,--“The Douglas”; and, like Gay thirty years before, he

haunted Allan Ramsay’s library,--in Smollett’s day the property of

Alexander Kincaid the publisher. _Humphrey Clinker_ contains all

Smollett’s comments on Edinburgh society, men, and manners.

Three years later, in 1769, Benjamin Franklin visited Edinburgh. He was

given the freedom of the city, and was accorded the usual hospitable

welcome from all the chief people of the town.

On a Saturday evening in August 1773, Dr. Johnson’s huge figure filled

the doorway of the old Whitehorse Inn in Boyd’s Close, and presently

Boswell, in his house in James’s Court, received the following note:--

_Saturday night._

Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being newly

arrived at Boyd’s.

Boswell hurried off to welcome the traveller, and found him roaring

passionately at the waiter, who had put sugar into the lemonade with his

fingers. Out into the hot August evening the two friends went, and

walked up the High Street arm-in-arm to James’s Court, where Mrs.

Boswell waited to administer tea to her ponderous rival. “Boswell has

very handsome and spacious rooms,” Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “level

with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other, four stories

high.” Here Mr. and Mrs. Boswell invited all the people of brilliant

achievement in the city to meet him,--Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Mrs.

Murray of Henderland, Allan Ramsay the artist, Beattie the poet, Lord

Kames, Lord Hailes, and many others; but among them was the Duchess of

Douglas, “talking broad Scotch with a paralytic voice,” and Dr. Johnson

showed open preference for her society. What all these people thought of

Dr. Johnson is suggested by the wit of Henry Erskine, the well-known

Edinburgh advocate, brother of the Earl of Buchan. After much inimitable

politeness and good-humour during his presentation to Johnson, he

slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand for the sight of “your English

bear.” Mrs. Boswell (_née_ Montgomery, one of the Eglintoun family) was

equally

[Illustration: OLD HOUSES IN CANONGATE

In the foreground of the picture are the piers and entrance gates of the

Canongate Parish Church. Past the shaft of the cross on the other side

of the Canongate is the opening into Bakehouse Close. The timber-fronted

houses with their gables present as picturesque an appearance as any in

Edinburgh.]

witty and even more frank. She had certainly some provocation, because,

as Boswell himself tells, Dr. Johnson had, among other habits, one of

turning the candles upside down when they did not burn brightly enough.

“I have often seen a bear led by a man,” the much-tried hostess told her

infatuated lord, “but I never before saw a man led by a bear.”

Boswell not only invited all Edinburgh to meet Dr. Johnson, but took Dr.

Johnson to all the sights of the city. On Sunday, after they had

attended service in the Episcopal chapel in Blackfriars Wynd, Johnson

saw Holyrood; and, under the guidance of Principal Robertson, he and

Boswell went over the University. Boswell also took his guest to the

island of Inchkeith, and to stay with Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield

for a few days, and they dined and drank tea at the old inn at Roslin,

and

Went to Hawthornden’s fair scene by night,

Lest e’er a Scottish tree should wound his sight.

Many of Dr. Johnson’s comments on things Scottish were quite genial; but

two terse ones expressed decided disapproval. “No, Sir!” he bellowed,

when some one proposed to introduce him to David Hume. And again, “I can

smell you in the dark!” he grumbled to Boswell, no doubt most

truthfully, as they walked through the city.

A year after Dr. Johnson’s visit there came to Edinburgh and its

hospitalities another Englishman. Captain Topham cannot be called a

famous visitor, but he deserves mention, both because of his charming

little book, _Letters from Edinburgh, written in the Years 1774 and

1775_, and because of the artistic contrast he forms to Dr. Johnson.

Captain Topham must have re-established his country’s character for good

manners in the opinion of Edinburgh citizens. He had not compiled a

dictionary; neither had he “kept a school and ca’d it an academy,” as

old Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, said of Johnson; but he was a

wide-minded man of good breeding, had been educated at Eton and Trinity

College, Cambridge, had travelled, and held a commission in the Guards,

and seems to have been equipped for enjoying social existence, and

adding to its enjoyment by others. He was by no means sparing in his

comments; his humour would make that impossible. Amid all his graphic

descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the

city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as

extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense

hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views

uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for

carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” He tells of the bad inns,

and here again his good-humour saves him. No swearing at the waiter

without sugar-tongs, but--“Well, said I to my friend (for you must know

that I have more patience on these occasions than wit on any other)

there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to

repose ourselves at some coffeehouse.” He describes the amusements,--the

theatre, the assemblies and dances, the oyster cellars, the funerals,

and the executions. The Kirk and devotion, the University and education,

trade and the booksellers, all are spoken of. He gives a warm picture of

a very friendly and hospitable town, simple in its ways and hours and

incomes and requirements, but brimful of intellect and cultured love of

letters and music, and peopled by a kindly, couthy race, with very

strongly marked characters, dwelling together in unity at very close

quarters.

The only social error Captain Topham seems to have made was when a lady

invited him to an oyster supper in a cellar. He “agreed immediately,”

but complains pathetically to his correspondent, “You will not think it

very odd that I should expect, from the place where the appointment was

made, to have had a _partie tête-à-tête_. I thought I was bound in

honour to keep it a secret, and waited with great impatience till the

hour arrived. When the clock struck the hour fixed on, away I went, and

inquired if the lady were there. ‘Oh yes,’ cried the woman, ‘she has

been here an hour or more.’ I had just time to curse my want of

punctuality when the door opened, and I had the pleasure of being

ushered in, not to one lady as I had expected, but to a large and

brilliant company of both sexes, most of whom I had the honour of being

acquainted with.”

But even Captain Topham’s amiable temper has its limits. Of two things

he speaks evil,--of his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, and of a haggis.

In November 1786 Burns paid his first and famous visit to Edinburgh. He

came, dejected, unknown, his mind hovering on the thoughts of intended

exile; and in a moment, as it were, Edinburgh recognised him, and

flashed on all her lights to welcome him and do his genius honour. There

followed the most brilliant and triumphant period of all his short life.

He was fêted and lionised by all ranks of society; the magnates and the

celebrities, the literary and the learned, the high-born and the

low-born, the fashionable and the gay, beautiful women and great men,

vied with each other in entertaining this wonderful poet with the rustic

garb and the dark eyes. Burns was the honoured and petted guest of every

man and woman of note in Edinburgh--of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo,

of Sir John Whiteford, of the Ferriers at 15 George Street, of the

eccentric Lord Monboddo and his “angel” daughter at 13 St. John Street,

and of a hundred more. He rollicked in Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s

Wynd, or, among the “Crochallan Fencibles,” listened to Dawney Douglas

quavering the minor pathos of his Gaelic song, “Cro Chalien.” He stood

bareheaded beside the unmarked grave of Fergusson in the Canongate

Churchyard, and knelt and kissed the spot, and sent to ask if the

“Ayrshire ploughman” might erect a stone to the memory of the poet to

whom he owed so much. He read aloud his “Cottar’s Saturday Night” before

the young Duchess of Gordon and the lovely Miss Burnet, and bewildered

them with his fascination and his genius. He published his Edinburgh

edition of his poems, and dedicated them to the Caledonian Hunt; and

the names of all his admirers and hosts are still there--a long list of

good, well-known Scottish names.

In 1786 there occurred the memorable meeting, at the house of Professor

Adam Fergusson, between Burns and Scott. There was a gathering of

“several gentlemen of literary reputation,” and Scott, a boy of fifteen,

was present. Scott “had sense and feeling enough to be much interested

in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him,” but, with

the better manners of that period, “of course we youngsters sat silent

and listened.” Burns was affected by one of the pictures on the wall,

and the lines printed beneath it. He “actually shed tears,” and asked

whose the lines were. None of the “gentlemen of literary reputation”

volunteering the information, Scott whispered to a friend that they were

Langhorne’s, and the friend told Burns, who turned to the boy with a

“look and a word.” “You’ll be a man yet!” is what Burns said: and those

words and that look are all the link between these two great Scottish

poets, who “spoke each other in passing.”

It was not until December 1787 that Burns met “Clarinda,” the very

lovely Mrs. M‘Lehose, a cousin-german of Lord Craig’s. She, forsaken by

her husband, lived in a house of three rooms in General’s Entry, between

Bristo Street and Potterrow. Burns had met her only once, at a tea-party

gathering, before--he having met with a carriage accident and being

unable to leave his lodgings--their famous “Clarinda and Sylvander”

correspondence began. Clarinda possessed more than beauty, as her

letters and verses show. There were many beautiful faces in Edinburgh,

and Burns has immortalised them in his eulogies--Miss Burnet, Miss

Ferrier, Miss Whiteford; but poor Clarinda’s verses he has mingled with

his own. It is said that it was these two marvellous lines of hers that

first struck him:--

Talk not to me of Love! for Love hath been my foe.

He bound me with an iron chain, and flung me deep in woe.

Clarinda continued to live on in Edinburgh, and died there when nearly

eighty, with a picture of the long-dead Sylvander beside her.

Of all comments on Edinburgh the best-known is Burns’s passionate

salutation to the venerable city:--

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and towers,

Where once beneath a monarch’s feet

Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers.

From marking wildly scattered flowers,

As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,

And singing, lone, the lingering hours,

I shelter in thy honoured shade.

Here wealth still swells the golden tide,

As busy trade his labour plies;

There Architecture’s noble pride

Bids elegance and splendour rise;

Here Justice, from her native skies,

High wields her balance and her rod;

There Learning, with his eagle eyes,

Seeks science in her coy abode.

There, watching high the least alarms,

Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar,

Like some bold veteran grey in arms,

And marked with many a seamy scar:

The ponderous wall and massy bar,

Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,

Have oft withstood assailing war,

And oft repelled the invader’s shock.

With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears

I view that noble, stately dome,

Where Scotia’s kings of other years,

Famed heroes! had their royal home.

Alas, how changed the times to come!

Their royal name low in the dust!

Their hapless race wild-wandering roam,

Though rigid law cries out, ’Twas just!

Wild beats my heart to trace your steps,

Whose ancestors, in days of yore,

Through hostile ranks and ruined gaps

Old Scotia’s bloody lion bore:

Even I who sing in rustic lore,

Haply, _my_ sires have left their shed,

And faced grim danger’s loudest roar,

Bold following where your fathers led!

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and towers!

Where once beneath a monarch’s feet

Sat Legislation’s sovereign powers!

From marking wildly scattered flowers,

As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,

And singing, lone, the lingering hours,

I shelter in thy honoured shade.

PART II

THE NEW TOWN

CHAPTER VII

THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR

Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,

Yea, an imperial city that might hold

Five times a hundred noble towns in fee,

And either with their might of Babel old,

Or the rich Roman pomp of empery,

Might stand compare, highest in arts enrolled,

Highest in arms, brave tenement for the free

Who never crouch to thrones, nor sin for gold.

Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage

Of clear bold hills that curve her very streets,

As if to vindicate, ’mid choicest seats

Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty;

And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage

Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.

ARTHUR HALLAM, _Sonnet to Edinburgh_.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque,

odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers

describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand

inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined

area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,”

however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields

and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and

sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea--a perfect _El

Dorado_ for the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the

high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and

wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a

deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old

state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood,

with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this

street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes

leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the

south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock.

“Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “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 or 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.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar,

compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and

[Illustration: PRINCES STREET FROM THE STEPS OF THE NEW CLUB

The spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in

the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of

the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North

British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing

over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is

carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.]

simple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single

stair, knew and took an interest in each other. 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.... The jostle and

huddlement was extreme everywhere.” And the overcrowding!

“A country gentleman and a lawyer, not long after raised to the Bench,

lived with his wife and children and servants in three rooms and a

kitchen. A wealthy goldsmith had a dwelling of two small rooms above his

booth, 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.”[55] Edinburgh citizens came to consider the highest storeys

in their tall “lands” the most desirable; and the tale is told of one

old Edinburgh gentleman who, on a visit to London, expressed pleased

surprise that the top flat where he had perched himself was the cheapest

in the house. On being gently enlightened that this was in consequence

of its being also the least thought of, he replied that he kent fine

what gentility was, and after having lived sixteen storeys up all his

life, was not going to come down in the world.

The first efforts at extension of the town were due to a private

commercial speculation. The open country beyond the Nor’ Loch and the

“Lang Dykes” was inaccessible till an Act of Parliament could be passed

and drastic measures taken; and, where Acts of Parliament are

necessary, progress is slow. Whilst time was passing, and others were

talking and scheming for the public good, a builder named George Brown

saw that the tide had come in his affairs, and took it at the flood and

made his fortune. He built, with stones from Craigmillar Quarry, two

squares of substantial dwelling-houses. The first built and bigger of

these was George Square, whose site had formerly been part of the park

of Ross House, the suburban residence of the Lords Ross, where

later--after 1753--the famous George Lockhart of Carnwath had lived. The

smaller square, Brown Square, was built after the first had proved a

success, and several of the houses in it been taken by well-known

citizens. George Square is still, though hemmed in by poor localities on

three sides, a favourite place of residence, with a pleasant garden in

the centre, and “the Meadows” near at hand. Here it was, at number 25,

that Scott’s father lived, and part of Scott’s boyhood was spent. Brown

Square has not survived socially, though it, too, has had its notable

residents. It was from Brown Square that Lord Glenlee, the last person

to use a sedan-chair in Edinburgh, used to sally forth in wig and cocked

hat, in knee-breeches and silk stockings and buckled shoes; and in Brown

Square there once lived the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” Miss

Jeanie Elliott of Minto, one of the many gifted Jacobite ladies of

Jacobite Edinburgh. These two squares formed a little southern colony by

themselves, confined their hospitalities to themselves, and, in fact,

as the Scottish phrase says, “kept themselves to themselves.”

At last, in 1767, the Act of Parliament for extending the city over the

northern fields was passed, and the North Bridge was built from the High

Street across the valley. And then, suddenly, as with the touch of a

magician’s wand, the beginnings of the New Town of Edinburgh came into

being: stately squares and noble buildings, wide, broad streets that put

London thoroughfares to shame, graceful curved terraces and crescents;

all the cold dignity of unlimited grey stone--stone pavements, stone

roads, stone houses; and, nestling in every crevice of the stone, the

green of the invaded country. New Edinburgh, like Jonah’s gourd, sprang

up in a night, to shade many a prophet.

And who wielded the magician’s wand? The name of Lord Provost Drummond

ought to be remembered in Edinburgh, of which, like a veritable Dick

Whittington, he was six times Lord Provost. He was a man of public

spirit and large enterprise, who brought dignity on himself and his

office and his city. The New Town dates from his Provostship. At first,

however, as all pioneers must do, he saw men look askance at the

triumphs of his energy. He was probably called extravagant, and accused

of squandering public money. “The scheme was at first far from popular,”

Mr. Robert Chambers tells his readers. “The exposure to the north and

east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses

were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered, that a

lover told a New Town mistress--to be sure only in an epigram--that

when he visited her he felt as performing an adventure not much short of

that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of

pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers

should forget them, if they removed so far from the centre of things as

Princes Street and St. Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable,

and behoved to be made.”[56]

And then the bees swarmed.

Those of the Scottish nobles whom the Union had left in the capital took

their persons and their households across the valley to the New Town,

and left their family mansions and their family traditions behind them

in the Old. All the legal dignitaries--Lord President, Lord Justice

Clerk, Lord Advocate, Dean of Faculty, Solicitor-General, Lords of

Council and Session--all those “carls” whom James VI. had made “lairds,”

accompanied by the “carlins” whom he had declined to make “leddies”; the

advocates, the “writers”; all the old Scottish “gentry,” the wealthy

burghers: all hurried out of their closes and took up their residences

in the big new houses across the Nor’ Loch.

Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and so do landlords; and the deserted

High Street and Canongate filled up rapidly with humbler citizens. “The

Lord Justice Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher, Lord

President Craigie’s house by a rouping wife or saleswoman 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!”[57]

David Hume was one of the bees who swarmed. He was buzzing busily on the

third floor of a house in James’s Court with (what was particularly

characteristic of Edinburgh houses of that period, but perhaps not so

appealing to Hume as to some others) two little oratories, one off his

dining-room and one out of his drawing-room. But neither the oratories

nor the view to the north from his windows had the power to retain him.

He spread his wings and alighted on the west corner house on the south

side of St. Andrew Square. When his house at the corner was almost the

only one in the street leading from Princes Street to St. Andrew Square,

and before the names of the New Town streets had been inscribed on them,

Dr. Webster, a humorous minister, wrote in chalk on the great sceptic’s

dwelling “Saint David’s Street.” Hume’s old servant ran indignantly to

her master to tell him; but Hume was a humorist too. “Weel, weel,

Janet,” he said, “never mind. I am not the first man of sense that has

been made a saint of.”

St. David Street it remains to this day.

Sir Laurence Dundas built himself a house in St. Andrew Square, but lost

it in play to General Scott, a noted gambler, who staked £30,000 against

it. Sir Laurence retained his house, however, by building General Scott

another mansion-house, “Bellevue,” which for long stood in the centre

of Drummond Place.

Along the line of the present Princes Street had formerly been the “Lang

Gait,” or “Lang Dykes,” a rough road through rough country, where

Claverhouse had clattered angrily towards the Highlands at the head of

his troopers. This had been the scene of many a footpad robbery and

murder, and many lovers’ evening strolls; but, when the New Town was

built, it gradually was feued out, from east to west; and along it were

built a single line of houses looking right across the valley and up

towards the Old Town. It was proposed to call this--the principal street

of New Edinburgh--“St. Giles Street,” after the patron saint of

Edinburgh, which would have been a very appropriate name, and a slight

offer of amends to the Saint for the insult offered to his effigy when

the rude-minded rabble ducked it in the Nor’ Loch in the first days of

the Reformation. However, George III. objected. “Hey, hey--what, what?

St. Giles Street! never do! never do!” No doubt to Londoners the name

might awaken associations with a neighbourhood unknown beyond London;

but George III. showed some ignorance of Scottish history, for the

district of St. Giles in London owes its name to the founder of a leper

hospital--Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who,

when Queen of England, evidently sometimes felt a little homesick and

very patriotic, and bestowed on her charity the name of the patron saint

of Edinburgh.

And what became of the Nor’ Loch? The citizens had no longer to swim

across it two at a time on a collier’s horse, as had the Hamiltons after

the “Cleanse the Causeway” battle. The Nor’ Loch, formed in 1450 when

first Edinburgh was walled, had done its duty and had its day, and was

drained; and its place--now well-kept gardens--was for long a boggy

morass. Across this morass some Lawnmarket shopkeepers were accustomed

to make their way to investigate the progress of the new city; and, as

the ground was marshy and muddy, they laid a few planks across to form a

foot-bridge. George Boyd, a dealer in tartan, called “Five o’clock,” in

jocular allusion to his bandy legs, seems to have been particularly

impressed by the plank bridge; and, when some loose earth from a quarry

fell on it and made the bridge more secure, his mind, which worked

better than his legs, caught at the suggestion that the earth flung out

by the builders from the foundations of the New Town might form a bridge

across the valley. The suggestion was adopted, and the earth, to the

amount, it has been calculated, of about two million cartloads, was

deposited and a great mound formed in the valley of the Nor’ Loch, just

below the centre of the High Street; and “Geordie Boyd’s brig” became

“the Earthen Mound,” and so continued to be called until well on in the

nineteenth century. So, indeed, one well-known and venerable Edinburgh

citizen still speaks of it.

And this is how, within about forty years of its first conception, the

New Town of Edinburgh spread itself over the plain and superseded the

crumbling cluster of seven centuries. And this is how modern Edinburgh

presents that curious spectacle, unknown in any other town, of two

distinct divisions, divided topographically as well as historically and

socially--Old Edinburgh and New Edinburgh.

CHAPTER VIII

THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE

Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about

him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve

others when he could, utter absence of envy or real

ill-will,--these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his

life and in the succession of his writings.... Positively, when I

contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how

free he was from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany

and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of

excellence ... positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can

express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him

to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.

PROFESSOR MASSON’S _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_.

It is easy to trace Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh life from door to door.

The house in the College Wynd, in which, on August 15, 1771, he was

born, was pulled down in his lifetime. Sir Walter once pointed out its

site to Mr. Robert Chambers during one of their walks together, and told

him that his father had “received a fair price for his portion of it”;

and, when Mr. Chambers naturally suggested that more money might have

been made and the public much more gratified had Scott’s birthplace been

retained to be shown,--“Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well;

but I am afraid I should have required to be dead first, and that would

not have been so comfortable, you know.”

The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands,

looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy

lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep

and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped

backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from

the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired

him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School

boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High

School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George

Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he

was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep

feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s

wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over

Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his

father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own

small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books

than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins,

and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a

little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest

[Illustration: THE HIGH SCHOOL AND BURNS’S MONUMENT FROM JEFFREY STREET

To the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part

of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine

classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern

slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme

left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.]

treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,--possibly unknown

to the father upstairs,--the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and

whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time

Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night,

of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and

remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after

the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but

woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was

silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and

two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so

long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be

a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But

Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his

guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the

empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the

night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes

after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]

It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square,

that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had

asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young

Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not

extend his approval of Scott and of the paper on Ballads to this sunk

den,--or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his

father’s house?--for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern.

No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the

treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton

saucer” had come by its widowed condition.

It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his

friend Clerk--a friendship made in the High School days, to last through

life--read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature

and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to

it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George

Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes

Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy

fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’s _Analysis of the

Institutes and Pandects_ and Erskine’s _Institutes of the Law of

Scotland_. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.

They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony

was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall,

till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass

waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron,

hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose,

however, Scott had earned his first guinea,--and he spent it on a silver

taper-stand for his mother.

It was all in Edinburgh--all his “supreme moments.” Was it not in a

shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love?

Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott

offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it.

Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his

dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks--more

talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other

father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had

been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart

Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank

was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the

romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to

Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the

beloved Scottish Highlands--

Never the time and the place and the loved one all together.

She married Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Of course she did. Had it

not been ordained since the beginning of time that she who had won the

first love of Walter Scott was to marry another? Who knows her story?

Who, for the matter of that, knows his? Who has measured the influence

on his life?

It was in Edinburgh that Scott’s youth passed, and that most of the

happenings took place that went to the making of him. In Edinburgh was

clustered his group of friends: Clerk (afterwards the original of

“Darsie Latimer”); Thomas Thomson, the legal antiquary; John Irving;

Adam Ferguson; George Cranstoun (afterwards Lord Corehouse); George

Abercromby (Lord Abercromby); Patrick Murray of Simprim; Patrick Murray

of Auchtertyre; and, most congenial of all to Scott’s own nature,

Erskine, the son of a Scottish Episcopalian clergyman of good family,

and the only Tory, save Scott himself, among the set of young Whigs then

predominant at Parliament House.

In those days Scott indulged in many rambles to the Borders or the

Highlands, to interesting neighbourhoods and historic houses and worthy

hosts; but it was from one of these excursions that he returned to

Edinburgh to see the execution of Watt the republican; and it was in the

Edinburgh theatre that he assisted to break the heads of a band of young

Irish rowdies who howled and hooted during the National Anthem; and it

was in Edinburgh that he haunted the vaults below Parliament House among

hoards of MSS. and deeds, and came up again steeped in dust and lore to

be made a curator of the Advocates’ Library, with Professor David Hume

and Malcolm Laing the historian as his colleagues.

Scott’s first serious attempt at verse was a rhymed translation of

Bürger’s _Lenore_. It was written when he was four-and-twenty, and was

done under the inspiration of hearing that Mrs. Barbauld, then on her

first visit to Edinburgh, had read aloud Taylor’s then unpublished

version of it at a party at Dugald Stewart’s. Scott, already deeply

interested in German literature, was fired; and one morning before

breakfast he brought his translation to show to his friend Miss

Cranstoun.

Walter Scott was not without women friends. Miss Cranstoun, to whom he

brought his poem before breakfast, had already been his confidante in

his love-story. Of his young kinswoman, the wife of the head of his

family, Hugh Scott of Harden,--who was a daughter of Count Brühl

Martkirchen, Saxon Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, and Almeria,

Dowager Countess of Egremont--he says that she “was the first woman of

real fashion that took him up.”

It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism

found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers,

in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his

twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French

bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim

whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome

awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to

her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his

enthusiasms,--military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these

must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott

began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death.

Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house

at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following

summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes

near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage,

with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and

unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably

on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their

friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade

it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses

of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near--as the country counts

near--to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of

Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at

Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his

sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17,

1803. Scott was then writing the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and read

the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to

Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border

country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at

Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick

Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the

house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here

that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and

song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew

later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of

appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and

then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful

merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was

addressed as “Charlotte.”

When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was

an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines

so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know

me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious,

street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one

stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which

strong, pithy poetry excites.”

Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded

with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism,

and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to

the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of

his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow

against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a

jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no--’tis no laughing matter; little

by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine,

until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59]

When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff

of Selkirk, and the author of the successful _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,

and a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, under the editorship first

of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of

Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street--“poor 39”--as he lived

to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,--here, and at

Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which

superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest

home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the

brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It

was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,--here that

Crabbe stayed,--here that every one of worth or want found a ready

welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!--what scenes and what

voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners

took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his

intimates--Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend

Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir

Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny

dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the

artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the

dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two

armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the

book-ladder, and one picture--the beautiful, sad face of Graham of

Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting

historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian

desperado.”

It must have been in the window of this study that Scott sat writing

night after night, when the son of William Menzies, living at his

father’s house in George Street, looked across from the back windows of

their house to the back of Scott’s, when, at a gathering of “gay and

thoughtless” young men, mostly advocates, he asked one to change places

with him that he might not see a hand that fascinated his eye. “It never

stops--page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and

still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought

in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand it

is--’tis Walter Scott’s.”

It was in this self-same study that an attempt was made on Scott’s life

by a man named Webber, whose literary efforts Scott had befriended.

Webber had taken to drinking, and a sudden mad resentment against Scott

filled his unhinged mind. In this study Scott suddenly found himself

confronted by a madman with firearms, insisting on a duel then and

there; and it was only because of Scott’s absolute self-control and

courage that the great man’s life did not end in the year 1818. He

suggested that a duel in the house might disturb the ladies of the

family and had better be postponed till after dinner; and then, locking

up the pistols, he calmly brought Webber into the dining-room, and,

whilst they dined with an unconscious hostess, Scott sent for the young

man’s friends.

It was to Castle Street that Scott walked home across the Mound leaning

on his daughter’s arm, his own trembling, speaking not a word all the

way, on the day after the Scottish Regalia had been discovered. It was

owing to Scott’s representations to his friend the Prince Regent that

the Commission had been appointed to examine the Crown Room in the

Castle, and the long-lost Regalia had been brought to light. The next

day he and his fellow-commissioners had brought the ladies of their

families to view it, and Sophia Scott had been so wrought upon by the

sight that she had turned faint, and was drawing back from the group

when she heard her father’s voice, “something between anger and

despair,” exclaim, “By God, no!” and turned to see that one of the

Commissioners had been, in play, about to put the Scottish crown on the

head of a young girl present. The father and daughter walked home

together in silence, with a new sympathy between them.

It was of this very year, 1818, that Lockhart said: “At this moment, his

position, take it for all in all, was, I am inclined to believe, what no

other man had ever won for himself by the pen alone. His works were the

daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe. His

society was courted by whatever England could show of eminence. Station,

power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every

demonstration of respect and worship, and--a few political fanatics and

envious poetasters apart--wherever he appeared, in town or country,

whoever had Scotch blood in him, ‘gentle or simple,’ felt it move more

rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.”[60]

Lockhart goes on to say that, “descending to what many looked on as

higher things,” the annual profits of Scott’s novels alone had been for

several years not less than £10,000, and his Castle of Abbotsford was

being built, and “few doubted that ere long he might receive from the

just favour of his Prince some distinction in the way of external rank,

such as had seldom before been dreamt of as the possible consequences of

mere literary celebrity.”

On February 2, 1820, Scott took Prince Gustavus Vasa, and his attendant,

Baron Polier, who were spending some months in Edinburgh, to the window

over Constable’s shop in the High Street, to hear George IV. proclaimed

King at the site of the Cross. Here Scott lamented to the Prince the

“barbarity of the Auld Reekie Bailies,” who had removed the historic

Cross; and when the exiled Prince broke down on hearing the National

Anthem sung by the crowd, Scott drew Lockhart away into another window,

whispering: “Poor lad! poor lad! God help him!”

Scott’s friend and admirer the Prince Regent once King, the distinctions

came. In 1820 Scott went to London to receive the baronetcy which, as

Lord Sidmouth had told him, it had been the Prince Regent’s desire to

confer on him. Whilst in London he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his

portrait for the King, and to Chantrey for his bust, and the degree of

D.C.L. was offered him by both the English Universities. Three Edinburgh

distinctions were conferred on him. He was elected President of the

Royal Scottish Society; he was first President of the Bannatyne Club,

which he had founded; and he was appointed Professor of Ancient History

to the Royal Scottish Academy. Those years were his most active time as

a citizen as well as an author, for he was chairman of nearly every

public meeting, or charity, or educational scheme in the town. Every day

must have seen him limping along Princes Street, recognised by all,

coming from Parliament House, or his meetings, or his printer’s; perhaps

one of a group talking eagerly, pausing to disperse at the door of some

bookshop or on the steps of a club, or at the corner of Castle Street.

Many a head must have turned to gaze after the rugged familiar figure;

many a whisper to child or stranger must have followed him, “There,

look! That is Sir Walter Scott!”

In August 1822 George IV. paid his state visit to Edinburgh, and stayed

a fortnight in the capital of the ancient kingdom. This fortnight was

perhaps the proudest and most brilliant of Scott’s life,--“his supreme

moment”--and again it was in Edinburgh. The Tories, their dream of

Jacobitism dead with the Cardinal of York, were more personally loyal

than the Whigs; and Scott, most tory of Tories, was loyalest of the

loyal. It was his influence that had brought about the royal visit, and

on him devolved all the arrangements; and for weeks Castle Street was

like a green-room, filled by all the actors in the great play. When the

day came and in the rain the King’s yacht cast anchor in Leith

Roads--where Mary Stuart’s galleys had in the mist cast anchor on a

bygone August day--Scott rowed alongside and boarded the _Royal George_.

The King toasted him in native whisky; and Scott, in his enthusiasm,

asked leave to keep the glass. He put it, carefully wrapped up, in his

deep coat-tail pocket, and went home holding the skirt of his coat

carefully in front of him. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! At

Castle Street he found that Crabbe the poet had chosen this inopportune

season to arrive unexpectedly on a visit. Scott, ever hospitable,

welcomed him warmly, and promptly sat down beside him; and crash!--the

glass was smashed to atoms.

At six next morning, Queen Street--that sober terrace!--saw Sir Walter

Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a

little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39

Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home

to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he

discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and

decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by

huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by

collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring

to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an

Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the

strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in

French, had been promptly taken by them for a French _abbé_.

Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything.

Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the

levées and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday,

at the performance by Murray’s company of _Rob Roy_, and at the banquet

given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was

Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in

copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in

his _Life of Scott_, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the

arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George

became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on

them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the

banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the

Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day

think the kilt the national--if not the usual--dress of the Scot, and

that _Punch_ makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak

Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit--also due to Sir Walter

Scott’s influence--were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson,

Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish

portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much

correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745

were restored.

Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It

was a cold January morning--seven o’clock--when Skene arrived, and

Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand:

mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance

poured in--from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh,

from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the

banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in

his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at

periods most interesting for me. Down--down--a hundred thoughts.”

No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That

eident hand!...

Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... _Ha

til mi tulidh._”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in

North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at

Abbotsford. And so--first there, and then next winter alone with his

youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at

No. 6 Shandwick Place,--Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in

Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in

the days of his prosperity.

Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it

may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to

Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and

lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in

Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her

again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished,

not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY

And the days of auld lang syne.

BURNS.

Social Edinburgh of yesterday,--that is to say, the social life of

Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen

Victoria,--what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during

those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and

what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds

of names rise in the memory--names of all sorts and conditions of men,

“thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery

in the background of all those lives--a piling up of noble architecture

against the cloudy Scottish sky; a running up of numberless “long

unlovely streets”; a constant pulling down of dear, dirty, historic

dwellings; an occasional restoration of some ancient building; a

widening out of all the suburbs. It means many statues in the streets of

those who once were alive in them. It means the intersection of the

heart of the beautiful city by gleaming lines of rail, and overhead by

gleaming telegraph and telephone wires; it means the light of

electricity flashing suddenly through the town, and the old gas-lamps

burning dimly, and then put out for the last time; it means railway

whistles and cable tramway bells; it means smoke rising from miles and

miles of cold grey streets. But it is still the smoke of domestic fires,

as in the days when Gavin Douglas, waking on a winter morning in 1512,

“bade beit the fire and the candel allicht,” and _not_ the smoke of

belching chimneys of commerce. Edinburgh, as befits her intellect,

prints and publishes; and, as befits her climate, she brews and distils;

and the streams that flow down her valleys towards the Firth of Forth

pass on their way many mills that provide paper for printers and

authors; but farther than this she declines to go.

During Scott’s lifetime there were living in Edinburgh a remarkable

cluster of men; and some of those who, as young men, had been his

fellow-citizens, survived him right on until past the middle of the

century, and wrote their names large in the annals not only of Edinburgh

but of the world, before they too in their turn passed away. In

literature, during Scott’s lifetime, there was the immortal Baroness

Nairne, of the “weel-kent” Jacobite and Episcopalian family, the

Oliphants of Gask. Baroness Nairne, while she lived and when she

died,--during the meetings she must have had with Scott at the house of

her sister, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston,--was all the time the unavowed

author of some of the best-loved and best-known of our national songs.

There were Jeffrey the critic, Lord Cockburn, Henry Mackenzie, the “Man

of Feeling,” Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Campbell the poet, M‘Crie, the

historian and biographer of Knox, Dugald Stewart, and his antagonist,

Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Allan, the artist, Sir Henry Raeburn, the

great Scottish portrait-painter, Miss Ferrier, the novelist, Dr.

Alexander Murray, the philologist, Kirkpatrick Sharpe of the bitter

tongue, and David Laing, the kindly antiquary. In 1817 _Blackwood’s

Magazine_ had been started in Tory rivalry to the Whiggism of Jeffrey’s

_Edinburgh Review_; and in 1832, the very year of Scott’s death, William

and Robert Chambers began the publication of _Chambers’s Edinburgh

Journal_. Robert Chambers--who may be regarded, in virtue of his

long-unacknowledged _Vestiges of Creation_, as the forerunner of

Darwin--had, as a boy of twenty, written his inimitable _Traditions of

Edinburgh_. The compiling of the _Traditions_ had brought him at once

under the astonished and delighted notice of Scott, and begun a

friendship between them, resulting in many walks all about Edinburgh,

and many talks--also all about Edinburgh. After Scott’s death there were

in Edinburgh many notabilities. There was a brilliant literary coterie

scintillating in the Blackwood Saloon: Professor Wilson, “Christopher

North”; Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart; Professor Wilson’s son-in-law,

Professor Aytoun, the writer of those stirring national ballads that

have thrilled so many Scottish hearts; Hogg, enticed from his Ettrick

pastures into the turmoil of _Noctes Ambrosianæ_; Dr. Moir, known as

“Delta.” These names are associated with the early days of _Blackwood_,

as are those of Lord Jeffrey, Lord Brougham, and Lord Cockburn with the

early days of the _Edinburgh Review_. Sir William Hamilton was living at

16 Great King Street; and somewhere in Edinburgh, invisible as a

microbe, but as far-reaching in achievement, there was the quaint little

figure of De Quincey. In one of a row of small houses in Comely Bank, on

the north-west outskirts of the city, lived Thomas Carlyle. Among the

judges were Lord Jeffrey and Lord Cockburn, survivors of the Whig party

of Scott’s days, and Lord Neaves, a staunch Conservative. Chiefest among

the Presbyterian Scottish clergy was the great Dr. Chalmers, and grouped

with him were Dr. Cunningham, Dr. Guthrie, and Dr. Candlish. Chiefest

among the Episcopalian Scottish clergy was the much-loved Scotsman, Dean

Ramsay, author of _Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character_.

In 1842 Queen Victoria paid her first royal visit to her Scottish

capital. She came, like George IV., by sea, and arrived at Granton on

September 1--most opportunely, for it was St. Giles’s Day. In the

following year, 1843, a great event occurred in the history of the

Church of Scotland, and the scene of its enactment was St. Andrew’s

Church in George Street, Edinburgh. No nation, it is said, knows

anything of what lies north of it. France knows nothing about England:

England’s ignorance in all regarding Scotland is supreme. Ask the

average Englishman what is meant by “the Disruption,” and he will stare

at you. And yet the Disruption was the outcome of a controversy that

agitated Scotland for years, a controversy strong enough to split the

Church of Scotland into two. Three years after the Disruption, the

“Philosophical Institution” was founded, and this was an event in the

history of intellectual and social Edinburgh that can best be valued

when it is remembered that among the first presidents were such men as

Lord Macaulay, Lord Brougham, Thomas Carlyle, and Adam Black, and that

among the first lecturers who came to Edinburgh by invitation of the

Philosophical were Dickens and Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Charles

Kingsley, and Ruskin, who so roundly abused our New Town architecture.

Through the second half of the century, social Edinburgh was proud of

such men as Sir James Y. Simpson, the discoverer of the anæsthetic

properties of chloroform; Dr. John Brown, the author of _Rab and his

Friends_; Hugh Miller, the geologist, author of _Old Red Sandstone_;

Alexander Smith, the poet; John Skelton, the essayist and historian;

Alexander Russel, the witty editor of the _Scotsman_; Dr. John Hill

Burton, the Historiographer-Royal; and Skene, his successor in that

office, who was the son of Sir Walter Scott’s old friend. George Combe

lived in Edinburgh until 1858; and in the University, besides those

already named, were Sir David Brewster, Sir Robert Christison, Professor

Syme, John Goodsir, Lyon Playfair, and Professor Tait. And does not the

whole of Listerian surgery date from Edinburgh? And is not Lister’s own

great original “spray,” though long since superannuated, still the

glory of an Edinburgh Infirmary ward? Through the last hours of

yesterday, Edinburgh was familiar with the picturesque figure of

Professor Blackie in his plaid, with his beautiful old face framed in

its silver hair, and his joyous Celtic exuberance and enthusiasms that

so often startled the sober Scot. He, too, is gone.

When, in 1884, Edinburgh University, “the Town College,” celebrated her

Tercentenary, and invited all the greatest celebrities of Europe to

attend it, the streets of the sober grey city were for one wondrous week

illuminated by flashes of academic colours and faces of foreign poets

and soldiers, foreign men of science and statesmen, foreign historians

and philosophers, foreign theologians and artists; Englishmen,

Canadians, and Americans; Frenchmen, Germans, and Austrians; Russians,

Italians, and Greeks. It was a week of compliments and fireworks, of

lions and lionising, when every one who wished saw his own special

Shelley plain, and he stopped and spoke to him; and then all the great

European savants went away again, the richer by another honorary degree,

and left Edinburgh to calm down again, the richer by another memory.

The town itself has changed greatly since the days when Cockburn,

Jeffrey, and Horner stood in Queen Street and listened to the corncrake

in the fields stretching between them and the sea. It has changed since

they lamented the cutting down of the trees round “Bellevue,” the

beautiful house of General Scott, in the centre of Drummond Place. It

has changed since the “Highland Lady” spent the winters of her girlhood

there, attended the routs and balls, and walked in Princes Street

attired in a white gown, a pink spencer, yellow tan boots with dangling

tassels, and a deep-poked bonnet with three tall white ostrich feathers

held aloft by the wind. The men and women who felt Edinburgh their own

during the first half of last century would scarcely find their way

about it to-day; they would wander through vast tracts of busy streets

where for them were green fields and yellow whins, and discover further

indentations of the country in new suburbs embracing fragments of old

villages, or enclosing in a new street some ancient castle or homestead.

Merchiston Castle, for instance, the home of the Napiers, a hoary and

battlemented old keep, now stands within a walled garden among modern

villas; and the fine old turreted dwelling of Chiesley of Dalry is now

imbedded in mean streets, and saved from ignominy, and kept clean and

orderly, by being an Episcopalian Training College. The various new

buildings that have sprung up during the Victorian era to decorate or to

deface the city are of course too numerous to mention; but a few of them

are closely connected with the social life of Edinburgh yesterday. “It

is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the

architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter

Scott,” writes the author of _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_; “the

finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth

to the memory of a man of letters.”[63] It stands on the green velvet

of the grass of Princes Street Gardens, noblest in the long line of

statues of Edinburgh’s notable citizens, facing the gayest and most

crowded thoroughfare of the modern city; but through its fine Gothic

arches one sees the old town Scott loved so well.

The University New Buildings have considerably enlarged the University

itself; and the M‘Ewan Hall has been further added to it by the

generosity of Mr. William M‘Ewan, and the Students’ Union by the efforts

of the ladies of the University and the town; and Mr. Andrew Carnegie

has given Edinburgh its splendid Public Library.

In 1879 there was consecrated the great Cathedral Church of St. Mary,

then the largest ecclesiastical building that had been built in Britain

since the Reformation.[64] The Cathedral was built by endowment of the

Misses Walker, and the architect was Sir Gilbert Scott. It stands at the

west end of Edinburgh, and its grounds include Old Coates House, one of

the two or three houses that stood beyond the Nor’ Loch in the days

before the New Town was thought of.

In 1887 the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street was presented to

Edinburgh by the late Mr. J. R. Findlay; and though many of the

portraits of our

[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT’S MONUMENT FROM THE EAST PRINCES ST.

GARDENS

On the higher level above the green slope lies the part of the Gardens

fronting Princes Street. The monument gains in height viewed from this

lower level. The tower in the distance is that attached to the North

British Railway Hotel.]

great dead, like the faces of our great living, have gone to London, yet

there is now a goodly collection of national portraits in the capital of

Scotland. And there must not be forgotten the greatest building of

all--if building it can be called--that has been achieved near Edinburgh

during yesterday: the Forth Bridge, the highest bridge in the world,

finished in 1890, with its monster claws planted firmly on either side

of the Firth of Forth, just where Queen Margaret and Malcolm Canmore

used to be ferried to and fro on their journeyings between Edinburgh

Castle and Dunfermline Palace.

It is not only by the building of new edifices that wealthy citizens

have generously endowed Edinburgh; there is another form of patriotism

which seeks to restore the old, and two such inestimable benefits have

been conferred not only on Edinburgh, but on all who visit her, and who

venerate the past. In 1883 the late Mr. William Chambers restored with

reverence and taste the Church of St. Giles, which had been half ruined

by ruthless vandalism in 1829, and in 1892 the late Mr. Thomas Nelson

restored magnificently the splendid old hall of the Castle, the scene of

so many banquets and so many Parliaments, and of not a few

tragedies.[65]

CHAPTER X

THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

The Tropics vanish; and meseems that I

From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir

Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.

Far set in fields and woods, the town I see

Spring gallant from the shadow of her smoke,

Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagged.

R. L. STEVENSON.

Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering his Edinburgh days, must have

remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town

house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set

low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little

Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence,

nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands.

During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row

was his home proper. Heriot Row, one of the pleasantest resident streets

in Edinburgh, is, like all Edinburgh resident streets, a row of grey

stone houses built in absolute uniformity. It is built on the northern

slope of the New City, parallel with the three large main

streets,--Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street,--but below

them, and is a single row of houses with an open outlook, facing the

green trees and turf of the gardens that stretch between Heriot Row and

Queen Street above. It was in the nursery facing the gardens and looking

up to the dignified dwellings of Queen Street through the trees that the

little fretful invalid child was soothed by his faithful Calvinistic

nurse, Alison Cunningham, and that on summer evenings, after he had gone

to bed, he lay listening to “grown-up people’s feet” on the street

below, and watching the birds in the trees.

Till yesterday, when electricity turned night into day, the lamplighter

used to go quickly at evening along the Edinburgh streets with his

ladder, fix the hook at the end of it into the cross-bar of each

lamp-post in turn, run up, lift off the glass top, and light the lamp.

Every small street urchin in Scotland knows the cry of “Leerie, Leerie,

licht the lamps!”--and the little town child, in his cosy Edinburgh

nursery, counted himself very lucky to have a lamp-post just before the

front door of his home, and used to sit until his tea was ready and

watch for “Leerie” posting down the street with his ladder and his

light.

The grandfather Balfour’s manse at Colinton was associated with holidays

when all the young cousins played in the dark, shabby, homelike rooms,

or, “sin without pardon,” broke the branches and got through a breach

in the garden wall, and so to the joys of the river.

It is all there to-day: the damp old harled manse beside the parish

church; the graveyard with its ancient tombs and the great iron

coffin,--memento of the days of “resurrectionist” terror; the great

swirling brown river under the magnificent trees of Colinton Dell; even

the “weir with its wonder of foam,” and the old mill with the “wheel in

the river.” It is one of the prettiest spots round Edinburgh, cool and

quiet, with the reflections of the branches on the brown, foam-flecked

surface of the deeper pools; and, close to the village end of the Dell,

where the tall, wonderful cedars stand high against the sky above the

manse and the church, there is a little fragment of ruin half-hidden

among the trees on the steep bank, and tradition speaks vaguely, but

suggestively, of a forgotten hermit and his cell.

The village itself is changed since Stevenson knew it. There is now a

little double line of railway passing through, and an occasional train

puffs out of a rocky tunnel into a little station, and presently

proceeds on its leisurely way up the valley. The old parts of Colinton

remain in picturesque patches, but round them has blossomed forth a

community of red-roofed, gabled houses, with quaint latticed windows,

and every shade of “harled” walls. They face every way; but whichever

way they face they command lovely views, seen through the clear, brisk

Midlothian air, across fields under the rule of the famed Midlothian

farming, and to the grand range of the Pentlands, with the beautiful,

richly-coloured valley between, and overhead a Scottish sky of great

fleecy clouds and deep blue vistas.

Of Stevenson it may be submitted that he was a wandering sheep who did

not love the fold; and his _Picturesque Notes_, for all their literary

value, are tinged with the Calvinism he learnt at his nurse’s knee, and

inhaled unconsciously in his native air, and that glooms his outlook

even whilst he is most jeeringly observant of its effects on others. He

was not happy in Edinburgh. But, underlying all the sarcasm, all the

sneers, all the bitterness and fretfulness--whether directed at

convention, custom, clothes, creeds, or climate--one seems to hear the

cry of despairing indignation of youth lacking its birthright of

strength and health.

It is pleasanter to think of Stevenson playing the truant from the

University, in his country haunts amid whins and whimsies, than of his

facing a “downright meteorological purgatory” in the “draughty

parallelograms” of the city. Every inch of the Pentlands, of Blackford

Hill, of the Braids, of “classic Hawthornden” and all the valley of the

Esk, of the windings of the Water of Leith and of the shores of the

Firth of Forth--all of it was known to the youthful Stevenson, known so

well and so faithfully that he could describe it afterwards from the

Tropics. But especially dear and homelike must the Pentlands have been

to him--the Pentlands, where the old manse of his boyish holidays lies,

and where “Little Swanston” of his later years still nestles in the

trees beside one of the most picturesque villages in Scotland, within

half-an-hour’s walk from Edinburgh. All the ground between Colinton and

Swanston is historic. Had the countryside kept a diary, the first leaves

would have been inscribed in Roman characters; for here was once a Roman

town, though all that now remains of the conquering race of the old

world is a little Roman bridge, and the great unhewn Battlestone

standing huge and awesome alone in a field, and telling of the battle

fought here, centuries ago, between the Picts and the Romans. A few

hundreds of pages farther on in the diary would come the stern words of

the persecuted Covenanters, who were encamped near here before the

battle of Rullion Green.

All this romance and lore was known to Stevenson and loved by him, as

well as he knew and loved the cry of the sea-gulls as they circled

overhead, or followed the plough with loud cries of hunger. Often must

the young Stevenson, with his strange face and long hair and his

eccentric garb, have climbed the steep hill road, past “Hunter’s Tryst,”

five hundred feet above sea-level, where, it is told, Allan Ramsay laid

the scenery of the _Gentle Shepherd_,[66] and where the members of the

Six Feet Club used to meet in the little roadside inn which Sir Walter

Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd both knew well. The quiet cart-road to

Swanston leads out of this road, a little beyond the sharp turn at

“Hunter’s Tryst,” and before the

[Illustration: ARTHUR’S SEAT FROM THE BRAID HILLS

In the immediate foreground is a portion of the Braid Hills; farther on

the Blackford Hill with the shelter on its highest point, and at the end

of the slope to the right the New Royal Observatory. To the left are

part of Edinburgh, the mass of the Castle, and the shores of Fife. The

Salisbury Crags and “Lion” of Arthur’s Seat are above all.]

cross-roads at Fairmilehead. It leads yet another hundred feet higher, a

gentle ascent between fields and pastures, and across a tiny trickling

burn fringed with willows, to the green slopes at the foot of

Caerketton, one of the Pentland range. Passing a big open cart-shed,

many empty carts, a cottage or two, cackling poultry, and a barking dog,

you come to Swanston, the garden gate open, giving a most alarming view

of a very modern and grotesque effigy of Tam o’ Shanter--usually taken

for a statue of Stevenson--which is set on a rockery half-way up the

little drive. All this is visible and prominent; but the village lies

hidden behind the house; and Swanston Cottage, Stevenson’s home, is a

little to one side, on the slope of the hill, and remains unseen,

especially in spring or summer when the trees are full of leaf. Swanston

itself, now a farm, was originally a grange belonging to some

neighbouring religious house, probably Currie, and is a fine old stone

building, its tall gabled side having the characteristically Scottish

“crow steps.” The road continues, a mere cart track, in front of the

garden wall, and curls round at the back to some modern cottages, “stane

sclated”; and here it ends, as if unwilling to betray that a few steps

farther on is one of the prettiest villages in Scotland--a rustic group

of thatched and harled homesteads, with here and there fenced-in gardens

of old-fashioned flowers, and all set round about an irregular patch of

village green and Swanston Burn, beside which play the little healthy,

bonny Scottish bairns, “like tumbled fruit in grass.”

The inhabitants of this village remember Stevenson well. They thought he

was “daft.” His fame has not yet impressed them. “Ay, he was much aboot

the place,” an old dame will say, indifferently. “But, whenever the wind

was in the east, he would be off to his grandfather’s at Colinton,” a

hale and sturdy old man will add.

“He was much aboot the place.” To the Stevenson lover this is its charm

to-day--above the bleating of the lambs, above the delight of the

wholesome air, above the tones and tints of thatch against the hill or

of wood reek against the sky. And yet, to Stevenson, it was all these

things that charmed, and that he recollected so tenderly when he lay

slowly dying in far-away Samoa: the barking of the sheep-dog and the

voice of the shepherd in the grey early morning, and the pure air that

was “rustically scented”--all the sights and sounds so dear to the

country-lover. And yet, climb up a little among the whins and the

pastures behind his home, and turn--and there lies Edinburgh below you,

painted like a picture in the haze of smoke and sunshine.

[Illustration: THE WATER OF LEITH FROM DEAN BRIDGE

We are looking west up stream, towards the sun setting behind

Corstorphine Hill. Above the waterfall is a distillery with its chimney

pointing to the Dean U.F. Church. On the right of the picture are the

two towers of the Orphan Hospital.]

CHAPTER XI

EDINBURGH TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

Life holds not an hour that is better to live in:

the past is a tale that is told,

The future a sun-flecked shadow, alive and asleep,

with a blessing in store.

SWINBURNE.

In Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist

may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be

brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off

at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly

startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at

one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in

the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing the

Castle. We are a little archaic in Edinburgh. Yet there are other things

of the present that you may notice after you have set your watch to

Greenwich time by the one-o’clock gun. Princes Street is gay with shop

windows under awnings, with the big bow-windows of the Clubs, with many

hotels; and now there are bigger and newer hotels to east and to west,

at the railway stations. And Princes Street is full of a constant stream

of traffic, plying in the wide street between the one broad pavement on

the north side and the row of statues along the green sward and the

blazing flower-beds in the beautiful gardens opposite: cable cars with

noisy bells, motor cars, carriages, bicycles, electric broughams,

station lorries, hansom cabs, and the crawling “char-a-bancs,” with

their scarlet-coated drivers, picking up passengers for the Forth Bridge

or Roslin. But still the north-east wind takes the liberty of blowing

from the Forth among all these modern innovations, and whirling an

unwary hat or a too-lightly-held newspaper high into the air.

As the wind is unchanged in temper, so are the natural features

unchanged in beauty; and the views of the city, “from a’ the airts the

wind can blaw,” are pictures to gladden the artist or the poet. There is

the “Marmion view” from the south,--the view that Scott loved and Turner

painted,--but with a denser massing of suburb than they saw, reaching

right up to the furzy knoll where Marmion stood. Here is the Castle in

all its majesty, with the Grassmarket and Cowgate huddled picturesquely

under its precipices, and the old dark descending spine of the High

Street, with St. Giles’s open crown over the roofs, and then all the

maze and glitter of a newer world, with its many domes and steeples, and

the Forth beyond.

This is from the south; but, seen from the western roads and heights,

the city is even more striking. As you drive to the Forth Bridge along

the fine old coach road to Queensferry,--the very road along which

Jonathan Oldbuck and his companion drove in their journey in _The

Antiquary_--you pass an occasional farm-house with mellow stacks about

it and a smoky throat, and you must remember you are “within a mile of

Edinburgh toun,” where “Bonny Jockie, blythe and gay, kissed sweet Jenny

making hay.” Here, turn your head and you will see the dark mass of

Arthur’s Seat lifted up in the air, and upon its western wall the

fretted outline of the city and the Castle Rock, seeming not painted but

actually engraven like some old hieroglyphic.

To view Edinburgh from the north, you must journey over the Forth Bridge

and look across from the Fife coast opposite. From the wooded “haughs”

between Aberdour and Burntisland, Edinburgh, seen through a veil of

green summer leaves across six miles of rough bright blue, seems painted

in air, a scene of magic loveliness not to be excelled in all the

idyllic world of romance or dream. In the nearest foreground the little

island of Inchcolm with its tiny golden strand and ruined monastery;

farther out to sea Inchkeith’s lighthouse ringed with a fringe of foam;

and, beyond, a world of heights and hollows: Arthur’s Seat and the rigid

uncurved slant of the Salisbury Crags, and the gabled intricacy of the

Old Town, stretching from the hollow up to the black mass of rock on

which the Castle glooms in mid-air, and then the New Town fantastically

domed and steepled in the low foreground, and the white-columned summit

of Calton Hill. Down at the water’s edge, between the Forth and this

fairy show, are the dusky roofs and docks and shipping of Granton and

Leith. Away to the west, the dwindling Forth is spanned by the arches of

the monster bridge; and beyond it stretch the woods of Dalmeny and

Abercorn. In the far east, where the Forth has widened to the sea, are

the outjutting headlands, and on one of them is the curious cone called

Berwick Law; while, behind all, for a background, the distant Pentlands

slope to the south in softest purple.

Dear to the heart of the resident is the view seen as one comes down the

Mound on a winter’s afternoon at sunset, when the Castle stands dark

against the glorious red of the western sky, and Princes Street, her

lamps and her windows all alight, looks like a jewelled necklace.

But of all views of Edinburgh the most mystically beautiful is that seen

from the Calton Hill by night. The city is close about you; but in the

darkness there is isolation. Across a gulf of impenetrable gloom there

is spread a panorama of heights and depths, beaded by a myriad of

lights, with those in the depths seeming to be reflected from those in

the heights, like a starry sky seen in a deep pool. And, as you encircle

the hill, you find always some new phantasy of light and gloom, until on

the side towards the Firth there seems to be a stretch of flat black

country garlanded with lights that dip and rise with every bend of the

land down to the lip of the sea; and all round the coast every

[Illustration: THE NATIONAL MONUMENT ON CALTON HILL

This noble monument represents a partial reproduction of the Parthenon

on the Acropolis at Athens. In the picture the spectator is supposed to

be looking at the north-west angle of the Temple, showing the eight

columns of the west front and two on the north side. On the left of the

picture is a glimpse of the Firth of Forth, while to the right, behind

the columns, rises Arthur’s Seat.]

point and pier and headland is studded with coloured sea-lights; and far

out in the measureless mid-Firth flashes the great Eye of the revolving

light of Inchkeith.

Brave the “sharp sops of sleet and snipand snaw,” and come to Edinburgh

in winter, and you will find all the residents at home and busy: the Law

Courts sitting; the University at work; a regiment, with khaki coverings

to their kilts, quartered at the Castle, and tramping through the town

in rhythm to the tune of the pipes; and all the gaiety of balls and

dinners and theatres in the evening hours. Risk the keen blast of the

east wind, and come to Edinburgh in April, and you will be able to

attend the Graduation in Arts at the M‘Ewan Hall,--in the character

of an honorary graduate if you deserve it. Come in May, and you will

find the streets thronged with black-coated ministers and elders from

every parish in Scotland; for the Assemblies will be sitting, and the

Lord High Commissioner will be holding semi-royal state at Holyrood.

Come in autumn, as you always will; and it will be to find the long rows

of stately stone dwellings left tenantless, and their appalling

regularity and monotony rendered even more appalling by the brown paper

that fills the windows, and by the boarding that is up before the doors.

But the shop windows will be full of tartans for your edification, and

you will find your cabman able to tell you all you want to know. At any

other season Edinburgh is a hospitable city, and it is growing every day

a more cosmopolitan one. English residents have altered national ways;

ruthless hands are tearing down our beautiful old stone houses, and

building tenements in their places; and soon--too soon--all Scottish

traits will be lost.

But the Castle Rock cannot be levelled. It was there, in the mist and

the rain, before Edinburgh began; and it will be there, in the mist and

the rain, when Edinburgh has ceased to be.

Index

Abbotsford, 138, 141, 145

Abercromby, George (Lord), 134

Adamson, Bishop (1584), 55

Advocates’ Close, 72, 73

Albany, Duke of, brother of James III., 13-14

Alexander II., 46

Alexander III., 9, 17, 24

Allan, Sir William, 138, 149

Alnwick Castle, 6

Anchor Close, 75, and _note_

Angus, Earl of, called “Archibald Bell-the-Cat,” 48, 49

Angus, Earl of, 15 _note_, 50, 88

Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI., 71, 102

Argyle, Marquis of, 15-16, 80

Arran, Earl of, 88, 89

Arthur’s Seat, 23, 27, 36, 38, 165

Ashestiel, 138

Assembly Rooms (Old Edinburgh), 73, 74, 75

Auchinleck, Lord, his caustic saying concerning Dr. Johnson, 110

Ayala, Don Pedro de, ambassador from Ferdinand and Isabella

of Spain to the Court of James IV., 28, 29

Aytoun, Professor, 149

Bailie Fyfe’s Close, 74, 77

Baillie, Joanna, 138

Balcarres, Countess of. _See_ Hyndford’s Close

Balfour, Dr., grandfather of R. L. Stevenson, 157

Bannatyne Club, the, 142

“Banner of Blue,” 14

Barbauld, Mrs., 134

Barnard, Lady Anne (_née_ Lindsay), 62, 77

Bastian, servant of Mary, Queen of Scots, 40

Baxter’s Close, 70

Beaton, Cardinal, 50, 76

Beaton, James, Archbishop of Glasgow, 88-89

Beattie, the poet, 108

Beaufort, Jane, wife of James I., 11-12, 25-26

“Begbie murder,” the, 77

Belches of Invermay, Sir John and Lady Jane, and their

daughter, Scott’s first love, 133

“Bell-the-Cat.” _See_ Angus

Bell’s Wynd, 73, 74

Bernham, David de, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews (1243), 46

“Bible Close,” 78

Bishops of Edinburgh (Established Episcopalian), 54

Bishop’s Palace. _See_ Whitehorse Close

Black, Adam, 151

Black, Professor, 120

Blackford Hill, 130, 159

Blackfriars Street, formerly Wynd, 40, 76, 88, 109

Blackie, Professor, 152

_Blackwood’s Magazine_, 149

Blair, Dr., 108

Borthwick, Master Gunner to James IV., 27

Boswell, Sir Alexander, his verses on Miss Nicky Murray, 73-74, 138

Boswell, James, 68, 100, 108-109, 110

Boswell, Mrs., 108-109

Bothwell, Adam, Bishop of Orkney, 40, 71-72

Bothwell, Earl of, 39, 40, 41, 66, 71

“Bow-head Saints,” the, 96-97

Boyd, George. _See_ Mound

Boyd’s Close, 82 _note_, 107-108

Braid Hills, the, 159

Brantôme, Sieur de, 36, 37

Brewster, Sir David, 151

Bristo Street, 113

Brodie’s Close, 70

Brougham, Lord, 150, 151

Brown, George, builder of George Square and Brown Square, 122

Brown, Dr. John, 151

Brown, Dr. Thomas, 149

Brown Square, 122

Bruce, King Robert the, 9, 10, 18, 42, 83