Where are the Scotch? -- Something wanting in the Landscape. --
The Inhabitants. -- The Highlanders and the Servant Girls. --
Evening in Princes Street. -- Leith and the Firth of Forth. --
Rossend Castle at Burntisland. -- Mary Stuart once more. -- I
receive Scotch Hospitality in the Bedroom where Chastelard was
as enterprising as unfortunate.
With the exception of the famous tartan shawls, which we come across
again in Edinburgh on the backs of the lower-class women, nothing in the
costume of the inhabitants could remind you that you were not in Paris,
London, Brussels, or any other haunt of that badge of modern
civilisation, the chimney-pot. In Glasgow this does not shock you more
than it would in Manchester or Birmingham; but, in the romantic city of
Edinburgh, even the whistle of the railway engine annoys you; the cap
and kilt are sadly felt wanting, and you almost want to stop the
passers-by and ask them: "Where are your kilts?" You feel as if you were
cheated out of something.
Alas! the national costume of the Scotch is almost a thing of the past:
it is no longer a dress--it is a get-up.
You may see it yet at fancy dress balls, in the army of Her Britannic
Majesty, at the Paris Opera-Comique, and in the comic papers.
I believe the Royal Princes occasionally don it, when they go to
Scotland in the autumn to shoot; but even in the remote Highlands the
national costume is dying out, and if you count upon seeing Scotchmen,
dressed Scotch fashion in Scotland, you will be disappointed. As well
look for lions in the outskirts of Algiers, or a pretty woman in the
streets of Berne.
A gentleman in kilts would make as great a sensation in the streets of
Edinburgh as he would on the Boulevard des Italiens. Nay, more, if he
stood still, he might have pence offered him.
The costume of _Dickson_ in _La Dame Blanche_ is only seen on the backs
of those splendid Highlanders whom the maidservants in large towns hire
by the afternoon on Sundays to accompany them to the parks.
In London you will sometimes see Highlanders--from Whitechapel--playing
the bagpipes and dancing reels, talents which bring an ample harvest of
pennies in populous neighbourhoods, but which would fall rather flat in
Edinburgh.
I cannot imagine anything much more picturesque than Princes Street at
night, when the old city in amphitheatre-shape, on the other side of the
valley, stands out from the sky which it seems to touch with its old
sombre majestic castle, and its houses ten or twelve stories high,
rising tier above tier up the side of the hill, and shining with a
thousand lights. I can understand that the inhabitants of Edinburgh
enjoy to come out in the evening and feast their eyes on the enchanting
sight, and this even in winter, when the street is a very funnel for the
east wind which blows across straight from the Scandinavian icebergs.
Edinburgh is the only town in Great Britain, which I have visited, whose
streets are not shunned by respectable people at night.
* * * * *
A fine road about two miles long leads to Leith, which stands for Piraeus
to the Scotch Athens. There, in the mud and smoke, dwells a population
of sixty thousand toil-stained folk, who contrast strongly with their
elegant neighbours of Edinburgh. There is nothing here to attract the
eye of the traveller, unless it be the harbour with its two piers--one
3,530, the other 3,123 feet long--where the inhabitants can go and
breathe the sea air, away from the noise and smoke of the town.
Along the coast to the west, two miles from Leith, we come upon the
interesting village of Newhaven. Here we find a little world apart,
composed of fisherfolk, all related one to another, it is said. They
treat as Philistines all who did not first see the light in their
sanctuary, and the result is that they are constantly intermarrying. All
the men work at fishing. The women go to Edinburgh to sell what their
husbands catch, and bring back empty baskets and full pockets. These
worthy women would think they were robbing their dear village if they
bought the least thing in Edinburgh. Needless to say, the little
community prospers. To see the costume of the women, who, in no point
imitate the ridiculous get-up of their sisters in great towns; to see
the activity and zeal for their work, one would believe oneself in
France.
"All the skippers own their own boats, and the pretty little houses they
live in," said the Scotchman who accompanied me.
And how neat and clean they look, those little white houses covered with
climbing plants of all sorts! The whole scene speaks loudly of the work,
thrift, and order of the people.
By pushing on two miles further we come to Granton. There we can take
the boat which will carry us over the Firth of Forth, and set us down at
Burntisland in Fifeshire; but instead of there taking the train to the
north of Scotland, we will stop to see Rossend Castle.
Standing on a promontory, which dominates the Firth of Forth and the
hills of Edinburgh, Rossend Castle is one of the most romantic places in
Scotland.
Its old square tower contains the bedroom used by Mary Stuart when she
travelled in Fifeshire, and stopped at the castle. The present owner,
whose hospitality is proverbial in the neighbourhood, has religiously
preserved the room intact. It is there just as it existed three hundred
years ago, with its two little turret-rooms, oak wainscoting, and a
thousand relics of its unhappy visitor.
The portrait of Mary Stuart at Rossend is the most striking that I saw
in Scotland. Placed over the mantelpiece, it seems to fill the room with
its dreamy melancholy gaze. It seems to follow you, and you cannot take
your eyes off it. I occupied this room for four nights, a prey to the
saddest thoughts. It was in the month of January, and the wind, which
was blowing hard across the Firth, roared round the tower. With my feet
before the fire, which burned in the immense fireplace, I let my fancy
reconstruct the scene in which poor Chastelard lost his head, first
figuratively, and then in reality.
As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, my young and handsome
countryman Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard had conceived a mad passion
for the queen. He had dared to declare this love in the Holyrood Palace.
His offence was forgiven.
Imagining, from the fact of his having been pardoned, that he had
succeeded in inspiring affection in the heart of his royal mistress, the
poor moth must needs flutter again around the flame, which was to be his
destruction. The romantic troubadour secretly followed the queen from
Edinburgh to Rossend Castle, and, on the night of the 14th of February,
1562, hid himself in her chamber, until she was almost undressed for the
night, when he left his hiding-place, and, seizing the queen in his
arms, so alarmed her, that she screamed for protection. This woman who,
to avenge Rizzio's death, did not hesitate to have a barrel of powder
placed under her husband's bed, felt herself insulted. Her cries
attracted her attendants, and Murray was ordered by the indignant queen
to stab the young madman dead then and there. But Murray preferred to
wreak his wrath on Chastelard, whom he hated, by having him hanged. The
poor secretary, who had been so favoured by his mistress that all the
courtiers were jealous of him, who had so often beguiled her solitude by
his poems and his music, went cheerfully to the scaffold. Like Cornelius
de Witt, who, a century later, recited Horace's _Justum et tenacem_
while the executioner of The Hague put him to the torture, Chastelard
mounted the scaffold calm and smiling, reciting Rousard's _Ode to Love_.
"I die not without reproach, like my ancestor Bayard," said he; "but,
like him, I die without fear."
And then, turning his eyes towards the castle inhabited by Mary Stuart,
he cried:
"Adieu, thou cruel but beautiful one, who killest me, but whom I cannot
cease to love!"
Rossend Castle is a veritable poem in stone. Do not visit Edinburgh
without pushing to Burntisland. The _chatelain_ is justly proud of his
romantic home, and does the honours of it with a kind grace that charms
the visitor.