Meditative people will find a charm in a certain conancy between the
aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, if
any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the very
midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a Bass Rock
upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains, carrying
a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike shadow
over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. From
their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces
all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
set with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the
breeze at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing
of architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes
most busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind
another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every
style upon the globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and
Gothic spires, are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder;
while, above all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of
Arthur’s Seat look down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity,
as the works of Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But
Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in
no way frightened of a strong effect. The birds roost as willingly
among the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the
same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and yesterday’s
imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out
everything into a glorified distinctness--or easterly mists, coming up
with the blue evening fuse all these incongruous features into one, and
the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn
in the high windows across the valley--the feeling grows upon you that
this also is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; that this
profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is
not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day
reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals
of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep
ledgers and attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a
daily paper. By all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half
deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion,
the play of the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief
thoroughfare: but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their
trains and posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they
make free with historic localities, and rear their young among the
most picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them
thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and
with a little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the
least striking feature of the place.
[Illustration: EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND.]
The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from
a picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one
of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the
whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth
judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must
be judged upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of
its effect on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency
of its situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set
it somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling
in a bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
city; for there the two re-act in a picturesque sense, and the one is
the making of the other.
The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs,
which fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the
new towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader,
and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the
whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for
miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
from this distant aspect that she got her name of _Auld Reekie_.
Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors; day
after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain;
so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
expressed in two words.
There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle
and Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about
the level of St. Giles’s, the music came abruptly to an end, and the
people in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was
choked with gasses, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the
Evil One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been
seen or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into
the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected,
may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a
strange moment for the cabmen on the stands beside St. Giles’s, when
they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
earth below their horses’ feet.
Of all places for a view Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you
can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur’s Seat,
which you cannot see from Arthur’s Seat. It is the place to stroll on
one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so common in our
more than temperate summer. Upon the right, the roofs and spire of the
Old Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad
bulk and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky.--Perhaps it is
now one in the afternoon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises
to the summit of Nelson’s flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a
puff of smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery
at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches,
as far as the sea-coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands. And while
you are looking across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and bugles begin
to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the sound; the
bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and melts into
the darkness like a star: a martial swan-song, fitly rounding in the
labours of the day.