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PICTURE PLAN OF EDINBURGH.
) / //' CITY o
/ /~\ I //OBStRVATQRT'-
\// / i^CALTON HILL
A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON.
LIST OF VOLUMES IN THE
PEEPS AT MANY LANDS
AND CITIES SERIES
EACH CONTAINING 13 FULL-PAGK
ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
BELGIUM
IRELAND
BURMA •
ITALY
CANADA
JAMAICA
CEYLON
JAPAN
CHINA
KOREA
CORSICA
MOROCCO
DENMARK
NEW ZEALAND
EDINBURGH
NORWAY
EGYPT
PARIS
ENGLAND
PORTUGAL
FINLAND
RUSSIA
FRANCE
SCOTLAND
GERMANY
SIAM
GREECE
SOUTH AFRICA
HOLLAND
SOUTH SEAS
HOLY LAND
SPAIN
ICELAND
SWITZERLAND
INDIA
A LARGER VOLUME IN THE SAME STYLE
THE
WORLD
Containing 37 full-page illustrations in colour
PUBLISHED BY ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W,
AGENTS
AMEMCA , . . THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVHNUB. NEW YORK
AUSTBALASIA. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS Lane, MELBOURNE
CANADA . . . THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA. LTD.
St. MARTIN'S House, 70 Bond Street, lORONXO
INDIA .... MACMILLAN & COMPANY. LTD.
MACMILLAN Building, BOMBAY
309 Bow Bazaar Strbht, CALCUTTA
PERENCfc
C-^14 .1
PU
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^s
^Hl..
11 (
p*
1
THE CASTLE AND SCOTT MONUMENT.
WITH TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
THE NK^^' '■■ 0'^<ii
PUBLIC LIBRARY
ASTOR, LENOX AND
TM.DE-N FOUNUATlOrfS.
INSCRIBED
TO
MY VERY DEAR FRIENDS
SIR LEWIS AND LADY McIVER
Oh City of my memories !
Oh City of my heart !
I love the rain that lashes you,
The wind that makes me smart ;
Your beauty in the sunshine
No mortal can forget, —
But most I love the smell of you
When every stone is wet !
Your New Town's stately rhythm,
Your Old Town's rugged rhyme ;
How many scores of comedies
You've laughed at in your time !
In what a host of tragedies
Your stones play silent part, —
Oh City of grey mists and dreams !
Oh City of my heart !
CONTENTS
II.
EDINA, SCOTIA'S DARLING SEAT
MINE OWN ROMANTIC TOWN "
III. " THE GREY METROPOLIS OF THE NORTH
IV. STORIES OF THE PAST I TWO MIRACLES .
V. STORIES OF THE PAST: BATTLES, MURDERS
AND SUDDEN DEATHS
VI. EDINBURGH GIRLS AND BOYS IN OLD DAYS
VII. GIRLS AND BOYS OF MODERN EDINBURGH
VIII. HOOD AND GOWN ....
IX. WIG AND GOWN .....
X. WINTER IN EDINBURGH
XI. EDINBURGH IN SUMMER
5
9
13
22
27
36
45
56
65
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CASTLE AND SCOTT MONUMENT
Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
EDINBURGH FROM "REST AND E2 THANKFUL" . . 8
PRINCES STREET . . . . . . . -I?
HOLYROOD PALACE AND PART OF THE ANCIENT ABBEY . 24
THE MESSENGER FROM FLODDEN 33
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS 4O
" GREENBREEKS ", LEADING, THE POTTF-R ROW BOYS IN A
"bicker" . • vV c'^''*' • • '49
SIR WALTER SCOTT , . ; , f \' J ;-. ' ; • • • • 56
JAMES VI. OF SCOTLAND iiN<li«\tiw ENGLAND AS A BOY . 65
THE CHURCH OF ST.-^ GlLfes- .; ' I .;) U^ j . . . '72
JOHN KNOx's HOUSE' ''.•'''''/<'-'. i .. c . . . . 81
LADY stair's CLOSE 88
J Picture Plan of Edinburgh inside front cover
EDINBURGH
CHAPTER I
A LITTLE English girl asked me the other day : " How
big is Edinburgh ? Is it as big as Amcrsham?"
Now, Amersham is a little town in Buckinghamshire
— one street of lovely old red-rooted houses, and the
spire of an ancient parish Church, and the chimney of a
new brewery, — and that is all. You can walk through
it in less than five minutes, and be out in the fields and
woods again. So I tried to explain that Edinburgh
was altogether different and very much bigger. " It is
the Capital of Scotland, just as London is the Capital of
England," the little English girl was told. *' Oh, I see,"
she said ; " then is it as big as London?"
Then Scottish pride had to be curbed, and Scottish
truthfulness had to confess that no, it was not nearly
so big as London. " It is about the size of — of — but
what other towns do you know?"
" Well," said the little f^nglish girl, " you sec, I don't
know any other towns except Amersham and London !"
So she had to be left picturing Edinburgh as some-
thing between London and Amersham, and I do not
feel she has a very distinct idea of Edinburgh. I
could only tell her I hoped to persuade her to come
and see it for herself some day.
And again the difficulty confronts me, for there is
nothing so hopeless as to try and give other people a
5
6 Edinburgh
picture of a town they do not know. It is easy to tell
its story, but impossible to give its portrait ; and again
I can only hope to persuade my readers to come and
see Edinburgh fof themselves s6me day. And Edin-
burgh is worth coming to see, for it is a picture as well
as a poem.
Some towns are very beautiful, and some are very
interesting ; just as some people are pleasant to look
at, and some people are amusing to talk to ; but
Edinburgh is both, and so is well worth making friends
with. Perhaps we might look at Edinburgh first,***
before we begin to talk to her. And the first thing one
sees in looking at Edinburgh is her Castle, for it standi
high up above the town on the " Castle Rock." Fancy ^
a great town with an abrupt, rocky hill rising out of
the very middle of it, — crags and cliffs sheer down into
the pretty public gardens at its base, close by the gay
shops and the traffic and the houses of the town. And
when, walking along the crowded, busy, cheerful street,
you raise your eyes, you find that the grim hill is
topped by a mighty castle — a town in itself — walls and
battlements and towers looking almost part of the rock
on which they are built.
The great mer de glace which covered Scotland in
glacial times, in the Edinburgh district flowed from
west to east, and consequently most of the hills in
and near Edinburgh stand straight and steep and
high to the west, and slope down gradually, like a
cat's back, to the east. The Castle Rock is shaped
thus ; and down the ridge to the east, — the backbone of
the cat, — the principal street of the Old Town of
Edinburgh descends for one mile to Holyrood Palace.
And the Castle Rock is not the only hill in Edinburgh,
" Edina, Scotia's Darling Scat *' 7
for Holyrood Palace lies against a background of the
green ■ slopes of Arthur's Seat, a great hill nearly a
thousand feet high, and shaped like a couchant lion.
Untii about a hundred years ago this used to be the
whole extent of the town of Edinburgh — the Castle,
and the long line of street down to t^l^rood, and all
li^lj^r
the little straggling "closes" and "\^nds" off this
main line of street, like very short ribs out of the
backbone. It must have been a very uncomfortable
town to live in, for there was not enough room ; and
yet it seemed impossible to extend it, because it was
all built on the ridge of this hill, and because, below
the hill, along under the ridge, and lapping the foot of
the cliffs of the Castle Rock, was a great deep lake —
"the Nor' Loch." And at the lower end of the street,
down in the plain in which Holyrood lies, was only a
narrow valley between two hills — Arthur's Seat and
Calton Hill. What was to be done ? It was as if the
town were perched on an island, surrounded by lochs
and hills. It was certainly very picturesque, and
visitors admired it very much ; but the inhabitants
could hardly breathe, and the little children could not
grow. And then suddenly, just over one hundred
years' ago, Edinburgh had a really great Lord Provost,
Lord Provost Drummond, and he saw how it could be
done. The Nor' Loch was drained, a huge bridge
flung across the hollow, houses and buildings sprang
up on the other side, and soon all the country lanes
and fields between Edinburgh and the sea were turned
into broad town streets and squares. And this is the
New Town of Edinburgh.
And now, facing the ridge of the High Street, and
with the bed of the Nor' Loch between filled by public
8 Edinburgh
gardens, is Princes Street, the chief street of the New
Town of Edinburgh. And because it faces the Old
Town above it, and the Castle, whose hoary cliiFs go
straight down into the gardens. Princes Street is built
with one side only, like a street split all down the
middle, — one row of gay shops and clubs and hotels
and great buildings, one broad stone pavement full of
people, — and on the opposite side only light railings,
trees, statues, waiting rows of cabs, and — the view !
It is said that Princes Street is different from all
other streets, and is the finest street in Europe.
All this is the centre of Edinburgh ; but the town
now stretches for miles on every side — north, behind
Princes Street, up slopes and down slopes till it reaches
the sea ; west, where Princes Street leads to the great
squares and crescents and terraces where the wealthier
people live ; east, till Princes Street ends at the foot
of the third hill, Calton Hill, opposite Arthurs
Seat — not nearly so big nor so high a hill, and with
buildings and monuments upon it ; and to the south,
behind the Old Town, there are suburbs for many
miles, right out into the country. But it is to the
High Street and Princes Street and the streets about
them that tourists come, and that have made Edinburgh
famous. Unfortunately, anyone can build a new house,
or buy an old house and alter it or pull it down
altogether, and many people have no feeling for beauty
at all ; so a great deal of modern Edinburgh is very
ugly, and a great deal of Old Edinburgh is much spoilt.
But Nature has done her best to make it impossible
for men ever to quite ruin Edinburgh. Nothing can
alter the Castle Rock, and that wonderful ridge down
from it to the valley and Holyrood, on which the Old
PUBLIC
^' Edina, Scotia's Darling Seat " 9
Town is built — high houses and gables and spires.
And nothing can alter Arthur's Seat, the great couchant
lion guarding the city,
" Gaunt shoulder Lo tlic Capital, and blind eyes to the Bay."
And then, beyond the city — beyond the massed streets
and chimneys and steeples, and the patches of green
trees and gardens among them — nothing can change
the Forth, to the shores of which the city stretches,
ending there in her busy harbours.
These are the points that catch the eye when
Edinburgh is seen from a distance — the Castle, painted
grey against the sky, abrupt and impressive out of the
very centre of the town ; the striking lionlike shape
of Arthur's Seat ; the miles of houses, up and down on
heights and in hollows ; every now and then some fine
building or graceful spire ; and then the gleam of the
Firth of Forth, and the hills of Fife beyond.
CHAPTER II
" MINE OWN ROMANTIC TOWN "
And now, having looked at Edinburgh, let us ask her
to talk. What a babble of Voices one hears im-
mediately ! In the Old Town, voices of Kings and
Queens, of powerful Churchmen and rulers and states-
men ; voices of priests and poets and soldiers ; voices
of women and of martyrs ; voices ot lawyers and of
criminals. And the Voices that we hear down the
centuries of Scottish history, telling the story of
Edinburgh, are not all speaking in the Scots tongue —
many of them are speaking French.
Very far off, up at the Castle, there is the sound of
ED. 2
lo Edinburgh
the Saxon queen, St. Margaret, teaching her splendid
old warrior husband, Malcolm Canmore, to read. But
that is over eight hundred years ago, and her voice is
very faint — I do not believe even Malcolm Canmore is
listening. There are many Voices up at Edinburgh
Castle — the voice of every king and queen of Scotland
has been heard there — Robert the Bruce, and all the
splendid Scottish Stewarts, and poor Mary, Queen of
Scots, and Charles I., and Oliver Cromwell. His voice
was heard in the Banqueting Hall. Ah ! what a noise
at the Castle ! — the clash of arms, the cries of midnight
surprises, the shouts of command, the groans of
prisoners, the prayers of the doomed, the shrieks of the
tortured ! And there are the voices of women, too, to be
heard ; — the weak voices of little defenceless princesses,
sent there for safety ; the voices of nuns, and of power-
ful abbesses ; the voices of clever queens - regent,
matching their women's wits against unscrupulous
nobles ; the brave tones of captives, — noble women,
imprisoned and ill-treated for their faith, or their loyalty,
or their politics
And hark ! There is another voice from the Castle,
and it can be heard above all the rest, though it is four
hundred years ago, and is only the little first cry of a
new-born baby. For he is a most important person,
that little puny infant, the son of Mary, Queen of
Scots ; he is afterwards to be James VI. of Scotland,
and the first king to rule over Scotland and England
also — England and Scotland, once such bitter enemies,
now one great kingdom, of whose pasts and present
each country may be equally proud.
In the wynds and closes jutting down out of either
side of the High Street, many famous people have
'^ Mine Own^ Romantic Town " i i
spoken, among thcni the author of " Robinson Crusoe,"
who lived for some time in Edinburgh, and Robert
Burns, who visited there ; and again there are women's
voices — that of her who wrote " The Flowers of the
Forest," and that of her who wrote " Young Jamie
lo'ed me weel." They both lived in Edinburgh closes.
All down the High Street there is a great din — you
can scarcely hear the Voices for the shouting and the
fighting and the quarrelling. But when you come to the
middle of the street, where the High Street becomes the
Canongate, and where St. Giles's Church stands, there
is only one voice to be heard, raised loud and insistent
above all others, — the voice of John Knox, preaching.
In the Canongate, where all the greatest nobles lived,
at the Court end of the town beside the royal residence,
there are very pretty sounds ; — courtiers' voices, soft
and learned ; sounds of music and dancing ; of love-
making ; of the reading and reciting of poetry. And
behind all this is again the sound of praying and chant-
ing, for Holyrood Palace was built in the fifteenth
century beside the great twelfth-century Abbey of Holy-
rood, where the Augustine abbots ruled ; and in the
Abbey Church all the pious Stewart kings of Scotland
worshipped, and before its High Altar most of them
were married, and beneath it some were buried.
But there are sounds of tragedy also from Holyrood.
There is Riccio's shriek of terror and agony when the
murderers came in from behind the tapestry as he sat
at supper with his Queen, and he was dragged out and
stabbed to death.
Round the doors of Holyrood can be heard — from a
century and a half ago — the sound of excited Gaelic, —
Gaelic, which many people think is the native tongue of
12 Edinburgh
all Scotland, just as they suppose all Scotchmen wear the
kilt. But Gaelic was welcome in Edinburgh in 1745,
when Prince Charlie held his Court for a few hopeful
days at Holyrood, and all the Highland chiefs who had
flocked to his standard, and the wild caterans that came
in their trains, were living about the place.
In the New Town also we can hear Voices, carrying
on the story of Edinburgh. These are the Voices of
the last two centuries. Dear, kindly, homely Scottish
voices, the voices of men and women who lived in
Edinburgh after its Law Courts and University had been
given to it, and after its royalty and its nobility had
been taken from it.
Very learned words we can hear at every windy
corner ! They come from the lips of philosophers, of
historians, of poets, of thinkers, of novelists, of preachers,
of discoverers, of artists, of scientists, of celebrities of
every kind. Amongst them there is the voice that told
so many sufferers they need feel no more pain under the
surgeon's knife — the voice of the inventor of chloroform.
There is the voice of Raeburn, the portrait painter ; of
Hume, the philosopher and historian ; of Carlyle ; of
Lister; of Henry Dundas, "the King of Scotland " ;
of Lord Jeffrey ; of Lord Cockburn ; of " Christopher
North"; of Aytoun, who wrote the "Lays of the Cava-
liers"; and a voice of yesterday — that of Robert Louis
Stevenson.
But again there is one Voice in the New Town of
Edinburgh that dominates all others. No harsh voice
preaching reformation, this, but a golden voice waking
the dead Past, and making our Scotland dear and famous
all the world over. It comes from the New Town, but
it tells of the Old, — it tells of " Mine own romantic
town " — it is the voice of Sir Walter Scott.
" Grey Metropolis of the North " 13
CHAPTER III
*'the grey metropolis of the north"
That was what Tennyson called Edinburgh. He
spent only one night there, in summer, and it was — as
sometimes happens, even in summer, in Edinburgh as
well as anywhere else — a cold, grey, cloudy day. And
Tennyson stood at an hotel window in Princes Street,
and thought of all his own beautiful Arthurian country,
that he has described in his poetry — rich English
pasturelands and lazy rivers and " rooky woods," and
he received a bad impression of Edinburgh which he
has immortalized in four lines. They always come
into the mind on a cold, misty day, when the grey
New Town, with all her broad, uniform streets of dark
stone terraces and crescents, and her great squares, with
their formal gardens of lawns and paths and trees, railed-
m and deserted, are all looking particularly chilly and
stately and dull. Perhaps this strikes a stranger more
than it does anyone who lives in Edinburgh, partly
because those who live there are well accustomed to the
stately grey gloom of the houses, and partly because
they also know well all the friendly, cosy rooms that lie
behind those rather forbidding-looking rows of windows.
The New Town of Edinburgh, for the reason that
it was all planned and built at one time, and has not
merely " growed," like Topsy, is all very even and
regular. When you look down at it from the Castle
you see it spread below you, something like a game of
*' noughts and crosses " on a slate. There are three
great parallel streets, each a mile long, the middle one
with a large square at either end of it, and smaller
streets go through these at right angles and at even
14 Edinburgh
distances, so that they divide the chief streets into
blocks. There are also smaller streets that worm their
way at the backs of the three big streets, and some of
these used to be good old dwelling streets, but they
are now all given over to lawyers' offices, printing
works, small shops, and slums.
At the east end, the New Town stretches on towards
Leith Walk, that used to be the famous old road
between Edinburgh and her port. It is now all shops
and tramway cars, and very noisy and busy and dirty.
To the north, that lies away behind the three chief
streets, is the old-fashioned, very respectable part of the
town, with dear old solid houses, built about a hundred
years ago, and full of memories of the cosy old days of
the early nineteenth century ; but now many of them
are " to let," and one hears that " prices are going
down," for people are moving away to the newer and
more fashionable west end, where the houses are not
nearly so well-built nor so comfortable.
Ever since James V. founded the Scottish Law
Courts there have been a great many lawyers in Edin-
burgh. Nowadays there are in Edinburgh more
lawyers than any other kind of man. Most of all these
great grey stone houses, both at the north side of the
town and at the west end of it, contain lawyers ; and
shortly before ten o'clock in the morning they all come
out, and wend their ways to their day's work, either to
their offices in the streets of the New Town, or, if
they be advocates, across Princes Street and up into
the Old Town, to the Law Courts — " Parliament
House " — in the High Street. And, later on, the front-
doors are again opened, and the perambulators are care-
fully lowered down the front-door steps, and the nurses
" Grey Metropolis of the North '" i 5
and children start for their morning's walk, and about
the same time the ladies and dogs of the town go out
to do their morning's shopping. They go to Princes
Street, and the streets round about ; and the nurses and
children either go to some gardens, or are tempted also
to Princes Street by the sunshine and the cheerfulness.
It is very difficult to walk along Princes Street on a
fair day, because of the number of perambulators, —
sometimes two, or even three, abreast. Each contains a
dear little gold-haired, pink and white, inteUigent baby,
combed and curled, its white capes and laces spread out
on its cushions, its ornamental rug covering it, its inevit-
able ^' Teddy Bear " placed beside it, and its neat nurse,
as she runs her front wheel into the shins of passers-by,
or streaks them with mud, looking defiantly and proudly
ahead over the top of her morning's achievement.
Twelve o'clock is the brightest and sunniest time in
Princes Street, especially on Saturday. On a bright
Saturday " forenoon " — a word not used in England —
in Princes Street, Lord Tennyson would have recanted
his words. The crowds are packed ; but there is no
jostling, as there is in a London street, for everyone
walks to the right-hand side, and so there are two
streams of people, one going east and one west. But
there are little " blocks " in the human traffic where
groups of friends have met and are chatting.
The shops of Edinburgh are justly famous. Of
course they are not all in Princes Street ; many are in
the other great streets, north or west, but Princes
Street has perhaps the gayest shop windows. George
Street, the second of the three chief streets that run
parallel through the New Town, is very grey and
dignified and sombre, and permits itself no such
1 6 Edinburgh
frivolity as a one-sided aspect, even of the view. In
the crowds gathered on Saturday morning, the passers-
by in Princes Street have to stop to admire the windows
of the flower -shops — carnations of every possible
shade, great, dewy roses, feathery acacia-sprays, azaleas,
brilliant-hued anemones, and deep, sweet violets —
all reflected in mirrors, gathered into baskets, arranged
in bouquets and festoons, tied with broad ribbons — a
perfect ballroom for a millionaire fairy. Other great
plate-glass windows will show just as delicate and
brilliant hues, but the flowers here are artificial, and are
amongst silks and satins, hats and gloves and laces.
These windows win a good deal of attention — pretty
frocks and hats both outside and inside. There are a
great many jewellers' shops, brilliant and flashing and
costly. The book-shops of Edinburgh are so historic
and famous that they ought to have a chapter to them-
selves. Are they not the lineal descendants of that
book-shop of the seventeenth century, the shop of
Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite
the Cross, the favourite lounge of the poet Drummond
of Hawthornden ? And of Allan Ramsay's book-shop,
also beside the Cross, where all the eighteenth-century
literati gathered? Edinburgh is a city of books —
authors, paper-makers, printers, binders, publishers, and
booksellers. But we must not forget, in " the land o'
cakes," our confectioners' shops. They are quite
superior to ordinary ones. Not only are Scottish cakes
works of art, but there are in Scotland our famous
scones, our *' bawbee baps," our shortbread, Pitcaithlie
bannocks, and mutton-pies. And each Princes Street
baker has upstairs a dainty tea and luncheon room,
some with a balcony full of little tables, — a gay sight in
■',dF?Maw¥*.t-.c5-v;-- --*"
" Grey Metropolis of the North " 17
summer uiulcr its strl[K\l awning, and the cause of
much envious interest from the inhabitants of the tops
of tramway cars or high coaches, who are on the line
of sight. Our much-abused climate cannot be very
bad if it allows eating and drinking, foreign fashion,
out of doors from Spring to Autumn, — though some-
times the wind does spill the tea !
Amongst the shops are every now and then great
buildings — hotels and banks and clubs, and the
windows of the clubs are full of those who idly watch
the crowds outside.
The road side of the pavement has its attractions,
too. Here are flowers also — humbler flowers, being
sold in baskets — flowers in their seasons, dafl^odils and
violets in Spring, roses in Summer. And there, stand-
ing patiently and smilingly on the edge of the causeway,
is something Tennyson never saw — a "Suffragette"
selling her papers, with her colours, purple white and
green, displayed in ribbon and on her embroidered bag,
and a bunch of papers in her outstretched hand. What
would the author of " The Princess" have thought of
this? Would he have stopped and bought a copy of
Votes for IVomen ?
And now we must cross the street, piloting our way
through among cars and cabs and cable-tramways and
carts and " taxis," and look at the statues. They stand
just within the gardens, behind the railings ; but they
face towards Princes Street. There are some half-
dozen, and they are all statues of, or memorials to,
those who have in their day been Edinburgh citizens.
At the extreme west of Princes Street is the Church
of St. John the Evangelist, built on the model of
St. George's Chapel, Windsor. It is opposite the busy
ED. 3
1 8 Edinburgh
Caledonian Station and its hotel, and the crowded
thoroughfare of Lothian Street lies between ; but facing
Princes Street there stands, beside St. John's Church,
the beautiful Cross erected in memory of Dean Ramsay,
the author of " Scottish Life and Character," who was
attached to St. John's all the last part of his life. Then
there are statues of Sir James Y. Simpson, the discoverer
of chloroform; of "Christopher North"; of Allan
Ramsay, the author of the "Gentle Shepherd"; of
Adam Black, Edinburgh's Member and Lord Provost ;
of Livingstone, the explorer — this last doubly interest-
ing, as the sculptor, Mrs. D. O. Hill, was also a citizen
of Edinburgh.
The newest statue in Princes Street is very instructive.
It is of a trooper on horseback. Who is he .? Why,
he is the last of our Scots Greys. He is the only one
left to us of our famous regiment, so long quartered in
Edinburgh, and the pride of Scotland. Who has not
heard of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? It was at
Waterloo that Sergeant-Major Ewart took the eagle
from three Frenchmen. It was the conduct of the
Greys at Waterloo that won for the regiment the right
to bear its emblem, an eagle, and the word " Waterloo."
But the story that sets every true Scot's blood tingling
is the story of how, late in the day, the Scots Greys
charged to the cry " Scotland for Ever !"
Many people have seen Lady Butler's picture of that
famous charge. It is told that, long ago, when the
picture was sent up to the London Academy, the
hanging committee all bared their heads when they
saw it. It was the picture of the year, and it had to
have a rail put round it to keep off the crowd that was
always pressing in front of it. But the artists would
'' Grey Metropolis of the North " 19
not make Lady Butler an Academician for all that, for,
though she painted the finest work of the year, and
though she could rouse patriotism by her work, was
she not a woman ?
Here, in Princes Street, stands the memorial to those
of the Scots Greys who fell in South Africa. It was
unveiled on a cold, wet November day in 1906 by Lord
Rosebery, who made one of his ahiiost inspired speeches
— a speech whose impression will not easily be forgotten
by those who heard. " Flesh of our flesh," he said,
" bone of our bone. . . . Scotland for Ever 1"
The Scots Greys have left us. There stands the silent
mounted trooper in Princes Street — " Lest we forget."
Farther on is the great Gothic monument that en-
closes the statue of Sir Walter Scott. You can go inside
this one, and pay twopence, and climb up the narrow
circular stair, up and up and up in the dark, every now
and then with a shaft of light and a breath of air from
a loop-hole, and again, every now and then, coming
suddenly out into wind and sunshine and finding your-
self in a little gallery, whence you can look down at the
town below, that grows smaller and smaller as you
mount. And the steps of the spiral stair grow smaller
and smaller, too, as you mount, till at the very top it
is difl[icult to find foothold on them, especially as the
last ones are worn hollow.
From the very top of the Scott Monument, if it is a
clear day, you have a wonderful view. The cabs and
cars in Princes Street below look like tiny crawling flies,
and all the town is spread away in every direction —
streets and spires and chimneys and domes and steeples;
but your eye passes quickly over that to the Firth of
Forth, with its busy shores — Leith and its docks and its
20 Edinburgh
fort ; Granton with her harbours and shipping ; Trinity
and Joppa and Portobello and their piers ; and then the
stretch of sea — the dotted vessels, the islands — Inch-
keith and its lighthouse, and Inchcolm and its monastery ;
and beyond them the shores of Fife, woods, fields and
farms on the Fife hillsides, and high above them the
Fife Lomands, and the dream of the snowy peaks of the
Highland hills. And look to the west — there, beyond
Dalmeny, is that monster of engineering, — the Forth
Bridge, — the highest bridge in the world, spanning the
Firth of Forth with its three mighty arches, where the two
shores are at their nearest, — a mile from shore to shore.
You will consider it has been worth twopence and
the climb ; but you will feel a little dizzy when you
have descended to the world again, step by step, round
and round in the darkness, and find yourself once more
in the sunshine of the busy street. And you will look
up at Sir Walter's statue under the arches of the monu-
ment, at his kindly, rugged head, at his great dog beside
him, and at the grass terraces round the monument
filled afresh every year with planted wreaths of flowers.
And now you are approaching the East end of Princes
Street, close to the other big railway-station, called "The
Waverley," after Scott's first novel. There is a large
new hotel there, too, and farther on is the General Post-
Oflice, and . . . Suddenly, with a terrific noise, a cannon
is fired off close at hand. The horses that are " gun-
shy " start and rear, and you, if you are a stranger to
Edinburgh, jump as if you had been shot ; but if you
belong to Edinburgh you merely pull out your watch,
and if the hands point to one o'clock you shut it and
walk on, looking satisfied. For this is " The Gun " —
*' the One o'clock Gun," fired from the Castle every day
" Grey Metropolis of the North "21
when the time-ball signal attached to the flagstaff of
Nelson's Monument on Calton Hill fills, showing that
it is one o'clock by Greenwich time. When The Gun
goes off in Edinburgh, for one moment everyone is hold-
ing a watch and looking at it. It happened once that in
London, quite late in the afternoon, a gun was tired —
it was the first of a royal salute — and two "people walk-
ing towards one another in Piccadilly each pulled out a
watch. And then, looking up, they met each other's
eyes, and laughed in friendly understanding. Each
knew the other must be from Edinburgh.
But what a change has come over Princes Street 1
All the babies and perambulators are hurrying home to
nursery dinners ; all the ladies and their dogs are going
too ; all the clerks, men and women, are hurrying out
of their offices, and there are swarms of girls and boys,
women and men, from the printing-works and other
places of industry, pouring out for their dinner-hours.
There is now a good deal of jostling and good-humour.
And, presently, out come the lawyers too, and the
bankers and stockbrokers and business men, all intent
on luncheon. Some turn into their clubs, some into
restaurants, or into the dainty tea-rooms with their
balconies. And while they are at luncheon the sun
clouds over, and big drops of rain stain the dark stone
pavement a darker grey. Umbrellas are put up ; the
last belated perambulator has its hood drawn over its
occupant, and the nurse bends her head and runs ; the
shop doorways till up, and so do the club windows ;
the broad pavement, lately so crowded, is rapidly
emptied, and so are the cab-stands opposite. Sky,
Castle, mist, views, vistas, houses, pavement,- — all are
no longer a picture, they are shades of a photograph,
22 Edinburgh
and we are again in the " gloom that saddens heaven
and earth," in "the Grey Metropolis of the North."
And so the day wears on to a close, till in the even-
ing it ''fairs," and the air is sweet and fresh. And
presently the stars appear above the chimneys, and then
the bugles sound from the Castle, calling the wanderers
home.
CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE PAST \ TWO MIRACLES
About eight hundred years ago, two young Saxon
princesses, and their brother and their mother, were
shipwrecked in the Firth of Forth, and were landed at
Queensferry. The young princesses were the grand-
nieces of Edward the Confessor, and their brother was
Edgar the Atheling, heir to the English crown, and
they had all fled from England because it had been
invaded and taken by William the Conqueror.
The king of Scotland in those days was Malcolm III.,
and when he was a prince he had been obliged to fly from
Scotland, — not because Scotland had been conquered by
a foreign foe, for that has never yet happened to Scotland,
though it may some day, — but because his father, King
Duncan, had been murdered by Macbeth, as Shake-
speare's play makes all the world aware. So Malcolm
had fled to the court of Edward the Confessor, and had
there been very kindly received and kept for fifteen
years, till Macbeth died ; and then he had come back
to reign in Scotland. So now of course the nieces and
nephew of Edward the Confessor thought Malcolm
would be grateful and kind to them in his turn. And
so he was ; and, though he was much older than they
were, and had been married before, he fell in love with
Two Miracles 23
one of the princesses, whose name was Margaret, and
made her his queen. Malcolm, called " Canmore,"
which means " big head," was a great soldier, and loved
fighting, and he fought many battles ; but he did not
know how to read or write. It is said that Queen
Margaret, who was more learned, taught the king to
read, and it is also told that he loved her so much that
he used to kiss her books that he could not read him-
self She also taught him to like all sorts of beauty
and splendour, such as should surround a king ; and
the court of Scotland became a fine and stately court,
instead of rather a rough and simple one, such as had
contented the soldier king and his first queen ; and
Malcolm and Margaret were waited on by persons of
high rank in the kingdom, and served on gold and
silver dishes, and wore beautiful clothes and jewels, and
encouraged the making of rare and costly things.
Queen Margaret was very pious, and she and the King
used to wash the feet of the poor, and with their own
hands feed beggars and orphans. Malcolm Canmore
and Queen Margaret lived a great deal at Edinburgh
Castle, though Edinburgh was not then the Capital of
Scotland, but was only a fortress built on a high rock
among woods. Edinburgh Castle itself is utterly
difli^erent to-day from what it was in those days, — there is
only a tiny bit left of Malcolm's and Margaret's Castle,
and that is Queen Margaret's little chapel, and it is the
very oldest bit of all Edinburgh to-day.
When the King and Queen were tired of living at the
Castle, they used to ferry across the Firth of Forth, at
the place where the shore of Fife is only a mile oflr", —
where the Forth Bridge now stands, — and go to Dun-
fermline. Here they had a palace, and here they had
24 Edinburgh
been married, and here the Queen had founded a mag-
nificent Abbey. The two villages on the opposite sides
of the Firth of Forth are still called North Queensferry
and South Queensferry.
But Malcolm Canmore was a fighter, and did not
always stay at home. Though he loved the Queen so
much that he kissed her books, her indirect influence did
not always prevail if it thwarted his own wishes. One
day, after he and the Queen had been married over
twenty years, he went with two of his sons to fight in
Northumberland, though the Queen was very ill indeed
and begged him to stay. He left her and the younger
children in Edinburgh Castle. And hither, four days
later, the second son rode back alone, and told his mother
that her husband, the King, and their eldest son were
both slain. The news killed the Queen. She died in
her little chapel, praying.
And when the little group of orphans and the old
priest in charge of them looked down over the Castle
walls, they found they were surrounded by enemies. A
wild, rough uncle, Donald Bane, who, when Malcolm
had fled for refuge to the civilized Saxon court, had fled
to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, where
life was still very savage, had now come, with a wild
horde of followers, to take his nephews prisoners or slay
them, and make himself King of'Scotland. There they
were, — men dressed in deer-skins, surrounding the Castle
Rock, howling and whooping and intent on battle. And
whilst the unhappy princes and princesses looked down,
and thought themselves doomed, — gradually it all faded
from sight. Wave after wave of soft white mist blew up
from the Firth of Forth, hung over all the land, blotted
the trees and hills and morasses from sight, crawled up
.'1 hit.:
PUBI
Two Miracles 25
the sides of the Custlc Rock, and shrouded everything in
a dense vapour. What did the orphans and the old
priest do ? They gave God thanks for a miracle, and
took dead Queen Margaret in her coffin, and escaped out
of a little postern gate, and crept and scrambled down the
steep rocky sides of the hill, — a perilous descent, — and
across the land, through woods and over morasses, bear-
ing their mother's coffin with them, and at last reached
the ferry over the P'orth, and crossed it to Dunfermline,
to the Abbey their mother had built, and were safe.
Donald Bane did reign for a short time as king of Scot-
land, but so did the gallant young princes who carried
their mother's coffin all that way that misty day eight
hundred years ago. Four of them were kings of Scot-
land, one after another, and one of their sisters, Maude,
married Henry I., and so became Queen of England.
The next story of a miracle in Edinburgh is the story
of one of these sons of Malcolm and Margaret, — David,
the last of them to reign, and one of the best kings
Scotland has had.
It is the story of how Holyrood Abbey was founded.
King David was hunting in the big forest of Drums-
heugh, and he had been advised that he ought not to
hunt that day, because it was a day his Church keeps
holy, — the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, — and
not a day to spend on sport or pleasure. But the King,
though he was very pious, would not listen. Perhaps it
was a fine day, and the temptation was great. Anyhow,
he went, riding among his courtiers, with jest and laugh,
with bugles slung and horses champing, joyous and self-
willed, taking his kingly pleasure. And somehow, as
the day wore on, he became separated from the others,
ED. 4
26 Edinburgh
and found himself riding alone in the great forest at the
edge of Arthur's Seat, and could no longer hear the
bugles and the cries of the chase. And suddenly there
crashed through the trees a huge angry white stag, and
it turned at bay and attacked the King, who had only his
short hunting sword with which to defend himself. And
then the miracle. No white woolly mist from the Forth,
but a hand from the clouds, that placed a Cross in King
David's hand, and the King held up the sacred emblem
in front of the stag, and the stag retreated before it into
the forest, and the King was saved.
King David had always been very generous to the
Church. To build and endow Churches and Abbeys was
the one way then of protecting the ownership of land
and property, and educating the people. King David,
indeed, was called " a sair sanct for the crown." But the
night after King David had disobeyed his Confessor and
hunted on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross,
St. Andrew, Scotland's Patron Saint, came to him in a
dream, and told him to found yet another Abbey on the
scene of the miracle. And so he built a splendid Abbey
at the foot of Arthur's Seat, — the Abbey of the Holy
Rood ; and the miraculous Cross that had saved the King
was placed above the High Altar, and remained there for
many years, till it was carried off by English invaders
and placed in Durham Cathedral.
So now there was a rich and powerful Abbey down in
the valley a mile below the Castle ; and the Augustine
Canons began to build the Canongate round about their
Abbey, and naturally there was much coming and going
between the Castle and the Abbey and the Canongate,
and a street, — a steep, mediaeval street, — gradually grew
all down the ridge of Castle Hill from one to the other.
And so began the town of Edinburgh.
Battles, Murders, and Sudden Deaths 27
CHAPTER V
STORIES OF THE I'AST : BATTLES, MURDERS, AND
SL'DDEN DEATHS
There have been so many battles, nuirders, and SLuiden
deaths in Edinburgh that it is impossible to tell of half
of even the most famous and romantic. Eet us take
four stories out of two hundred and ten years of Edin-
burgh history, and let us begin with a story of sudden
death, — the story of " the Black Dinner" in the Castle,
in the year 1440, when James II. was a little boy often
years old, four years after he had come to the throne.
There was a great family in Scotland that was second in
wealth and power only to the royal family of Stewart, —
the family of the Douglases. When James I., the good
and great poet-king of Scotland, was murdered at Perth,
and his little six-year-old son was crowned James II.,
the head of the great house of Douglas was the old
Earl of Douglas ; but he died and was succeeded by
his son, a youth of seventeen. This boy-earl was very
brave and proud and haughty, and he kept great state,
and surrounded himself with royal splendour, riding
about with a regiment of two thousand lances, and
sending ambassadors to the court of France, as though
he had been a king instead of a subject. The little
King — too young to see any wrong to himself in all this
— admired and looked up to the young earl, as a boy
of ten would admire the bold ways of another boy, seven
years older than himself. But the statesmen who had
charge of the King were more experienced and saw
danger ahead.
In those days sudden death was the only method that
occurred to men when other people annoyed them. The
2 8 Edinburgh
young Earl of Douglas and his fifteen-year-old brother
were invited to Edinburgh Castle by the King's
guardians, Sir Alexander Livingstone and Sir William
Crichton ; and the little King and they, and the two
young Douglases and their old adviser, Sir Malcolm
Fleming of Cumbernauld, all made merry and feasted
together ; but the Earl's retinue were not allowed within
the Castle walls. Suddenly there was placed on the
table a dish containing the head of a great black bull.
This was the old Scottish symbol that someone present
was doomed to death. The warlike Douglases under-
stood it. Instantly all was clamour. The two brave
boy-nobles sprang to their feet and drew their swords :
the little King begged and prayed for the lives of his
friends. But the banqueting-hall was filled with armed
men — armed men, against two striplings and an old man,
— guests ! They would not have called it murder —
there was a form of trial for treason — but the prisoners
had been doomed to death before the trial, for the black
bull's head had meant that. They were executed on
the Castle Hill.
" Edinburgh Castle, towne and toure,
God grant thou sink for sin !
And that even for the black dinour
Earl Douglas gat therein."
That was not the last sudden death in King James II. 's
reign. His own death was sudden, as was the death of
most of the brave kings of Scotland ; but it did not
occur in Edinburgh. Let the next story of the past be
a story that redounds to the credit of the town, though
it is the saddest story in all Scottish history, — the story
of Flodden.
It was a moonlit night in August, 151 3. On the
Borough Muir, — part of the old royal hunting forest of
Battles, Murders, and Sudden Deaths 29
Drumsheugh, where King David had encountered the
stag, — was encamped the host of the Scottish army, old
men and young men, Lowlanders, Highhuiders, and
Islanders. A thousand tents gleamed in the moonlight,
and the cries of the sentries broke through the hushed
sounds of the night. Within the little city few were
sleeping, and many a brave woman's heart was anxious,
for on the morrow their gallant and beloved King,
James IV., was to march to war with the English, and
not a home in Edinburgh but was giving a husband or
a son to follow him and strike for King and Country.
In the centre of the High Street, beside the Col-
legiate Church of St. Giles, stood the City Cross, rising
from its little battlemented tower, whence all royal
proclamations were made to the citizens. The moon-
light fell on the High Street and on the Cross. King
James was at the Abbey of Holyrood. It was midnight,
and many honest folk were in their beds, but others
were wakeful.
Who are these heralds and pursuivants who mount
to the foot of the Cross in the moonshine ? Are they
living men, or are they a spectral throng ^ The night
is wakened with trumpets, and scared faces appear at
the windows of the tall houses of the High Street. A
voice proclaims from the Cross a ghastly summons,
reading by name a long roll of Scotland's chivalry —
earls and barons, knights and gentlemen and honest
burghers, — desiring them to appear within forty days
before the Court of Pluto. Amongst those who heard
this dread summons was a certain " Maister Richart
Lawsone," who, when he heard his own name read
out, called to his servant to bring him his purse, and
took out a crown and cast it over the stair on which
30 Edinburgh
he stood into the street, crying, '' I appeal from that
summons' judgement and sentence thereof, and take me
all hail in the mercy of God and Christ Jesus His Son."
Next day, Scotland's Standard, the ''ruddy lion
ramped on gold," waved in August sunshine on the
Borough Muir, and the tents were struck, and all was
eager preparation and enthusiasm ; and then the King
and his army moved south, and Edinburgh was left
deserted — women and old men and children, waiting.
It was about three weeks after the army had marched
away that one messenger rode back into the town, — the
first escaped from the battle, — and told the news. The
King was dead, the battle lost, and dead beside the
King were all the flower of Scotland who had marched
so gaily forth. The story runs that not one from all
that ghostly death-roll had escaped save only that
" Maister Richart Lawsone " who had appealed from
the summons. Thirteen earls, fourteen lords, an
archbishop, a bishop, two abbots, all had fallen. Not
a noble house in Scotland but had lost a member ; not
a Scottish home but mourned its dead. The whole of
Scotland was staggered by the blow.
And Edinburgh ? Brave little sixteenth-century
Edinburgh !
What should we hear now ? That the stocks had
fallen. What did they hear then ? Another Pro-
clamation from the City Cross, — not a spectral throng
then. " All manner of persons " were ordered to have
ready their goods and weapons of war for defence of
the town lest the English marched upon it ; and the
women were not to weep in the streets, but to go into
the Church and pray for their Country.
The next battle was not an international one : it was
Battles, Murders, and Sudden Deaths 3 i
civil war. Eelinburgh was famed for its street-fights
in the Middle Ages. Every Edinburgh burgher was
bound to keep a spear, and to be ready to rush out
with it when the beacon fires flashed from hill to hill,
telling Scotland that the English were over the Border
again. That was the way they telegraphed in those
days, — and it was almost as quick a way of sending the
news. A bonfire blazed up on Berwick Law, — in a
moment, the fire laid ready on the top of Arthur's
Seat was kindled and began to crackle ; and so on,
right up to the Highlands. And when the bonfires
blazed, out came the lusty citizens with their spears ;
for in the Middle Ages in Scotland there was no paid
army as there is now, and so it was every citizen's duty
to be able to bear arms in defence of the Country.
But Edinburgh folk were quick tempered, and the
spears were- handy, and were not always used legiti-
mately on English heads. Many a fight has raged in
the High Street of Edinburgh, and up and down the
narrow closes.
The most celebrated is the one that took place in
the reign of James V., and it is called " Cleanse the
Causeway," and was a political fight between the two
great houses of Douglas and Hamilton. The Earl of
Angus was head of the house of Douglas, and the
Earl of Arran was head of the house of Hamilton, and
Bishop Gavin Douglas, the famous poet, nephew of
the Earl of Angus, tried to make peace between them,
by appealing to the great Archbishop Beaton, who was
with the Hamiltons. But the Archbishop vowed that
on his conscience he knew nothing at all about it, and
he struck himself on the chest as he said so, and there was
a noise of metal, showing that the Archbishop was wear-
32 Edinburgh
ing armour under his rochet. So Gavin Douglas told him
his conscience " clattered," which means it told tales.
Then the fight began. Such a fight ! The Hamiltons
streamed up the narrow wynds from the Archbishop's
palace in the Cowgate, and fiDund the Douglases waiting
for them, packed in a mass in the High Street, and
there were clashings of arms and cries and blows, and all
the windows were filled with spectators, and spears
were handed down to the fighters. At the end of the
fight all the causeways and closes were filled with dead
and dying. The Douglases had won the day, and the
Earl of Arran escaped by swimming across the Nor'
Loch on a collier's horse ; and the Archbishop, whose
conscience had told tales, hid behind an Altar in a
Church, and was dragged out, and was saved by the
would-be peacemaker, Bishop Gavin Douglas !
The story of the next reign is the story of a murder
at Holyrood. When sightseers visit Holyrood they
are shown a little room with part of the threadbare
tapestry still hanging on the wall, and a secret stair
behind it. This was Queen Mary's boudoir, off her
room, and the stair led down to the room of her bad
boy-husband. Lord Darnley.
In this little ante-room Queen Mary sat at supper
with the Countess of Argyle and the lay Abbot of
Holyrood and others of her household, including the
Queen's Italian secretary, her musician and favourite,
Riccio. The visitor to-day wonders how so many
could have gathered in this tiny room ; but there were
still others to come into it. The first to come was
Darnley, who entered and sat down by the Queen ;
and at that signal in rushed Lord Ruthven and a band
of others, — armed assassins, ^ — ^and seized Riccio. There
THE MESSENGER FROM FLODDEN.
Battles, Murders, and Sudden Deaths 33
was a struggle, the Ouccn trying to protect Ricclo,
and Riccio clinging to her skirt and j^raying her to
save him. I'hc supper-table was overturned, and they
pointed a pistol at their Queen, and stahhcd the man in
her sight, and then dragged him across the Presence
Chamber, and completed their murder with " whingers
and swords " — fifty-six wounds — one unarmed man
against an armed band. Nowadays, a candle is held
down to a dark stain in the wooden boards in the
shadowy doorway to let the stranger see the brass plate
and the bloodstains of Riccio, — once real, perhaps now
not so real.
All night the young Oueen, the outraged daughter
of a line of kings, was a prisoner in the hands of this
husband and his brutal friends ; and one of them told
her that if she attempted to speak he would " cut her
into coUops and cast her over the wall." Little wonder
that a few months later, before the birth of her child,
she sought the safety of the Castle.
Darnley was not arraigned for treason ; but a year
later he was visited with smallpox, and lay in a house
just outside the city. The Queen visited her sick
husband there ; and one Sunday evening she went
thence on foot under a silken canopy, with lighted torches
and a guard of Archers, to Holyrood. Here baby James
lay peacefully in his cradle, unaware of his royal destinies,
and here a masque was going on in honour of the
marriage of one of the Queen's servants. And in the
small hours of that morning the house where Darnley
lay was blown up with gunpowder, and Darnley was
blown up with it.
A shifting of the scenes, and it is eighty-three years
later in Edinburgh. Much has happened. Sixty-three
ED. 5
34 Edinburgh
years have passed since Mary, Queen of Scots, ended
her sorrows on the scaffold. Her son, born in Edin-
burgh Castle, had reigned for fifty-eight years over
Scotland, and for the last twenty-two of them had been
king of both England and Scotland. His son, Charles I.,
had been beheaded ; and his son — the great-grandson of
Mary, Queen of Scots, — was in exile, while Cromwell
ruled as Protector.
The Marquis of Montrose had been faithful to
Charles I., and had fought many battles for him against
the disloyal Covenanters in Scotland. Six days after
Charles I. was beheaded the Scots had Charles II. pro-
claimed King at the Cross of Edinburgh. But they
then sent to tell him that he could not be King unless
he gave up his creed and became a Covenanter. Rather
than do this, Prince Charles, then eighteen years old,
sent Montrose to Scotland to try and win his ancient
kingdom for him. But Montrose was defeated, taken
prisoner, and sent to Edinburgh and condemned to
death. How the Covenanters hated him ! On the
day of his death they had him dragged, tightly bound,
on a high hurdle drawn by a single horse, all through
the streets of Edinburgh, that the rabble might enjoy
the spectacle. On the hurdle sat the black-garbed
executioner, and in front of it were marched a band of
other Cavalier prisoners, bound and bareheaded. The
cavalcade was preceded by the City magistrates in their
robes of office ; and all round the people pressed, a
mass of pitiless humanity, yelling and throwing mud
and stones, jibes and curses. The forestairs, balconies, and
the windows of the lofty houses were filled with specta-
tors. Were they all pitiless ? No ; some shed tears.
And so the hurdle rattled on, slowly. It took three
hours to drive through the town.
Battles, Murders, and Sudden Deaths 35
Close down to Holyrood, the procession paused in
front ot Moray House ; for on that day the great
Marquis of Argyle, the most powerful Covenanting lord
in Scotland, and Montrose's rival and arch-enemy, was a
guest at Moray House, attending the marriage festivities
of his son and the Earl of Moray's daughter. The
wedding-party, including many of the Covenanting lords,
came out on to the stone balcony to gloat over their
enemy as he passed to his death. In their bravery of
silks and laces and jewels they leant over and looked at
the moving mass of yelling rabble, and at the pale, proud,
calm face of Montrose. He must have been close to
them in that narrow street on his high hurdle, — bare-
headed, wounded, bound, and utterly fearless. For one
moment the eyes of the two men met, and Argyle
turned away.
Montrose was hanged on May 21, 1650, at the Cross
of Edinburgh, on a gibbet thirty feet high, and his head
was spiked on the Tolbooth, out in the middle of the
High Street by St. Giles's Church. It remained there
tor eleven years, and then it was taken down and
reverently buried with his mutilated body, buried in all
pomp and respect by Bishop Wishart, who had been his
Chaplain, and was now made Bishop of Edinburgh, It
was on the same day that Montrose was buried that the
Marquis of Argyle, a martyr in his turn, was executed
at the Cross.
Many are the battles, murders, and sudden deaths
that have helped to make the story of Edinburgh. But
in remembering them we ought to remember that the
cruelties were never all on one side, either in Religion or
Politics. The Covenanters treated their enemies most
barbarously, and in their turn were treated by their
enemies most barbarously. It is all because it is men's
36 Edinburgh
nature to be cruel and tyrannical to those who defy them,
and then are helpless and in their power. Nor need we
judge the people of the past, lest we be judged ; for,
with all our added three centuries of civilization, are we
in this respect very much better to-day?
CHAPTER VI
EDINBURGH GIRLS AND BOYS IN OLD DAYS
Almost the first thing we know about Edinburgh, —
out of the shadowy, legendary past, before it was even
a town, — is something about little girls ; for it is thought
that the reason why Edinburgh Castle used long ago
to be called the " Castell of Maydens," was because
very young Pictish princesses v/ere kept there for safety.
Such cold little Pictish " Maydens " they must have
been, spending long days looking down over the ram-
parts and rocks on to woods and mists and far-off sea
and hills, and wondering, in their cramped little minds,
what the world was like, and what it held for them !
But this was very long ago indeed.
Scottish children could not always have been very
happy in the Middle Ages, for there was so much
fighting between England and Scotland that people
lived in a continual state of readiness for their enemies ;
and in the towns there could have been very little room
for children, — no freedom nor running about ; no
country walks on fine days, for outside the town there
were v/olves prowling ; and on wet days no large airy
nurseries or schoolrooms, even for the children of rich
parents, and no books and no grand toys.
The boys were better oflF than the girls, for what
education there was was given to them. Of the girls
Girls and Boys in Old Days 37
we hear nothing; but we have a glimpse of the boys of
the fifteenth century. In James I.'s reign, a boy of
sixteen was counted a man, and had to possess weapons
according to his rank, to be ready to defend his Country.
And four times a year he had to attend, with all the
men of the land, meetings called " Wapinschaws " —
(shows of weapons) — and be fined if he did not possess
the right ones. It was thought in those days much
more necessary that boys should be trained to be ot use
to the Country than that they should enjoy themselves,
and so boys were forbidden by law to play at football,
which did not train them to fight, and any boy found
playing football was fined fourpence. But they were
ordered by law to practise archery from the time they were
twelve years old, for that was learning to fight. Close to
the Church in every Parish there was a shooting-ground,
and on each public holiday, — that is to say, about once a
week, — every boy had to shoot three arrows at a mark.
This is why to this day we see yew-trees in Church-
yards. They were planted there in the days of bows and
arrows, for it was from these trees that the bows were cut.
But the sons of gentlemen in Scotland were from very
early days taught Latin as well as fighting. All the
Scottish kings were fond of learning, and encouraged it.
In the reign of James IV., — himself a highly educated
man, speaking several languages, and interested in all
arts and crafts as well as being excellent in all manly
sports and a brave knight, — the boys of Scotland
who were the sons of men of rank were well looked
after. Their fathers were ordered by law to send them
to school when they were eight or nine till they were
good Latin scholars, and then they were to go on to one
of the Scottish Universities.
38 Edinburgh
But all the Latin in the world could not tame the
unruly little boys of Edinburgh. Fighting was their
one instinct. They used to have great street-fights like
their elders. But whereas the street-fights between rival
noble houses and their followers were called " tulzies,"
and were fights to the death, the street-fights between
rival bands of boys were called " bickers," and were
conducted with fists and stones and mud. So long ago
as 1529, when James V. was king, the Town Council
of Edinburgh passed an act ordering that there should
be no more " Bickerings between Bairns," and that if any
should be found bickering their ^'faderis and moderis "
(fathers and mothers) were to answer for it. But how
could the bairns be expected not to bicker if their
respected faderis set them such bad examples? It was
only nine years before that the great " tulzie " of
" Cleanse the Causeway " had raged up and down the
town. Had not every Edinburgh boy of course heard of
it ? Had he not often, on dark winter evenings by fire-
light, sat and listened open-mouthed to the story of that
day ? Was it not his proudest ambition to do likewise ?
All through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the boys of Edinburgh must have witnessed many
^'tulzies" in the High Street, between great rival
families, — between the Scotts and the Kerrs, between the
Hoppringles and the Elliots. How could the Town
Council hope to make the boys bicker no more ?
The High School was the chief School in Edinburgh,
to which all the important citizens sent their sons. It
was the descendant of the Town Grammar School in
which the boys of James IV. 's time had been drilled in
Latin, and so was governed by the Town Council. At
the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Edinburgh
Girls and Boys in Old Days 39
was still the home of royalty, and the Royal Standard
waved at Holyrood, showing that James VI. was in
residence there, the King took a keen interest in the
chief school of his Capital, and it was in these days that
it was christened " The Royal High School." The first
Earl of Haddington, Secretary of State for Scotland,
himself an old High School boy, also took great interest
in the school, and he showed this interest in a way that
must have won the hearts of all the scholars.
One summer evening the Earl of Haddington was in
his own splendid house in the Cowgate, sitting resting
in his dressing-gown and cap and slippers, chatting and
drinking wine with a friend. There was a noise in the
street outside, and they looked out to find that a '^bicker"
was in progress between the High School boys and the
students of the newly-founded University, — then merely
boys too, — and the students were winning the day. Up
rose the Earl of Haddington, President of the Court
of Session and Secretary of State for Scotland, in his
dressing-gown and sHppers. Out he rushed and took
command of his old school, cheered them on, drove the
students through the Grassmarket and out of one of the
City gates, the West Port. No doubt using his high
authority, he locked the City gate, so that the students
had to spend the night outside ; and then he went back
to his friend and his wine.
It was later on in James VI. 's reign that the boys of
the High School felt themselves wronged by the refusal
to them of a week's holiday, so they got into the school
by night, taking swords and firearms with them, and in
the morning it was found that the school was in a state
of siege. The Town Council sent a force of city officers
to quell the young garrison. The boys refused to
40 Edinburgh
surrender, and threatened death to any who approached
them. Bailie Macmorran, a merchant of great wealth and
importance in the town, ordered the door to be forced
open with a battering ram, and while this was being done,
one of the boys fired at him, and killed him on the spot.
The wealthy Macmorran family demanded " blood for
blood"; but the father of the frenzied boy was a man
of rank and note, and great influence was used to have
the boy set free. When one remembers the spirit of
vengeance of the time, one is thankful to know that he
was saved from the clutches of the law. The house of
Bailie Macmorran, in Riddle's Close, where he enter-
tained King James and his Danish bride, still stands.
Of the girls' schools in Edinburgh at the beginning
of the eighteenth century, we hear occasionally. In
Chambers's " Traditions of Edinburgh " it is told that in
1 703, — that was only eight years after Bailie Macmorran
was shot by the High School boy, — the mistress of a
boarding-school kept in an Edinburgh "close" advertised
that she taught " young ladies and gentlewomen all sorts
of breeding that is to be had in any part of Britain, and
great care taken of their conversation." Later on in the
century there was a very noted school for girls in Edin-
burgh, at which Sir Walter Scott's mother was educated.
It was kept by Mrs. Euphemia Sinclair, a lady who was
connected with many of the old families, and so was
given charge of their daughters. Sir Walter Scott said
of her that " she must have been possessed of uncommon
talents for education, as all her young ladies in after life
wrote and spelt admirably, were well acquainted with
history and the belles lettres^ without neglecting the
more homely duties of the needle and the accompt book ;
and perfectly well-bred in society." After leaving her
MARV QUEEN OF SCOTS.
from the Memorial Portrait in the fosstssion oj Lord Darnley
Girls and Boys in Old Days 41
the " young ladies " were sent " to be finished off by
the Honble. Mrs. Ogilvie," and by her were trained,
above all things, to sit upright and walk gracefully.
A happier school this of Mrs. Euphemia Sinclair's than
the Hiffh School seems to have been. Lord Cockburn
to
describes it when he went therein 1787, a trembHng
little man of eight years old, and his account is not very
cheerful. " There were probably not ten days in which
I was not flogged, at least once. . . . Two of the
masters, in particular, were so savage, that any master
doing now what they did every hour, would certainly be
transported." The pupils had to be at school by seven
in the morning in summer ; and all the teaching they
received was still Latin, and Latin only, as it had been
three centuries before. And yet this was the system
that turned out such men as Sir Walter Scott, Lord
Brougham, Lord Jeffrey, Francis and Leonard Horner,
Lord Cockburn ; and many others, notables of their time.
And they contrived to be very happy in spite of the
floggings, as boys will, learning very little Latin and less
love for it in six hours indoors, and roaming over the
hills and the open country by which Edinburgh was sur-
rounded. And then there were always the "bickers"!
The " bickers," in spite of the Town Council and the
Town Guard, had survived the tulzies, and were still
in full force in the eighteenth century. There were
" bickers " between rival schools and between rival parts
of the town, and between sons of gentlemen and the
poorer boys of the town ; and when the New Town was
beginning to be built, there were great "bickers" between
the boys of the Old Town and the boys of the New
Town. Sir Walter Scott, when he was a boy, used to
take part in "bickers" between the boys of George
ED. 6
42 Edinburgh
Square, where he lived, and the boys of Potterrow, a
poor street near George Square. He tells how the leader
of the Potterrow boys was a fine little fellow about
thirteen years old, tall and active, blue eyed and fair
haired, bare armed and bare footed. The George Square
boys did not know his name, and he went by the name
of " Greenbreeks." In one terrific conflict in " The
Meadows," on the outskirts of Edinburgh, this young
champion, leading a charge, was struck on the head by a
"hanger" or knife, and fell, " his bright hair plentifully
dabbled with blood." This was utterly against all the
traditions and rules of" bickers." The Watchman, — the
police of that day, — carried Greenbreeks off to the
Infirmary, and the boys all fled, throwing the hanger
into a ditch as they ran. But bare-footed Greenbreeks
was a boy of metal : he declined to tell tales. So did
he Watchman. When Greenbreeks recovered, a ginger-
bread baker, who supplied both the rich boys of George
Square and the poor boys of Potterrow, was called
upon to act as " go-between," and Greenbreeks was
proffered a sum of pocket-money by the very penitent
boy who had done the deed. He replied that " he
would not sell his blood." After much urging he at last
accepted a pound of snuff for an old grandmother or
aunt with whom he lived. But the boys never met nor
made friends, not from any ill-feeling, but because that
would have stopped the " bickers " and the fun !
Long, long years after, that hanger was found, rusty
and earth-clogged, in The Meadows.
The last picture of Old Edinburgh is also, like the
first, a picture of its little girls. No Pictish princesses
in captivity, but two little hoydens in the reign of
George III.
Girls and Roys in Old Days 43
All the wooden houses of the Old Town had " tore-
stairs," — flights of outside steps leading from the pave-
ment up over the booths of the street to the first storey
of the house, where people lived. It had always from
very early days been the habit for pigs to be kept under
these " forestairs," and to have free liberty to run
about in the streets. For the honour of Edinburgh
be it said that this was the same in other towns, — in
Paris, for example. And so it was part of the life of
the High Street that the pigs should come grumphing
out from under the " forestairs " and stroll at their
piggie pleasure through the chief street of the town.
No fear of motor car or cab I — for there was no vehicle
passed in those days down the crowded, jostling, dirty
street, only foot passengers and sedan chairs and an
occasional horseman, and then the laugh was on the
pig's side, if he could run snorting between the horse's
legs and throw the rider. Not only did pigs run about
like dogs, but they were made into pets. There was
one old judge in Edinburgh who, when he was a boy,
had a pet pig that followed him wherever he went, and
at night used to sleep at the foot of his bed.
And the last story of Edinburgh little girls of old
days is of the little daughters of Lady Maxwell of
Monreith, who lived in Hyndford's Close. They used
to spend happy mornings riding up and down the
High Street on the last of the pigs that were allowed
to run about free in the old way — one sister proudly
mounted on a big sow, and the other sister running
along by her and thumping the sow with a stick. One
of these little women became afterwards Duchess of
Gordon, and the other. Lady Wallace, was a society
wit and a beauty.
44 Edinburgh
These, then, were the Edinburgh girls and boys of
old days, — the girls and boys who lived in Edinburgh
when it was a dear old picturesque town, high houses
and narrow closes all down the hill from the Castle to
the Canongate, a mile of densely-packed squalor and
splendour, dirt and learning, gossip and wit, kindliness
and brutality, cosiness and crime. It was in this
crowded hive of a city that the girls and boys of Edin-
burgh lived in old days. And they had not room to
grow. If they were the children of people of quality,
or of wealthy people, they lived in the closes off the
High Street ; and if they were the children of merchants
or tradesmen, they lived in the upper storeys of the tall
houses in the High Street, above the booths and shops
and cellars of the street. But they were all very over-
crowded ; and as in those days it was not as it is now,
when the best of everything is given to children, the
grown-up people took as a matter of course the best
rooms of the house, and the children had to live and
sleep wherever they could.
Chambers's " Traditions " tells how in Edinburgh,
just before the people could stand it no longer and the
New Town was built, the town house of a country
gentleman and lawyer, afterwards a judge, contained
only three rooms and a kitchen ! There was the
mother's parlour and the father's study, and the third
room was a bedroom ; at night the children and the
nurse had beds laid down for them in the study, the
housemaid slept under the kitchen dresser, and the butler
was turned out of doors.
In a merchant's house in the High Street the kitchen
and nursery were in cellars under the street, and the
" children rotted off like sheep." It was time indeed
that the New Town was built !
i
Girls and Boys in Old Days 45
CHAPTER VII
GIRLS AND ROVS OF MODERN EDINBURGH
The Old Town of Edinburgh still swarms with
children, but they are the children of the very poor.
They live in the old closes and wynds, where the
children of noblemen lived in bygone centuries ; they
run in and out of old stone doorways, — doorways with
armorial bearings carved above them, or the pious
legends so beloved of the seventeenth-century people
who built these homes — " Feare the Lord and Depart
from Evil," or, " Blissit be God in al His Gittis " ;
they keek out of windows high up, behind garments
suspended to dry on a pole stuck out of every case-
ment ; they climb up and down the dark, noisome
turret stairs indoors ; they sit outside in the street in
groups, on the forestairs, watching the sights of the
streets, as did the gaily-dressed ladies ot the past. A
very different street, and very different sights ! But
the children on the forestairs are the prettiest of the
sights, just as the ladies used to be. Such bonny little
tow-headtd, or curly red-headed, creatures ! The
motherly small girls with babies in their arms, and
gossiping like their elders ; and all, boys and girls
alike, with their little bare toes 1 For very poor
children in Edinburgh do not wear boots and stockings —
they run about, even in winter, with nimble naked legs,
and chilly, mud-stained feet. In hot summer weather
it is evidently great fun to sit in rows on the edge of
the causeway after a heavy shower of rain has filled the
gutters, and splash these little bare feet, with complete
abandon and shrill cries of delight, in the flowing stream.
46 Edinburgh
It is almost as good as going out of town, and is perhaps
the nearest approach to country holidays they ever have.
But the children of the poor are in many ways not
so badly off as were the rich folks' children when the
Old Town was the residence of the great, — and certainly
they are not so uncared for as were the children of the
poor in those days. Each door now in these high
closes, — rabbit-warrens of human life, — is marked telling
the number of cubic feet of air the room contains, and
how many persons may live in it. Then there are the
Board Schools to give poor children free education from
the time they are five till they are fourteen ; there are
the Infirmaries and the Sick Children's Hospital to
give them free attendance when they are ill ; and since
Queen Victoria's day there are the Jubilee Nurses to
nurse them at their own homes ; and there are the
Cripples' Home, the School for the Blind, the Deaf
and Dumb School, Dr. Guthrie's Ragged Schools, the
Boys' Brigade, Sunday Schools, Free Breakfasts, and
last, but by no means least, there are the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the League of
Pity, and the Children's Shelter, all in one building in
the middle of the High Street. There are hundreds
of enterprises, public and private, to make the children
of the poor healthy and happy and of use to the world ;
but of course, in spite of all, there are hundreds of
unhappy, starved little children, with wizened, reproach-
ful faces and miserable homes, in Edinburgh to-day.
It is the very poorest who live in the closes of the
Old Town ; but there are many as poor in the New
Town and in the suburbs ; and there is one thing that
the poor children of Edinburgh have that must seem to
them the best thing of all, and that is the Parks and
open spaces they have in which to play.
Girls and Boys ot To-day 47
There are many of these in Edinburgh ; and they are
jealously guarded for the children. Iwen the little
ones of the Old Town can run on their little bare feet
out of the foetid air of the wynds and closes, and in a
minute or two be playing in the Queen's Park or on
the green sides of Arthur's Seat. The Princes Street
Gardens are free to all, and it does not take two minutes
to run down some steep wynd from the Lawnmarket,
by the Castle, and cross the top of the Mound to the
gate leading into West Princes Street Gardens, and so
along a rough little path, high above the gay flower-
beds and walks and seats, and skirt round the edge
of the cliffs of the Castle Rock, and over a crazy
footbridge and some rocks that protrude through the
path, and so to the ruins of the Well-House Tower,
the only bit left of the fifteenth-century wall.
Opened only this summer, there is the new park at
Saughton, to the west of the town, taking in the old
walled garden of Saughton House. And Edinburgh
citizens are promised thousands of roses, and alfresco
teas.
The children of the South Side have still The
Meadows, where Sir Walter Scott played, and also
Bruntsfield Links, where very smoky-fleeced sheep
crop, careless of golf-balls.
And lastly, to the north of the town, there is the
People's Park, a huge open space, fresh and wholesome,
from which the very best view of Edinburgh can be
seen, — a perfect panorama, spread out in the sunshine
or seen through the mist, as the case may be, — what
artists call " a broken sky-line," the Castle in the very
centre, and many a church steeple and many a tower,
new and old, the great clock-tower of the modern
North British Railway Hotel, the beautiful, hoary, open
48 Edinburgh
arches of St. Giles's broken crown halfway down the
ridge of the Old Town, and the steeple of St. Mary's
Cathedral rising highest of all. " Peter " would no
longer be able to lament, in his " Letters to his Kins-
folk," about Edinburgh, that " the only want, if want
there be, in the whole aspect of this City, is, some such
type of the grandeur of Religion rearing itself in the
air, in somewhat of its due proportion of magnitude
and magnificence. It is the only great city, the first
impression of whose greatness is not blended with ideas
suggested by the presence of some such edifice, piercing
the sky in splendour or in gloom, far above the frailer
and lowlier habitations of those that come to worship
beneath its roof."
Beyond the town altogether, but not beyond the
reach of little feet, even bare ones, there are still the
hills and the open country round Edinburgh, where
children may roam among grass and whins, with all
the beautiful clean-washed colours of the Midlothian
country spread before their eyes, and the sun on their
shoulders, and the wind in their faces. How often, on
Saturday afternoons, or on a holiday, does one meet in
the lanes round Edinburgh little troops of bare-legged,
eager-voiced, ragged bird's-nesters scanning the hedges ;
or of venturesome children, often accompanied by the
baby in an ancient perambulator, all tired and dragging
along in charge of an older sister, a "wise-like wean "
of some thirteen summers or so. They carry in their
paws bunches of fading wild-flowers, or, if their walk
has lain in the direction of the Canal, — that most Dutch
little bit of Edinburgh, — one of the small boys may be
bearing a bottle of water, and if you inquire you will
be told it is " a fesh," and the bottle will be proudly
'GREENBREEKS" LEADING THE POTTER ROW BOYS IN A "BICKER.'
Girls and Boys of To-day 49
exhibited that you may sec for yourself a fish about an
inch long, somehow extracted from its native element.
The elder sister will ask you the way back to some
incredibly far-off home whence they have wandered,
and whither they are now returning in the evening, to
find the mother equally tired, for she will have spent
her holiday in doing all the family washing, hanging
it on the pole out of the window to dry, and then
" redding up " the house for Sunday.
And what about "gentlemen's bairns," as they used
to be called in old days ?
Well, they live now in the dull, dignified, formal,
grey terraces and crescents and squares of the New
Town ; and happy those little ones whose nursery
windows, high up in the roof, look down on to the
green trees of gardens across the way, and not merely
to another row of staring windows opposite.
The boys of Modern Edinburgh have a great many
other schools now besides the Royal High School, and
they do not learn Latin only, nor do they shoot the
Town Bailies. The girls of Modern Edinburgh are no
longer to be seen riding on sows, but neither have they
learned to sit upright ; and the way in which they
propel themselves along the streets by swinging one
arm like a flail, would have shocked the soul of the
Honble. Mrs. Ogilvie.
The High School is still what James VI. made it, —
the Royal High School ; and it is still the Town School,
for its Governors are Edinburgh's Lord Provost and
Council. But it is no longer in the old quarters to which
Scott and Cockburn went; for in 1825, just ^fter its
first rival, the Academy, had been founded and was being
built, the old High School roused itself into action. The
ED. 7
50 Edinburgh
Academy was rearing a dull, low, classic building in a
rather mean part of the North Side of the town ; but
the High School possessed itself of a wonderful site,
on the green slopes of Calton Hill ; and there, in the
four years from July 1825 to June 1829, it erected
a copy of the Athenian Temple of Theseus, — a huge
mass of Greek columns and temples and wings, and
two acres of playground right on the face of the hill.
The High School then emerged from the Old Town
and betook itself and all its traditions, — a proud proces-
sion, Provost and Bailies, University professors and
eminent citizens, former scholars, parents and boys, all
to the music of a military band, — to its magnificent new
quarters. And Lord Cockburn was so ecstatic that he
forgot all about his floggings, and said in a speech that
" with great experience and opportunity of observation,
I certainly have never yet seen any one system so well
adapted for training up good citizens, as well as learned
and virtuous men, as the old High School of Edinburgh
and the Scottish Universities . . . because men of the
highest and lowest rank of society send their children
to be educated together . . . they sit side by side."
Alas ! Was it a case of —
" Oh the auld hoose, the auld hoose,
Deserted tho' ye be,
There ne'er will be a new hoose . . ." ?
Or was it, perhaps, the fact that at the newly-founded
Academy the highest and lowest ranks were not educated
together, and did not sit side by side }
Sir Walter Scott was one of the first directors of the
Edinburgh Academy ; and at the Opening, in i 825, he
made a speech, and told " his young friends round him "
that there was to be a class at this school not to be found
Girls and Boys of To-day 5 i
in any similar academy, — a class for the study of English
Literature. A teacher was " to be added to the institu-
tion " who should teach boys Knglish composition and
a knowledge of the history of their own country. Sir
Walter Scott " would have the youths taught to venerate
the patriots and heroes of our own country along with
those of Greece and Rome ; to know the histories of
Wallace and Bruce, as well as those of Themistocles and
of Ciesar ; and that the recollection of the fields of
Flodden and Bannockburn should not be lost in those
of Plata^a and Marathon."
To-day the school has had many a " teacher added to
the institution," and the boys learn many kinds of know-
ledge besides Latin and Greek. In 1909, at the opening
of the new Science Department, the Academy boys of a
newer generation were gathered, as were the boys of
1825, to listen to one of the great men of their day.
Greece and Rome and Scotland ? — Themistocles and
Caesar and the Bruce ? — Platsa and Marathon and
Flodden ? — -Why, Sir William Ramsay took his hearers
through earth and fire and water and air, hanging wildly
on to the spectrum-coloured tails of elusive new elements!
What would the Wizard of the North have thought,
could he have entered the Academy lecture-hall that
day and listened with the rest, lost in amazed awe, to
the discoverer of argon lightly telling how through
Earth and Heaven — or such fragments of Heaven as have
condescended to fall on to Earth — he had stalked his
prey ^ Truly, the "fairy tales of Science"; and certainly,
— how many thousand times had he lifted that piece of
apparatus.^ — "the long result of time."
Besides these two chief day-schools — the High School
and the Academy — there are several big public boarding-
52 Edinburgh
schools, — Loretto, Fettes, and Merchiston. The last is
interesting because it is at one of the old historic houses
left in Edinburgh, — Merchiston Castle, the home of the
Napiers, and where the inventor of logarithms lived.
Fettes College is only about fifty years old. It stands on
the northern slopes, down towards the sea, and is on the
English pubHc-school system, with a central College
and separate large " Houses," each under its " House
Master " ; and it has a pretty Chapel.
Then there are the great " Hospitals," — that is, the
endowed schools. Most of these were founded by
Edinburgh citizens who began life poor and ended it
rich, and left their money to help other boys to make
their way in life.
The chief of these "Hospitals" is Heriot's Hospital,
founded by the famous goldsmith of James VI. 's day.
George Heriot began life as a goldsmith's apprentice,
and then started for himself with a tiny little booth or
shop in ParHament Close, off the High Street. He
rapidly became rich, and was made goldsmith to the
Queen. Scotland in the seventeenth century was a
poor country, and its King had not much money of his
own, and greatly valued those of his richer subjects who
supplied his wants. He had to depend on the private
fortunes of those about him, and this explains the great
favour in which '' Jingling Geordie," as he called the
goldsmith, was held. There is a well-known story that
one day George Heriot had been sent for to Holyrood,
and found his sovereign sitting by a fire of cedar-wood.
The goldsmith noticed how pleasant the fragrance was
which the cedar-wood made in burning.
** Yes," said the King, who always thought a good
deal about money, " and it is as costly as it is pleasant."
Girls and Boys ot To-day 53
Heriot told the King that if he would pay him a visit
in his little booth he would show him a costlier fire, and
the King accepted the invitation and went, only to find
an ordinary fire burning brightly.
" Is this your costly fire ?" he asked.
" Wait till 1 get my fuel, your Majesty," said Jing-
ling Geordie ; and he took out of his press a bond for
two thousand pounds he had lent the King, and put it
on the top of the fire.
A useful subject to a poor monarch, Jingling Geordie !
When George Heriot died he left money to endow a
school for " Puir orphan and faderless boys, sons of
freemen in Edinburgh." To this day Heriot's Hospital
is one of the most beautiful buildings in all Edinburgh.
Its architecture is said to be peculiar to Scotland, and it
is certainly very impressive, with its quadrangle and its
octagonal towers, its Chapel and its doorways.
Other rich Edinburgh citizens left their money to
found schools. George Watson, a merchant in Edin-
burgh, who died in 1723, left money for a Hospital for
sons and grandsons of merchants. This has now been
changed into day-schools. Daniel Stewart, of the
Exchequer, who died in 1 8 14, founded Stewart's Hospital
for boys ; and John Watson, a Writer to the Signet,
founded a Hospital which bears his name, and in it
sons of Writers to the Signet are taken by preference.
Donaldson, the printer, was more open-minded than any
of these, for " Donaldson's Hospital " was founded to
clothe, maintain and educate poor boys and girls for
trade or domestic service.
And lastly there is the Orphan Hospital, which has
the old clock of the Netherbow Port in its clock tower ;
and it also educates girls as well as boys. All these
54 Edinburgh
Hospitals stand in grounds of their own, and are large
buildings, — some of them things of architectural beauty;
and in two of them, as we have seen, girls as well as
boys are inmates, but in both of these the scholars are
the " puir orphans, faderless children." What about the
daughters of Edinburgh who are neither puir nor fader-
less ? What education for girls is there in the town ?
In the eighteenth century, while the boys had their
High School, it was thought enough for the girls to go
to a school kept in a private dwelling up a stair or two
in a close. We have not got much farther nowadays,
for whereas Edinburgh boys have their big public day-
schools, and their vast palaces, like Fettes, the schools
for their sisters are all in private houses, neither built
nor intended for the purpose, and it is thought much if
these private houses are on the outskirts of the town, —
some disused old family mansion, — so that there is some
form of garden, and not merely front-door steps and a
" back green." The education in the dining-room and
drawing-room is no doubt excellent, and the little girls
are most carefully tended ; but some day, when the
girls and boys of the Edinburgh of to-day are written
about as the children of old days, it may happen that
Edinburgh daughters as well as Edinburgh sons will have
their great schools, and that brothers will not come home
for the holidays from their palatial towers and quad-
rangles, their Grecian columns and temples, their Chapels
and windows and gateways, their playgrounds and cricket-
fields and swimming-baths, their Greek and their Latin
and their Science, their lecture-halls and laboratories,
their libraries and their busaries, and feel themselves —
small blame to them ! — such intensely superior beings
to their street-bred sisters.
Girls and Boys of To-day 55
And the play-hours ? They would take a volume.
And perhaps play-hours and games and parties are nowa-
days pretty much the same in Edinburgh as those of
the girls and boys of other towns. But Edinburgh may
be very grateful for the new form of play that is not
play at all, but good citizenship— the " Boy Scouts "
and the " Girl Guides." Up and down the cold grey
streets they march, workman-like little band in their
serviceable khaki uniforms ; but chiefly are they decora-
tive in the gardens, where much scouting goes on. Is
this the evolution of the " Bickers ".'*
Flat they lie on their faces, high up in the long grass
among the flowering rhododendrons, silent, intent, and
watchful. Far down below, on the smooth lawn, above
the Water of Leith, another band is moving slowly,
prodding the shaven, carefully-rolled turf, earnestly
examining the newly-raked gravel-path. Suddenly,
down upon them with whoops and a rush come the
ambushed band. There is a wild skirmish ; but it is
not they that the enemy from the ambush seek, — they
scatter them and rush on to a seat on which lie a photo-
graphic camera, two or three straps of school books, and
an overcoat. These are hastily grabbed, and the enemy
are ofi^ up the hill again with their plunder.
"Oh, Brown! — 1 say! — that's not fair!" shouts one
from below.
" IVho left their guns unprotected T' comes the answer,
in a voice of breathless triumph.
What battles of the future, one wonders, are they to
be that are now being fought in the flowery glades of
the Dean Gardens .^
56 Edinburgh
CHAPTER VIII
HOOD AND GOWN
Edinburgh University stands, a grey, square, stern
building, in a thronged, busy street leading right up
from the east end of Princes Street to the southern
suburbs. It stands on the very spot where, in 1567,
Darnley, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was
blown up by gunpowder. Then it was outside the town,
but now the University has tramway cars in front of it,
shops all round it, and slums clustering at its back.
This stern grey college is " the University Old Build-
ings," and a little way off, facing " The Meadows," are
" the University New Buildings," built within the
memory of this generation. They are chiefly given over
to the Medical and Science classes and laboratories.
Between the two are other buildings belonging to, or
connected with, the University, — the McEwan Hall, the
Music Class-room, the Men Students' Union. But it is
round *' the University Old Buildings," built at the
beginning of the nineteenth century on the original site
of the old college buildings, that tradition clings.
Edinburgh University is the youngest of the four
Scottish Universities. St. Andrews had been founded at
the beginning of the fifteenth century, while James I.
was a prisoner in England ; Glasgow in the middle of
the fifteenth century, in James II. 's reign ; Aberdeen at
the end of the fifteenth century, in James IV.'s reign.
But Edinburgh, the Capital, was not a University town
for nearly another century, — not until 1582.
The University of Edinburgh is always called " the
Protestant University," because it was built in the
Protestant days of James VI., whereas the earlier Uni-
SIR UALTKR SCOTT, BART. i«22.
From the />a:nti>ii^' dy Sir Henry Raehurn.
Hood and Gown 57
versities were founded in Roman Catholic days, by Papal
Bull. But it is hardly truthful, and it is certainly un-
grateful, to give all the credit to the Protestants and the
Town, for the earliest benefactor of Edinburgh Uni-
versity was a Catholic Bishop, — Robert Reid, Abbot of
Kinloss and Bishop of Orkney. This Robert Reid died
in I 558, and left 8,000 merks— a big sum in those days —
to found '^a College of Edinburgh "; and it was actually
this sum that the Edinburgh magistrates used, twenty-
four years later, to buy the site on which " the Protestant
University " was reared, and on which it stands to-day.
If all the founders and benefactors and promoters of
our institutions and charities were allowed to return to
Earth on All Hallows Eve, and to flit about in ghostly
fashion, pass by their own statues, find themselves in
streets christened after them, enter buildings dedicated
to them, or carrying on work for the world's good which
they began, — if such a thing were to happen, would not
that All Hallows Night be, as the refrain of a Cowboy
chorus says, " Their night to howl " ?
Certainly there would be, on such an All Hallows
Night in Edinburgh, one lonely soul who would stand
aghast in our University quadrangle, and not give even
Darnley's shattered spirit first place for pathos.
The Abbot in the quadrangle would be a very courtly
ghost. In his day he had been a scholar, a courtier, a
lawyer, an ambassador ; he had built Churches, gathered
libraries, travelled on royal embassies, been the second
Lord President of the Court of Session, had encouraged
art and learning, and founded other colleges besides
that at Edinburgh, — one, for instance, at Kirkwall, the
Capital of his Diocese, for teaching country youths
grammar and philosophy. He had drawn up an admir-
ED. 8
58 Edinburgh
able scheme for the college he wished to endow at
Edinburgh ; and then he had died at Dieppe,~died very
mysteriously with several others, as people did occasion-
ally in those days, — as he returned from witnessing the
marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to her first husband,
the Dauphin of France. And now ? — the ghost of the
Abbot of Kinloss and Bishop of Orkney might flit over
the quadrangle to the spirit of Sir David Brewster, lean-
ing against the pedestal of his own statue, and ask for
information.
" I beseech you to tell me, good Sir, is this the
colledge within the Burgh of Edinburgh, for exerceis
of leirning thairinto, quhilk umqhhill I bequeathed in
my testament the sowme of aucht thousand merkis?"
And Sir David Brewster would reply shortly :
"You're very far out, Abbot. Your name's never
mentioned here."
In the twenty-four years between the Founder's death
and the building of the University much had happened
in Scotland. Darnley had been blown up ; Queen Mary
had been imprisoned for fourteen years in England ;
John Knox had been dead for fourteen years ; and
Scotland had become a Protestant country. No Papal
Bull was needed, only a Charter signed, in April 1582,
by sixteen-year-old James VI., to empower the Lord
Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council to found the
University of Edinburgh.
Kirk o' Field, the purchased site, was at that time
a place of fields and gardens outside the town, with
some Church edifices and other buildings straggling over
it — including the family mansion of the Hamiltons. The
Town authorities purchased it with the Bishop's bequest
in June 1 582, and apparently their further funds were not
Hood and Gown 59
great, for they did not attempt to build a University,
but only proceeded to alter and add to the buildings
already there. Then they appointed the first " Provost "
or professor, and he lectured in the lower hall of
Hamilton House. His name was Robert Rollock, and
he came to Edinburgh from a professorship of philo-
sophy at St. Andrews University. He was a young
man of twenty-eight years of age, round-headed, his
ruddy face surmounted and surrounded by hair and
short beard, both of reddish hue. His name and colour-
ing somehow suggest the Three R's ; but he had to
instruct '' everie bairne repairing to the said coledge "
in much more learned subjects, Latin and Theology, —
and, in a year or two, in Theology also.
This was the first of our Edinburgh professors.
What a list of notable names comes after his !
It seems that the Edinburgh Magistrates did not
have to lay out any money on the University library,
any more than they had to do so on the University
site, for it was fortunate that in 1580, two years before
the University was founded, an Edinburgh advocate,
Mr. Clement Little, had bequeathed his library to
*' Edinburgh and Kirk of God thair to reman," and this
library was appropriated by the Magistrates for their
new University. These books are chiefly theological,
but they were soon added to, for Drummond of
Hawthornden, the poet, left a large number of books
to the University, including a few of the earlier editions
of Shakespeare's plays. There they are still, with
Drummond of Hawthornden's beautiful handwriting in
them, treasured in the strong-room of our University
library. There also are the volumes of the original
library of Mr. Clement Little, and many other treasures.
6o Edinburgh
for the library has been richly endowed from time to
time ; and here in the strong-room are books wonderful
to handle, rare manuscripts, illumined missals, beautiful
soft specimens of early printers' work, and bindings with
great clasps and bosses, relics of the days of scholarship
and leisure and devotion.
And so, the Magistrates having laid out the Abbot's
bequest with one hand, and commandeered the Advocate's
bequest with the other, the University prospered, and
they took all the credit. No, not all. There was yet
King James to come. He came in 1616. It was
thirty-five years since, a boy of sixteen, he had signed
the Charter, and it was fourteen years since he had left
Scotland to be King of England as well, and he came
back to visit his ancient Kingdom of Scotland. He
found the youngest Scottish University thriving,
*' beginning to take notice," as nurses say of babies.
So he christened it, and stood Godfather. He said it
was " worthie to be honoured with our name," and that
it was " to be callit in all times herafter by the name of
King James's College," and gave it a " Royal Godbairn
gift " of lands and tithes in Lothian and Fife.
At first, the University must have been more like a
school than a University, and the students, — though
they were far more independent than are the students
of English Universities, were allowed to live where they
pleased in the town, were not under the authority of
the University except in bounds, and wore no especial
dress, yet were in themselves mere schoolboys. We
have seen how they *' bickered " in the streets with the
boys of other schools, and we find them spoken of in
the Burgh Records as " bairns." Moreover, the ancient
practice that Solomon recommended seems to have been
Hood and Gown 6i
resorted to by the early professors, for at Edinburgh, as
well as in other Universities, unruly students were
birched. But on one occasion the son of the Lord
Provost was birched, and this gave dire offence to the
City Magistrates, who were the patrons and governors
of the University, and considered themselves and their
sons entitled to all respect at its hands. So the birchitig
of the Lord Provost's son, though it may not have im-
proved him, improved the University — there was no
more birching after that.
The interference by the Magistrates was not always so
happy for the University. The Magistrates were not
learned men and knew little about education, and it must
have been very irksome to the professors of early days
to have to submit to their ruling in matters concerning
learning and education. There was much friction be-
tween Town and Gown. On one occasion, so regardless
of the dignity of the University had the Town become,
that the Magistrates actually dared to ''borrow" the Uni-
versity Mace, and to forget to return it for four years.
In matters of teaching as well as discipline the
students were treated as schoolboys. For more than a
hundred years they were taught as is the fashion in
boys' schools, — that is, one professor, or '^ regent," as
he was called, taught his own group of students all the
subjects for three or four years. But this is not our
modern idea of a University. We expect a professor
to be a man famous in some special subject, and who
has devoted all his life to it, and can inspire others to
do the same. For a University is not a place merely
to train people for different professions and ways of
making money. The ideal University is a place where
anyone who wants to study any subject, — no matter
62 Edinburgh
how unknown and out of the way and " speciaHzed "
the subject may be, — can receive the very best teaching
to be had in that subject, and find the best methods, —
in laboratories and Hbraries, — of learning all that it is
possible to learn about it.
In 1708 a new system was introduced ; and since
then Edinburgh University has had a separate professor
for every subject. So far so good ; — but in those days
there were only three hundred students, and they were
all Divinity students or Arts students ; and there were
only eight professors !
In 1707 a Professor of Public Law was appointed,
and this began the Legal Faculty in Edinburgh ; and
in 1720 a Professor of Anatomy was appointed, and
that was the beginning of the great Medical School of
Edinburgh, now — thanks to its having had so many
eminent professors, — famous all the world over.
And there have been great names in the other
Faculties also, — in Arts, in Law, in Divinity. To give
a list of the men that Edinburgh University is proud
of would take too long ; but a few must be mentioned.
Dugald Stewart, the metaphysician ; Dr. Alexander
Munro, who really began the Medical School ; Pro-
fessor Cullen ; Professor Black, of " latent heat " fame ;
Lister, — does not the whole of Listerian surgery date
from Edinburgh University ? Dr. Chalmers ; Sir
David Brewster ; John Goodsir ; Aytoun, author of
" Lays of the Cavaliers " ; Sir James Y. Simpson, the
discoverer of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform ;
Sir Lyon Playfair ; Professor Tait.
The present buildings — " the University Old Build-
ings,"— date from the end of the eighteenth century and
beginning of the nineteenth. The original plan was
Hood and Gown 63
designed by the architect Adam, who built so much of
the New Town of Edinburgh ; but lack of funds caused
years of delay, and when finally, in i 8 1 5, an annual grant
often thousand pounds from Parliament quickened the
process of building, Adam's plans were altered by
another architect, Playfair.
In 1858 the University, which had long since come
to be called '^ Edinburgh University," instead of " the
Town College," was enabled, by the Universities Act,
to finally throw off the control of the Town, and now
the Senatus Academicus (the Principal and Professors)
regulates the teaching and discipline, subject to the
control of the University Court ; and the Lord Provost
and one member of the Town Council are members
of this Court, to represent the old order which had
prevailed for two hundred and seventy-six years.
In 1884 Edinburgh University celebrated its "Ter-
centenary,"— its three-hundredth birthday. It was a
most brilliant week in Edinburgh, that week in April
1884, for the University had invited all the greatest
celebrities of Europe to her birthday party, — invited
guests from England and Ireland, from our Colonies,
from America, from France, Germany, Austria, Italy,
Russia, Greece. Every country in Europe, and Britain
beyond the seas, had sent of its greatest men — authors
and thinkers, divines and men of science, discoverers,
philosophers, historians, statesmen, soldiers, — names to
thrill the pulses and fire the brain. The grey streets
of the sober old city v/ere enlivened by flashes of
academic colours, and her halls were lit up by flashes
of foreign eyes and foreign wits. All the guests were
feted and lionized ; the hospitable private houses were
thrown open tor their entertainment ; they were feasted
64 Edinburgh
and they were listened to, and were one and all given an
honorary degree of Edinburgh University. And then
they ail went home, and Edinburgh sobered down again.
It has always been a feature of Edinburgh University
that she " thinks Imperially." To attend a Graduation
Ceremonial is to receive a lesson on the number of
races that live under the British Flag. Students from
all parts of the world come to Edinburgh University ;
but especially students from Britain beyond the Seas, —
from India, from Australia, from New Zealand, from
Canada, from South Africa, from Newfoundland. It
seems impossible that anyone brought up at Edinburgh
University, enjoying the education of such contacts,
should ever go out into the world a " Little Englander."
And now, since 1894, there is another feature of
Edinburgh University. She has admitted women.
Most of the women students are Arts students, — in the
Arts Course there have of late years sometimes been
more women than men ; but there are a large number
of women Medical students — not yet quite so hospitably
treated as the men as regards their training, but quite as
hospitably treated as regards their examinations, — and
there are women Science students, and women students
of Music. They have their academic life, — their
Union and their Debating Societies, their Conservative
Association and their Liberal Association ; and at the
Graduation Ceremonials nearly as many women as men
go up in their academic hoods and gowns to be "capped"
by the Chancellor. And they, too, are gathered from all
parts of the world.
''What made you think of coming here.^" it was
asked of one girl graduate who was from South Africa.
" Well, 1 think it was because my father is an Edin-
JAMES VI. OF SCOTLAND AND I. OF ENGLAND AS A BOY.
Fr07n the painting by Zitcchej-o in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Wig and Gown 65
burgh man, and he is very loyal to his old Alma Mater,
and often talks of it. So my brother :ind 1 both decided
to come here."
What would Robert Rollock have thought! For
that matter, what would any professor forty years ago?
But with some of them even then it was an as yet
unrealized dream.
CHAPTER IX
WIG AND GOWN
" La Salle des pas perdus," it has been called — the hall
of lost footsteps.
Up and down, down and up, the great Hall they pace
daily, the members of His Majesty's Bar, in their black
gowns and grey wigs — tall men with gownsflapping about
their knees, short men with gowns to their ankles ; big-
headed men with little wigs set awry atop of their
craniums, and their own hair showing beneath ; small-
headed men with the stiff curls of their wigs well down
over their ears. And here they, or those who went
before them, have paced and loitered up and down for
almost two hundred years, ever since the Union of
Scotland and England sent our Scottish statesmen to help
to govern England as well as Scotland, and left the Parlia-
ment House in Edinburgh empty for the use of the legal
world of the Scottish Capital, — "la Salle des pas perdus."
Where have all the footsteps led? Some have never
led beyond this Hall. Many a man has paced here
from the time he was " called " to the Scottish Bar till he
was called to a higher tribunal. He has grown grey while
pacing, — grey and disappointed, wearied and dulled,
— and has passed away, having done nothing nobler
than to live and die. But not all. All have not been lost
ED. Q
66 Edinburgh
footsteps. Hundreds have led to worldly success and
wealth. Hundreds have led to great public careers
and fame. Hundreds, — better still, — have led to lives
spent for the general welfare. Some have led to
European reputations. Some of the footsteps have led
to immortality. Some ? Well, one at least. Sir Walter
Scott has paced this floor.
It is a difficult profession. Often the best men get
to the front, but sometimes they are outdistanced and
shoved behind by mere astuteness, or by a stroke of good
luck, on the part of others less worthy. It is the same,
no doubt, at the London Bar. " He is a rising man,"
one hears ; and he rises rapidly, like Jonah's gourd, for
next time one hears him spoken of it is with another
prefix before his name. Or else, also like Jonah's
gourd, he is never mentioned again.
A beautiful and dignified setting, this ancient Scottish
Parliament Hall. Perhaps, had the Town and citizens
known that the Scottish Parliaments were to meet for
only sixty-seven years after its completion, they would
not have spent so much money on it, and on the great
arched black oak roof, its arches crossed and interlocked
and resting on one another, high overhead. Here,
only eleven years after it was built, Montrose's trial
took place. Here Cromwell's troopers gathered. Here
the beauty and chivalry of Edinburgh feasted at the
Restoration. But the chief use of the Parliament Hall
was for meetings of the Parliament.
When Scotland had her own Parliament, it was a
one-chambered House. But — it was not a House of
Commons, rather was it a House of Peers. Of its
three hundred and fourteen members, ten were Dukes,
three Marquesses, seventy-five Earls, seventeen Vis-
Wig and Gown 67
counts, fifty-two Barons, ninety Knights of Shires, and
only sixty-seven were Burgesses.
It was to Parliament House that the " Riding to the
Parliament " came from Holyrood, — the yearly cere-
monial of the Openingof Parliament, when the Sovereign,
or the Lord High Commissioner representing the
Sovereign, was conducted in a great procession, — " a
very stately and pompous Cavalcade," Maitland calls it
in his history. This was its order: — Two Trumpeters;
two Pursuivants; the sixty-seven Burgesses, two by two,
each attended by a footman ; four Door-keepers of the
Court of Session, two by two ; the ninety Knights of
Shires, two by two, each attended by two footmen ; Com-
moners and Officers of State, two by two ; two Door-
keepers of the Privy Council Chamber ; the Peers in
their robes — first the fifty-two Barons, attended by train-
bearers, pages, and three footmen each ; then the seven-
teen Viscounts, attended by train-bearers, pages, and
three footmen each ; then the seventy-five Earls,
attended by train-bearers, pages, and four footmen each ;
then the three Marquesses, attended by train-bearers,
pages, and six footmen each ; then the ten Dukes,
attended by train-bearers, pages, and eight footmen each.
The Dukes were followed by the Lord High Chan-
cellor, bearing the Great Seal. Then came four Trum-
peters, two by two, and four Pursuivants, two by two,
six Heralds, the Gentleman Usher, and then the Lyon
King of Arms. He was followed by three of the most
ancient of the nobles, bearing the Scottish Regalia,
which had been conveyed that morning from the Castle
to Holyrood to be in readiness. The Sword of State
came first, then the Sceptre, then the Crown, and a Mace
walked on either hand of each of these. Finally rode
68 Edinburgh
the Sovereign, or the Commissioner who represented
the Sovereign ; and the Cavalcade wound up by a troop
of Life Guards.
Arrived at Parliament House, the King, or the Lord
High Commissioner, was led to the throne by the Lord
High Constable and the Earl Marischal, and the Regalia
was laid on the table in front of him.
Little wonder that the gaping crowd had their
patriotism and loyalty stirred by such pageantry, and
that they were ignorantly unwilling to exchange it for
the larger future opened out to Scotland — and to
England too — by the Treaty of Union.
But the removal of the political centre to London
naturally changed altogether the character of Edinburgh
Society, and in no way more so than by leaving the
lawyers in possession, not of Parliament House only,
but of the whole command of public life. In the
absence of other aristocracy, the legal lights became the
leaders of society in the Capital. This has been
modified in late years by other great interests springing
up in Edinburgh, and enriching its society ; and also by
the fact that the members of the Bar are now no longer
altogether drawn, as used to be the case, from among the
younger sons of noble houses or great landed families,
but are rather the clever elder sons of professional men.
But Parliament House casts a legal shadow over all
Edinburgh. How many a door in the dignified stone
terraces and streets and crescents bears a brass plate
with a name and the word " Advocate " underneath !
And in some of the cold northerly streets, where the
top windows command a view of the sea, and legal
firms have their dwellings, or in the great wind-swept
squares, where papers and dust eddy at their ease, and
Wig and Gown 69
legal firms do congregate, there the doors show many
brass plates, one above the other, each bearing below
the names the mystic letters '' W.S." or *' S.S.C." Yes,
it is a very legal town. It is told that once the love-
letter of an Edinburgh swain began : *' Madam, In
answer to your duplies, received of date as per margin."
One of the first sights that the stranger to Edinburgh
is taken to see is Parliament House, and the first thing
he is shown there is the great Parliament Hall. But
he will not be told about the Scottish Parliaments from
1639 ^o lyoy* he will be invited to look, awe-struck,
at the pacing, loitering, whispering, gossiping, jesting
crowd of wigs and gowns — advocates, solicitors^ agents,
writers, and litigants ; and then he will be shown the
statues of Lord Melville and Lord President Blair by
Chantrey, and that by Roubillac of Duncan Forbes of
Colloden ; and the splendid series of portraits, all the
great Edinburgh Judges and Lord Advocates and Deans
of the Faculty and Presidents of the Court of Session,
— such clever faces ! — Some such beautiful faces, fine
in expression ; some so dissipated ; but one and all so
clever ! The portraits are many of them by Raeburn,and
there is one by Kneller, and of the later ones some are
the work of Sir Daniel Macnee, of Sir George Reid,
of Sargent, of Orchardson. And then, passing through
the throng to the top of the Hall, the visitor will be
shown the great window, representing James V. of
Scotland, — the dear " Red Tod," the Founder of the
Court of Session, — presenting Pope Clement VII. 's
Charter to Alexander Mylne, Abbot of Cambuskenneth,
the first President of the Court of Session, and Bishop
Gavin Dunbar blessing the act. This Alexander Mylne
was the elder son of the first Royal Master Mason of
70 Edinburgh
that name, — and the line, carried on by his brother, con-
tinued till 1811, — twelve generations in direct descent,
all Royal Master Masons. Alexander Mylne, whom
James V. appointed first President of the new Court of
Session, was prominent in his day both in Church and
State, an ecclesiastic, a statesman, a lawyer, an author,
and an architect. In those days the President had to
be an ecclesiastic, as most of the revenues came from
the Church, and also because the clergy were the only
class trained in law. Nowadays it is the lawyers who
seek to rule the Church.
It is curious that both great facts in Edinburgh life,
Hood and Gown and Wig and Gown, seem to have
had an Abbot at their source.
The stranger, having had the window explained to
him, will be taken through the modern corridors that
lead out of the Hall to the stuffy Court-rooms, that he
may stand and hear the eloquence of Judge or Counsel.
Then he will be taken to the Library to see the treasures.
The Advocates' Library was founded by Sir George
Mackenzie, King's Advocate in the reigns of Charles II.
and James VII. He was a man of letters and the friend
and correspondent of Dryden ; but what is recollected
of him in Edinburgh is that he was the prosecutor of the
Covenanters. His books are in the Advocates' Library,
and his tomb is in Greyfriars Churchyard ; and in old
days the little street-boys used to come to the gate of it,
and peep in through the little squares of open ironwork,
and call out :
"Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye daur !
Lift the sneck and draw the bar !" —
and then run away as quickly as their little Noncon-
forming legs would carry them.
Wig and Gown 71
The Advocates' Library, as the present Keeper writes
of it, has since the middle of the eighteenth century
" become universally recognized as being not only the
national library, but the natural place of deposit for
national records and relics." And indeed it is this.
Not only does it now number about 500,000 volumes,
not only is it the only library in Scotland which has
retained the right to receive a copy of every book pub-
lished in Great Britain, but, as the same writer says,
" from earliest date the Faculty has pursued the
generous policy of giving ample access to the Library
to all orenuine workers in literature and science." One
such " genuine worker in literature " was Thomas
Carlyle, who used it as a young man, and wrote of it
gratefully long afterwards. There have been countless
others. As for " national records and relics," is there
not, over the stair, the Standard of the Earl Marshal of
Scotland, saved from Flodden field by Black John
Skirving of Plewland Hill ? But the priceless treasures
are in the " Laigh Parliament House," that pillared,
vaultlike hall under the Parliament Hall, in which the
Privy Council met, and where, it is alleged, torture took
place. Here, on an easel, is the Bull sent by the Pope
to grant to Scotland the right to crown and anoint her
Kings. It was sent in answer to a petition from Robert
the Bruce. Here, each reverently curtained, are the two
Covenants, — the " Solemn League and Covenant " and
the " National Covenant." Here, in glass cases, are
valuable manuscripts, — manuscripts ot the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Here are the Bas-
sendine Bible, and all kinds of wonderful and rare
specimens of early printing, both home and foreign.
Here are many letters, among which, — most interesting
72 Edinburgh
of all to younger visitors, and pathetic enough to any, —
are some letters written by little royal children, — the
child letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to her mother,
Mary of Lorraine, widow of James V. ; and one of
Charles, afterwards Charles I., to his father, James I.
and VI. Both these little innocent writers afterwards
died on the scaffold. Here is Prince Charles's, — undated,
but probably written to his father in London from Holy-
rood, where he was being brought up under his tutor,
Robert Carey : —
" SWEETE
Sweete Father i learne to decline substatives and adiectives.
give me your blessing, i thank you for my best man.
Your loving sone.
To my Father the King." York.
Scarcely less affectionate is the letter of one of the
little sons of James VI. 's youngest daughter, Elizabeth,
to his grandfather : —
I kisse your hand. I would fain see yo"" Ma*'^. I can say
Nominative hie, haec, hoc, and all 5 delensions, and a part of
pronomen and a part of verbrum. I have two horses alive, that
can goe up my staires a blacke horse, and a chestnut horse. I pray
God to blesse your Ma*'^
Yqi- Ma*'^^
obedient Grand-child,
Frederick Henry."
Evidently King James's respect for Latin, learnt in
his boyhood at the knee of George Buchanan, and
shown in his keen personal interest in the Royal High
School of Edinburgh, had not deserted him when he
was King of England. And his son, and long after-
wards his grandchildren, knew this.
When the stranger reluctantly tears himself from the
Laigh Parliament House, he has, having seen it and the
Parliament Hall and the Court-rooms, seen all that there
Wig and Gown 73
is to be shown. And he niay, or may not, have grasped
the system of our Scottish Law Court Procedure. But
he has still to hear the stories of the Scottish lawyers of
the Past.
The judge of whom, perhaps, most stories are told,
is Lord Braxfield. Lord Cockburn describes him as
*' illiterate, and without any taste for refined enjoyment,
strength of understanding, which gave him power with-
out cultivation, only encouraged disdain of all natures
less coarse than his own.'' He was harsh and domineer-
ing, and with a kind of brutal joviality, which Lord
Cockburn excuses as ''not cruelty," but a "cherished
coarseness." It was Lord Braxfield who told a prisoner
who had pleaded his own cause, " Ye're a very clever
chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o' a hanging."
Still more incredibly brutal was Lord Kames when he
had before him, charged with murder, a man named
Matthew Hay, with whom he had often played chess.
After pronouncing the death sentence upon him, *' That's
checkmate to you, Matthew !" he added.
Another judge of whom many stories are told is
Lord Eskgrove, or " Esky " as he was usually called.
The wags of Parliament House of his day used to
imitate his peculiarities. Lord Cockburn relates that it
was a common sight to see a knot of persons in Parlia-
ment Hall all listening to one of their number who was
talking slowly, with low muttering voice and a projected
chin, — and then suddenly the listeners would burst
asunder in roars of laughter, and one knew that an
imitation of " Esky " was going on. Walter Scott was
one of the young advocates who was famous for being
able to caricature him.
It Lord Cockburn's description is a true one, " Esky "
ED. 10
74 Edinburgh
must Indeed have been a decorative oddity. It is worth
quoting.
" He seemed, In his old age," he says, " to be about
the average height ; but as he then stooped a good deal,
he might have been taller in reality. His face varied,
according to circumstances, from a scurfy red to a scurfy
blue ; the nose was prodigious ; the under lip enormous,
and supported on a huge clumsy chin, which moved like
the jaw of an exaggerated Dutch toy. He walked with
a slow, stealthy step — something between a walk and a
hirple, and helped himself on by short movements of his
elbows, backwards and forwards, like fins. His voice
was low and mumbling, and on the Bench was generally
inaudible for some time after the movement of the lips
showed that he had begun speaking."
Nevertheless, he was kinder to the poor wretched
prisoners before him than was either Lord Braxfield or
Lord Kames, for what this extraordinary absurdity used to
say to a man he hadjust condemned to death was this : —
'' Whatever your rellgi-ous persua-shon may be, or
even if, as I suppose, you be of no persua-shon at all,
there are plenty of rever-end gentlemen who will be most
happy for to show you the way to y eternal life."
Most of these judges,— as were unfortunately so many
men, and wise and great men too, in the eighteenth
century, — were hard drinkers. It was the days when
men boasted of being " two-bottle men " and " three-
bottle men." It was claret they drank ; but they drank
too much.
There is a story of a learned judge who was found on
a dust-heap in the morning, and neither he nor anyone
else seems to have been ashamed of the position.
Indeed, the men of those days were rather proud of
Wig and Gown 75
their drinking, and it is very untortunate that a good
many of our laws and regulations concerning drinking
were apparently framed in those days, and are rather for
the care and protection of the drunken people than for
their punishment.
There was a judge called Lord Hermand (all Scottish
judges have the courtesy title " Lord ") of whom the
story is told that when he was trying a young man who
had killed a friend In a drunken quarrel, he exclaimed,
" Why, he was drunk ! And yet he murdered the very
man who had been drinking with him ! ... If he will
do this when he Is drunk, what will he not do when he
Is sober .?"
Once an advocate was not sober when he began to
plead, and pleaded most eloquently, — but on the wrong
side ! Indignation on the part of his client, whom he
ought to have been defending, and whom he was
denouncing instead ! It was all In vain that his agent
and those near pulled his gown and signed to him and
frowned at him — on he went, a long and fervid speech.
At last someone slipped a paper into his hand. He
glanced down and read, " You have pled for the wrong
party." Perhaps this sobered him, — at any rate his wits
never failed him, for he simply turned again to the
judge and went on pleading, " Such, my Lord, is the
statement which you will probably hear from my brother
on the opposite side of the case. I shall now beg leave,
In a very few words, to show your Lordship how
utterly untenable are the principles, and how distorted
are the facts, upon which this very specious statement
has proceeded." Which he then did.
But " I hate scandal," as the old lady said at Intervals
while she was telling shocking tales of all her neighbours.
76 Edinburgh
Let us come to the memorable names and splendid
memories of Parliament House.
There have been great lawyers on the Scottish
Bench. James Dalrymple, afterwards the first Viscount
Stair, Lord President of the Court of Session towards
the end of the seventeenth century, was not only one
of the most able of lawyers and administrators, but
was also a soldier and a philosopher, — had, indeed, held
a Chair of Philosophy in Glasgow ; and he wrote a
learned legal tome.
Sir Thomas Hope, King's Advocate during Charles L's
reign, was an interesting figure apart from his law. He
was the grandson of John de Hope, of the family of
Des Houblons in Picardy, who had come over from
France in the train of James V. and his first little bride,
Madeline, daughter of Francis I. of France. His fragile
little Queen died a few weeks after her coming ; but
John de Hope did not find our winds so rough, and
settled in Scotland, and from him are descended many
of our old Scottish families, — the Hopes, the Hoptouns,
some of the Erskines, and the Bruces of Kinross. Sir
Thomas Hope had several sons, three of whom were
judges, and in the portrait of him in Parliament House,
and also in another one in the possession of one of his
descendants, he is represented as wearing a kind of head-
dress,— the Parliament House one is like a lace cap, but
in the private portrait what he wears looks like a laurel
wreath, — but the reason of this head covering is that it
was not considered dignified or proper that a father
should plead bareheaded before his sons !
Sir Thomas Hope was one of the two lawyers who
drew up the National League and Covenant.
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, who founded
the Library, was King's Advocate later in the Century.
Wig and Gown 77
In the eighteenth century two names at very Jeast
must be mentioned. First, that of Duncan Forbes of
Colloden, who was Lord Advocate and then Lord
President, was a poHtician as well as an administrator,
and, thouirh so humane to those who were in trouble
for the Jacobite Rising of 1715 that he was accused
of being a Jacobite himself, yet was really the pillar
of the House of Hanover in Scotland. He tried to
prevent the second Rising of '45, and then was active
in lessening Scotland's sufferings after it'; and he died
impoverished and unrewarded.
Next must be mentioned Henry Dundas, first
Viscount Melville. His was a career of statesmanship
rather than a legal career. He entered Parliament as
Member for Midlothian, was appointed Lord Advocate
and held the office all through the Tory administration
of Lord North, and was Pitt's trusted colleague and
adviser all the time Pitt was Premier. He held various
offices, — Treasurer of the Navy, Minister for India,
Home Secretary, Secretary for War, First Lord of the
Admiralty. Henry Dundas has been called " the King
of Scotland," and was the central figure in all Scottish
affairs, and for seventeen years ruled Scotland, — " The
Dundas Despotism," His monument now stands on
its column high over the city, in the centre of St. Andrew
Square, — the only monument that can compare with it is
the Nelson Monument in the centre of Trafalgar Square.
In the nineteenth century two names also stand out
among the many that might be chosen, those of Lord
Brouorham and Chancellor Infjlis. Lord Broui^ham's
fame extended beyond the city in which he was born.
He defended Queen Caroline ; he was Lord High
Chancellor of Great Britain ; and he was Chancellor
of Edinburgh University.
78 Edinburgh
Lord Inglis first made his name by his successful
defence of Madeline Smith, and he afterwards became
one of our greatest judges, was Lord Justice General
and Lord President, and Chancellor of our University.
His name brings us very near the present day, for he
died in 1891.
These are some of the men who, down the centuries,
have administered Law in Scotland and upheld the
dignity of the Court of Session. Their footsteps have
paced Parliament Hall, and their portraits now hang on
its walls, looking down at their successors.
CHAPTER X
WINTER IN EDINBURGH
Winter is " the Season " in Edinburgh, and it is also
the busy time when everyone is in town and everything
is going on, — schools, University Session, Law Courts,
art exhibitions, concerts, lectures, political meetings,
balls, dinner-parties, bazaars.
As a rule Edinburgh does not take very active interest
in new ideas. Enthusiasm for antiquity is understood,
and some forms of it are tolerated, but any other form
of enthusiasm finds itself " up against it," as the
Americans say, in Edinburgh. The majority of the
citizens are exceedingly Conservative in everything, —
except their politics. They do each year as they have
done the previous year, and, if possible, what their
fathers and mothers did before them. It is even hinted
that their politics come to them by the truly Conservative
method of inheritance, and are the result of their fathers'
or their grandfathers' admiration of Mr. Gladstone.
But, if Edinburgh can be roused to interest or activity
Winter in Edinburgh 79
at alJ, it is between October and March. " Now we
shall have to wait until October," it is said in February
or March, when some function has to be postponed.
Thus people who have met constantly all the winter
months lose sight of one another during the summer,
and have to re-begin their intercourse all over again
when October brings them back to town and work and
sociability. Sometimes they have been away all summer ;
or it may merely be that they have had no reason nor
opportunity of meeting. In October they all forgather
again, and " Where have you been .^" neighbours ask ; and
*' I suppose you are back now for the winter r' But the
friendhness has suffered a check. In fact, the six summer
months are, as sportsmen say, '* a close-time " for friends.
But winter — winter in Edinburgh ! The very words
bring up a hundred pictures, a hundred memories.
What sunsets we have ! What sudden views of frost-
bound landscape ! What grand skies !
*' Winter in Edinburgh " — when we hear the words
in summer, as we lie lazily on the hot, honey-scented
moors, we first shiver at the thought of mist and cold,
and of what Gavin Douglas described —
"The frosty region ringes of the year.
The time and season bitter cauld and pale.
The plain strectis and every high way
Was full of flushes, dubbes, mire and clay."
And then we seem to feel the glow of fire and light
and warmth and life, to see the brilliant rooms, to hear
all the clash of good music and good talk. And then
and there among the heather, with the untroubled blue
sky overhead, and the silence broken only by the bees
among the honey, we shut our eyes and let the pictures
8o Edinburgh
concentrate themselves into two or three : — the mirrors
at the end of the Assembly Rooms reflecting the moving
crowd of dancers, — the " glimmer of satin and shimmer
of pearls," and the brilliance of the uniforms. Or we
hear the sudden music of fife and drum, thrilling and
arresting, and see the kilted soldiers swing down the
Mound from the Castle, and march along Princes Street,
with the little ragged boys, and all the slouching, un-
trained young men, running or shuffling along the pave-
ment beside them. Somehow it always recalls the story
of the Relief of Lucknow, — the far-off music of the
pipes, the one Scotswoman who heard it first, — started
up, listened,— -recognized the air — " The Campbells
are coming !" — and gave the glad news.
Or we think of another picture, — of coming down
the Mound about five o'clock on a winter's after-
noon, with the great outline of the Castle blotted in
Indian ink, battlements and walls and towers, against
the red glow and radiance of the western sky, and Princes
Street below, a line of clustering yellow lights in the
gathering dusk, like a necklace of jewels.
Until Christmas, the winter climate of Edinburgh is
not so bad as grumblers pretend. Our summers —
Tennyson was right — are often chillier than summers
ought to be ; but at all times we have plenty of
*' weather," — fresh, keen, pure air, unstinted sunshine
and winds, large expanses of sky, — and all the oxygen is
to-day's allowance, not yesterday's complicated leavings.
And in winter, — at any rate until Christmas, — we are
warmer than our brethren in London. Indeed, in
October and November we often have glorious weather
— the '' Indian Summer "as it is called. It is not until
February or March that the east wind comes, and sweeps
.J
JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.
Winter in Edinburgh 8i
round our streets and squares, the " draughty parallelo-
grams," as Louis Stevenson dubbed them, and drives
all the loose papers and some of the hats before it, and
the City becomes what Stevenson called it, " a downright
meteorological purgatory."
We generally expect and receive one fall of snow
before Christmas, — happy the children if it come just
at Christmas-time, — and perhaps a day or two of frost
and of skating. Anxious inquiries are made as to
whether Craiglockhart " is bearing." When it is, a
^' skating holiday " is given in the schools, and groups
of people with jingling skates dangling from their hands
hurry off for a day's pleasure on the ice. But the
skating does not last long, and the snow melts and the
sun returns, for most of the winter is due after Christ-
mas— it is seldom that Duddingstone " is bearing," or
that the ice on the canal is thicker than a canal boat,
drawn by a thin, unhappy horse straining at his rope on
the slippery towing-path, can manage to crash through.
Happy the children, and happy also the artist, when
the snow falls on Edinburgh !
" Gardens in glory and balm in the breeze —
Ah, pretty Summer, e'en boast as you please 1
Sweet are your gifts ; but to winter we owe
Snow on the Ochils and sun on the snow."
But winter brings other visitors to Edinburgh besides
the snow. It brings seagulls and owls and wild geese.
The seagulls come from the Eirth of Forth, — poor things,
they are starving, and they come with harsh, hungry
cries, and great white wings. If you put bread out for
the birds all winter, as every well-conducted person does,
on the doorsteps or window-sills, or in the garden if you
have one, you well know what happens. I'he cocky
little sparrows come first, and perhaps a tame, smart
ED. I I
82 Edinburgh
little robin ; and then, shyly and hesitatingly, and then
with sharp, angry pecks and dabs, come the bigger birds,
—thrushes and blackbirds, — " mavis and merle " we call
them in Scotland. Soon there is quite a crowd of birds
making short work of the crumbs. But with the first
frost come the gulls, dwarfing even the great big black
rooks, and the crumbs are strangely inadequate, and huge
basins of porridge or scraps and crusts have to be pro-
vided for thesewhite-winged Vikings from the North Sea.
The owls and the wild geese are more rare visitors,
but they do come ; and it appears they used to come in
Gavin Douglas's day, for he speaks of them :
" Horned Hetawd, which clepe we the nicht-owl
Within her cavern heard I shout and howl,
Laithly of form, with crooked camshow beak :
Ugsome to hear was her wild eldritch shriek.
The wild geese, claiking eke by nichtes tide,
Attowe the city fleeand heard I glide."
Our language has changed since Gavin Douglas's
time ; but the languages of the horned night-owls and
of the wild geese have not. The hideous shriek that
proceeds from the distorted beak is just what disturbed
the poet in Edinburgh in the year 151 2, when he was
Provost of the Collegiate Church of St. Giles. And the
wild geese still, in severe winters, " claik " by night-time,
" fleeand " round about the city.
In the winter of 1909-10 there were spells of intense
cold, and they brought both owls and wild geese among
us. The wild geese swept high over the gloomy pillars
and propriety of Moray Place, and were lost to sight ;
but the owls stayed for some time, and, like little children,
were heard and not seen. '' They start to hoot at about
nine every evening," a young Scot reported ; and it was
true. They seemed to have come into town for the
Winter in Edinburgh 83
winter, and to have taken up their residence in the
Moray Place Gardens and the Dean Gardens, on either
side of the Water of Leith, and in the beautiful
Botanic Gardens and Arborituum ; and from these
comfortable surroundings they culled to one another
eerie remarks across the valley, and vied with the f )g
signals from the Forth, which also generally '' start to
hoot " about nine o'clock.
In winter another cry is heard in Edinburgh, neither
owls nor fog signals, but quite as weird as either. It is
the cry of our fishwives. " Caller herrin' " we are all
tamiliar with, from the song ; but there is also " Caller
haddie," and, more rare, "Caller Oo," and, most rare,
" Caller Partin !" '' Caller Oo !" is only heard if the
name of the month has the letter R in it, for " Caller
Oo " means fresh oysters, and we all know that oysters
are not in season unless the month has an R in it. So
we hear " Caller Oo !" cried in the winter evenings, and
a beautiful minor cry it is, drawn out plaintively on a
minor seventh.
"Those commiserating sevenths — 'Life might last I we can but try !'"
And life generally does last to those who try the
oysters out of the picturesque fishwife's creel.
Far back in the centuries, native oysters used to be
very cheap indeed in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh, — cosy
and learned but not wealthy, — used to eat a great many,
especially for supper. So many, indeed, that the builders
used the shells for cement, and there are still some
very old houses in Edinburgh where one can see the
oyster-shells embedded in the cement between the
stones of the rough rubble walls. So we may feel that
we are keeping up the traditions of the town when we
eat oysters.
84 Edinburgh
" Caller Partin " means fresh crabs ; and there are
some loyal Scots who are patriotic enough to speak of a
certain delicacy to be discovered at ball suppers and
dainty luncheon parties as " partin tart."
The last two General Elections have taken place in
winter. Even at these times of public anxiety over
great issues, and of universal upheaval and excitement,
Edinburgh remains calm. It would seem as if the fall
of a Ministry and the fate of an Empire disturb many
an honest person less than it would disturb him if the
One O'clock Gun did not go off. That indeed would
be something to talk about ! The evening papers
would be full of it, with big headlines, and the boys
crying it in the streets — " News ! — 'Spatch ! News ! —
'Spatch !" And those who paused to read the posters
in the gutters would see :
"Unprecedented Occurrence in Edinburgh."
"Account by Eyewitness on Calton Hill."
" Guests all late at Civic Luncheon."
But a General Election ? — There was a deaf man
resident in Edinburgh who did not record his vote.
He had not heard there was an Election.
But on the actual Polling Day itself, especially towards
evening, some degree of interest is exhibited, and crowds
gather about the Polling stations, and outside the Scots-
man Office, and a few public-spirited people flash about
in motors, or roll or rattle along in carriages or carts,
with the ribbons of their party fluttering in streamers
behind, "and " Vote for " tied on behind. It is an
ill wind that blows nobody good, and Polling Day is a
happy time for the little street gamins, for the Board
Schools are used as Polling stations, and so perforce
they are given a holiday. There is no need to complain
Winter in Edinburgh 85
of apathy on their parts. They gather in noisy, chatter-
ing, excited, bickering crowds outside the Polling booths,
and they snatch at the fluttering stream^jrs of gay ribbons
and run off with them. The little Radicals are hot
politicians ; and at last Election they had been drilled
all over Scotland, and taught to sing a specially written
Election song to the martial air of " Tramp, tramp,
tramp, the boys are marching !" They formed quite a
feature of the Election tumult, marching in good order
about the streets, with cars and banners, all singing
shrilly, as they tramped in unison — " Vote, vote, vole
for " And here the name of whoever was the
Radical candidate for the special constituency had been
ingeniously worked somehow into the metre. Poor
mites ! They did their parts well ; and they probably
knew just as much as many of their fathers.
The electors of Edinburgh needed all the urging that
could be given as that winter's day wore to a close.
The Country needed their votes ; yes, — but it was pitch
dark and snowing heavily. Thick, great, soft flakes fell
on Conservative and Radical alike, till to outward seem-
ing there was nothing to choose between them, and all
were white and pure and shriven. Certainly there was
nothing to choose between the Radical and the Con-
servative posters, for the snow had drifted swiftly and
silently against them, till each one was literally carle
blanche^ and the electioneering promises in blue and red
were obliterated altogether, as is so often the fate of
electioneering promises. The white boards caused great
merriment among the sandwich-men in charge, and the
passers by joined in and jeered at them.
" Who's your man V
" Who are you for .?"
86 Edinburgh
Down the street at a quick trot came a small urchin
with a big board tied round his neck. Boy and board
were both white with snow.
" Hi, my laddie !" called the men to him, '' who
?iveyou for .?"
The little fellow swept his ragged coat sleeve down
the face of his board.
" I'm for Bovril r^ he cried, with consequence and
pride.
And sure enough, the layer of snow removed, there,
printed in huge letters, was the advertisement, " Vote
for Bovril."
Shouts of applause nearly overwhelmed the sturdy
little urchm.
" Ay, my laddie, you're recht ! Yours is the best
man ! Wish we had him !" they all cried, stamping
their feet in the snow.
But the thought of snow in Edinburgh recalls another
scene — as impressive a scene as any that Edinburgh has
ever beheld.
It was nearly ten years ago, in the High Street, — that
ancient street that has witnessed all the history of Scot-
land. The people of Edinburgh had gathered there to
hear a Proclamation from the City Cross, — a new Cross
now, on the model of the old, and erected on its site
beside St. Giles's Church and Parliament House, and
close to where the " Heart of Midlothian," marked on
stones of the pavement, shows where the old Tolbooth
of many memories stood.
The whole of the street was crowded, and every
window and stair was filled with spectators. How often
has this happened in the High Street all through the
centuries ! How often have the citizens of Edinburgh
Winter in Edinburgh 87
tilled their street to see a Royal procession pass, or a
martyr driven to his death ; to watch a wild street fight,
or to enjoy the pageantry of the " Riding of l^arliament"!
How often have they loyally decorated their " forestairs "
and windows with rich tapestries and rugs hung over
them, and crowded in that very street to cheer and wave
and welcome home a very young royal bride for one of
their brave Stewart kings ! How often have they
assembled beside St. Giles's and Parliament House to
hear a Royal Proclamation read by the Lyon King of
Arms from the Mercat Cross !
Again they had gathered, that winter day in 1901, in
the ancient, poverty-struck street, among the traditions
of the Past. And snow had fallen on all the city, and
left it white and silent, unsullied in its shroud. Oueen
Victoria was dead ; and the citizens of Edinburgh had
gathered to hear King Edward proclaimed King, — King
Edward, the thirteenth generation, in direct descent, from
James IV. of Scotland, whose marriage with Margaret
Tudor united the Royal Families of Scotland and
England, and led the way to the Union of the Crowns.
Some of us were met on the Outlook Tower, high
up beside the Castle. Thence we looked right down the
whole length of the ancient mediaeval street descending
the ridge to Holyrood through the centre of the massed
Old Town of Edinburgh. It was an unforgettable scene.
The mourning crowds ; the murky air, grey with yet
unfallen snow ; the white roofs and gables ; the flashes
of colour as the soldiers and heralds appeared in view ;
the fanfare of trumpets through the snow ; the bared
heads ; and then — suddenly all seemed to stand still, a
moment of pause between the Past and the Future, for we
heard the familiar strain of the National Anthem, and it
88 Edinburgh
was the first time we had heard it when it was no longer
" God Save the Queen " that we sang. And through
the music, and the snow-laden air, and the hushed
crowds, came the sound of sobs.
Only nine and a half years, — it seems yesterday. And
again, so soon ! — another Proclamation has been read
from the City Cross, — read this time on a balmy day in
May. And while the solemn salute crashed from the
Argyle Battery at the Castle, and the echoes beat and
reverberated and thundered against the mountain sides,
as far as the Ochils across the Forth, and back against
the lion front of Arthur's Seat — the Pentlands — Corstor-
phine — and then found their way against the great street
fronts of the City, making the hearts of those who
heard throb and their hands clench, while the thoughts
and the faces were serious and sad, — the brilliant sun-
shine blazed down on the black-garbed crowds that
moved about the streets, and on the gay Spring flowers
and green grass in the Princes Street gardens below the
Castle, and on the flags that were raised from half-mast.
Was the sunshine an omen ? God save the King !
CHAPTER XI
EDINBURGH IN SUMMER
Summer comes upon us gradually in Edinburgh. First
there is a sudden balmy day in March. The fire in the
breakfast-room is much too hot, and the wide-opened
window admits the music of a blackbird, and a scent of
burning wood in the air, wafted from the fields round the
town where they are gathering bonfires of rubble. Some
people's thoughts, under the influence of this day, are
driven to " Spring cleaning," and the thoughts of others
LADV STAIR'S CLOSE.
Edinburgh in Summer 89
to Spring holidays, and the fancies of yet others lightly
turn to thoughts of Spring clothes.
Next day it is bitterly cold again, and the sun over-
sleeps himself under a mass of clouds, and winter is
sulkily resumed.
Then come the showers and sunshine of April, and
with them a whisper of green begins to breathe over the
trees in the gardens, and the birds are quite happy and
very noisy. This lasts a full fortnight, when even the
grumblers have nothing to say. And then a snowstorm ;
and the buds wither with indignation, and the snow
lies on the flowering currant and buries the crocuses,
and the poor little songsters all come back to the
windows to be fed and comforted.
But this must be the last snow, we tell one another ;
and no doubt the birds tell one another too. And, sure
enough, in a few days the snow begins to melt, and melts
very quickly, and discovers several intrepid crocuses
none the worse, and the sun blazes out again, and in the
gardens the great leaves of the chestnuts unfold, and the
wallflowers make the air fragrant, and —
" The winter it is past, and the summer's come at last,
And the small birds sing on every tree."
In the streets, the shops begin to deck their windows
with " Spring goods," and every grey stone street of
dwelling-houses is cold as mid-Winter on the side where
the sun is not, and hot as mid-Summer on the side
where the sun shines. And people catch colds.
On the First of May, in old Catholic days in Scotland,
there used to be great merrymaking, and May Day
revels and sports. Bands of people went about dressed
up as Robin Hood and Little John, acting, and playing
practical jokes. Unfortunately these frolics and games
ED. 12
go Edinburgh
became very noisy and rough, and ended in being
drunken riots, and instead of trying to revive them and
make them pretty harmless pastimes for the people
again, the authorities simply tried to put a stop to them.
Queen Mary herself wrote to the magistrates of Edin-
burgh to tell them to end " Robin Hood's Day " ; and
though it survived Queen Mary's orders, how could
foolish frolics survive the sober days of stern Presbyterians,
who would not let a bird sing in its cage on Sunday ?
To this day, however, energetic citizens climb to the
top of Arthur's Seat on May Day morning. If it be fine,
by five o'clock one or two people reach the summit, and
before eight o'clock over a thousand will be gathered.
A contemporary writer states that this is " a last remnant
of the worship of Baal," and that the custom is kept up
by " the young of the female sex particularly." But it
is noteworthy that the two instances he immediately gives
of citizens who used to regularly climb Arthur's Seat
before breakfast on the First of May, presumably to wash
their faces in the dew, were neither of them " the young
of the female sex," — one of the active old gentlemen
being indeed over eighty !
Later on in May comes the Assembly week, when the
Lord High Commissioner as representing the Sover-
eign, takes up his residence in Holyrood, and presides
over the Annual Assembly of the Established Church
of Scotland, which, as some few English people do not
quite realize, is the Presbyterian Church. The United
Free Church and the Free Church also have their
Assemblies at this time, and it is a busy week in Edin-
burgh, and the streets are full of ministers. A great
many ministers and elders come from all parts of Scotland
to " attend the Assemblies," and you see them with their
Edinburgh in Summer 91
wives and daughters, or their clerical brethren, walking
about and looking at the sights of the town. And
there are special functions going on all day. On the
first day of all, the Commissioner, — who is a Scottish
peer whose politics are in accord with those of the
Government of the moment, — drives in procession
through the town, to open the Assembly. It is a sort
of shadow of the '' Riding of the Parliament " of an
older day. The Established Church and the United
Free Church and the Free Church has each its
" Moderator " elected for the year, and it is the custom
for these Moderators to entertain all and sundry by
giving breakfasts before the business of the day begins.
Then there are the sittings of the Assemblies, before
which all matters of Church doctrine and discipline
and politics are discussed and decided. In the evening
there are dinners and levc;es and receptions at Holyrood,
and sometimes the Lord High Commissioner gives a
garden-party in the historic grounds of the old Palace
of the Stewarts. It usually rains heavily.
Every year people seem to go away from town earlier
than the year before. Some go in May, and a few
houses, here and there, are shut up, and the windows
filled with brown paper. Others go in June, and more
houses stand empty. Those who have children at school
are kept till July, when the schools " break up." But
by the beginning of July F^dinburgh is growing deserted,
and bv the end of the month, if you are in town, you
walk about among the dull, grey, dignified streets and
find every window papered inside with brown paper, and
even some of the doors boarded up, so that the paint
may not blister and crack with the summer's sunshine
before the family comes back to town at the beginning of
92 Edinburgh
winter. And in these days the grass grows up, green
and tender, between the stones of the roads, and there
will be quite a luxuriant crop along the edges of the
pavements, and wherever it can break through. Flocks
of footsore, silly sheep, driven through to Market or
slaughter, have quite a " find," and nibble and crop round
the curb-stones in front of stately, sombre mansions,
where in winter judges wend their homeward way, or
carriages and motor cars wait. It is an epitome of the life
of the town — the romantic Past springing up fresh and
vivid through the unimpressionable conventionality of
the material present. For was not Moray Place " My
lord of Moray's grounds " ? And was not Princes
Street " The Lang Dykes " ?
But in summer, though its " residential quarters " are
like a city of the dead, — rows of empty houses staring
with blind, closed eyes at a deserted, grass-grown street,
— Edinburgh is not empty. An exodus of the Citizens
has taken place, but an influx of tourists has poured into
the City. The familiar faces are gone ; but the town is
flooded by a new population. Every hotel is crowded.
The shops are prepared for them, and the shop windows
are full of tartans and Harris tweeds, rugs and shawls,
knitted goods, knickerbocker stockings and " Tam o'
Shanters," with pieces of heather laid on the top of
them. Even the boot shops have their goods im-
bedded in banks of heather. Other windows are filled
with guide-books and picture postcards, with views of
the Castle, of the Scott Monument and Princes Street,
of a fishwife in her pretty dress, of Louis Stevenson in
his velvet coat, of the Forth Bridge, of the soldiers
being drilled on the Castle Esplanade, of the High
Street and John Knox's house in a snowstorm. A
Edinburgh in Summer 93
third shop is full of clan brooches, pebbles, cairngorms
and amethysts, and Queen Mary heart monograms in
silver. Little boys run about in Princes Street selling
sprigs of white heather, and others waylay tourists at
the foot of the Mound, shouting " Guide to the Castle !
— Guide to Edinburgh Castle, one penny !" Great
motor " char-a-bancs " start from the " Waverley steps "
at the east end of Princes Street, and drive right along
it, and out by the beautiful broad country road, the
Queensferry Road, to the Forth Bridge. And the
tourists stand about on the steps of the hotels, guide-
book in hand, and gaze up at the Castle, and at the
lion shape of Arthur's Seat, and they go to see all the
proper sights.
They drive or walk up from Holyrood to the
Castle, or down from the Castle to Holyrood. Half-
way on the steep street they look over John Knox's
house, and at the relics collected there. They go
into St. Giles's Church, and are told the lively tale
of Jenny Geddes and her militant tactics, and divide
their attention between her and the tombs of Montrose
and Moray and Argyle. They peep into Parliament
House, and into the Parliament Hall, empty if the
Courts have " risen," — they cross to the Municipal
Buildings, and see some of the signs of our luxurious
civic life, and they discover the museum there. If
they have time they go also to see the University and
the McEwan Hall, and the Public Library. And no
tourist will fail to go into Greyfriars Churchyard, where
George Buchanan's grave bears his mask — familiar to
all readers of Blackwood's Magazine ; where so many
wonderful old tombs bear interesting names ; where
" Greyfriars Bobby " kept his faithful watch for years
94 Edinburgh
on his master's grave, — (and Baroness Burdett-Coutts
raised a little effigy to him too, outside the sacred
precincts, over a water trough where other dogs may
lap) ; where the Covenant was signed on the flat tomb-
stones, and the Covenanters were imprisoned, and the
Martyrs Monument commemorates them ; and where
Sir Walter Scott met his first love under an umbrella
in a shower of rain.
Then the tourist will wander about the New Town, and
find it dusty and deserted. There are some sights here
to see, — St. Mary's Cathedral, the largest ecclesiastical
building reared in Britain since the Reformation, save
Truro Cathedral and the Roman Catholic Cathedral at
Westminster. There is also the National Gallery and
the National Portrait Gallery for those who love Art,
and the view from either side of Dean Bridge for those
who love Nature. And if the tourist have a free after-
noon, and it is fine, he may wander farther, and admire
the marvellous landscape gardening and the show of
flowers at the Botanic Gardens ; or walk round the
Calton Hill and look at the views, and then turn into
the Calton Burial ground and discover the grave of
Hume, and the Martyrs Monument.
But above all, those who love the Past and know
anything of it will spend their time in the Old Town.
They will investigate some of the tortuous closes and
wynds, and people them with the men and women
who lived in them hundreds of years ago. There is
''Lady Stair's Close," built in 1622 by Sir William
Grey of Pittendrum, a wealthy Scottish merchant of the
days of Charles I., and one of those who was ruined by
his faithfulness to the Royalist cause, and to the brave
Montrose. His initials and those of his wife, and their
Edinburgh in Summer 95
Coat of Arms, are engraved over the entrance door
inside the close, under the words " Keare the Lord
and depart from eville." This close has been restored
by Lord Rosebery, who is a lineal descendant of the
builders of it, Sir William Grey of Pittendrum and his
wife. Early in the eighteenth century, the house
belonged to Lady Stair, the Dowager of the second
Earl of Stair, the famous Field Marshal and Ambassador,
and she lived here for many years, and was a great
social figure in the Edinburgh life of her day, and
celebrated for having the only black servant in the town.
James's Close is where Boswell lived, and Dr. John-
son stayed with him ; but the actual house was burnt
down. In Baxter's Close, however, is still the house in
which Robert Burns lodged when he stayed in Edin-
burgh in 1786. Opposite is Riddel's Close, where
stands the house of the ill-fated Bailie Macmorran.
But any close is worth peeping into, however dirty,
for every close and every wynd has its history,
public or private, which it would take hours and
volumes to tell, — Advocates' Close ; Old Assembly
Close, where the stately dancing and the formal love-
making of the eighteenth century were conducted ;
Bell's Wynd ; Niddry Street, where St. Cecilia's Hall
still stands in squalid neglect, — the beautiful oval
concert-room, once the centre of musical life in a music-
loving town ; Hyndeford Close, where Lady Anne
Barnard, author of " Young Jamie lo'ed me weel," and
correspondent of Lord Melville, lived. And the
tourist will ask the reason why a new tavern hereabouts
is called *' Heave awa' Tavern," and has a young lad's
head carved in stone. ijbo\:e,i;:, ,and wilLbe told the
story of the brave boy who'-was j^mong'.dle thirty-five
g6 Edinburgh
people buried under the debris of an old house that fell
here in 1861, and who was heard faintly to call from
underneath the beams and masonry that hid him, to the
rescuers who were digging, '' Heave awa', chaps, I'm
no deid yet !"
Down in the Canongate there is Moray House with
its balcony where Argyle and the wedding-party stood
to watch Montrose driven by ; there is Queensberry
House, now the House of Refuge ; there is White-
horse Close, a fine old close, still intact ; there is the
Canongate Tolbooth, standing out into the street ; and
lastly there is the Canongate Churchyard, where so
many of Edinburgh's famous dead lie, and where
Robert Burns knelt and kissed the earth above the
unmarked grave of the poet Fergusson.
Having seen the town, the tourist will go on some
of the many excursions, — perhaps mount one of the
unwieldy motor coaches and drive to see Queensferry
and the Forth Bridge ; certainly go to Roslin and walk
through the " Den," and see the wonderful little
Chapel ; and drive round the " Queen's Drive " that
encircles Arthur's Seat, and visit Craigmillar Castle,
where Queen Mary spent happy days.
And then the tourists too, like the citizens, will
leave Edinburgh to the sheep and the grass and the
dust, and close their guide-books and journey on to the
Highlands, — to the Trossachs and Loch Katrine, — and
they will think that they have seen and knov/ Edin-
burgh, whereas they will only have had a little peep
at it.
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