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•TLIBRAHVoI

EDINBURGH.

EDINBURGH

picturesque J^otes

BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

AUTHOR OF 'AN INLAND VOYAGE.'

WITH ETCHINGS BY A. BRUNET-DEBAINES

FROM DRAWINGS BY S. BOUGH, R.S.A.. AND W. E. LOCKHART. R.S.A.

And Vignettes by Hector Chalmers and R. Kent Thomas.

■j. 'V.

• Li hi; w^^

SEELEY, JACKSON, AND HALLIDAY, 54 FLEET STREET
LONDON. MDCCCLXXIX.

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012 with funding from

National Library of Scotland

http://archive.org/details/edinburghpicturOOstev

CONTENTS.

CHAP. pAGE

I I

II. OLD TOWN— THE LANDS . 5

III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 10

IV. LEGENDS 14

V. GREYFRIARS ......... 18

VI. NEW TOWN— TOWN AND COUNTRY . ... 23

VII. THE VILLA QUARTERS 27

VIII. THE CALTON HILL 2S

IX. WINTER AND THE NEW YEAR 32

X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 36

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ETCHINGS BY A. BRUNET-DEBAINES.

THE QUEEN'S ENTRY INTO EDINBURGH IN 1876.
By W. E. Lockhart, R.S.A.

PAGE

Frontispiece.

ADVOCATES' CLOSE. By W. E. Lockhart, R.S.A. . .6

GREYFRIARS, EDINBURGH. By W. E. Lockhart, R.S.A. . . .18

PRINCE'S STREET GARDENS, EDINBURGH. By W. E. Lockhart, R.S.A. 24
VIEW FROM C ALTON HILL. By W. E. Lockhart, R.S.A. . 28

DISTANT VIEW OF EDINBURGH. By S. Bough, R.S.A. . . . 36

VIGNETTES.

The Old City from Salisbury Crags
The Castle .....
cowfeeder row and head of west port
Old Bow-head, Lawnmarket
John Knox's House, High Street
Planestones Close, Canongate
Tombs in Greyfriars .
Tombs in Greyfriars .
In the Village of Dean
Queen Mary's Bath .
Back of Greenside
Duddingstone .

1
3

5

7

1 1

15
19
20

25
29

30

34

PICTURESQUE NOTES ON EDINBURGH.

THE ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the
slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be more commanding for the head
city of a kingdom ; none better chosen for noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced
gardens she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean ; and
away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven.
She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be

THE OLD CITY FROM SALISBURY CRAGS.

buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward
from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in
summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and
I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy
them their fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and
perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing
place of residence. Many such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination,
where all troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New
Town with the Old — that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern temple of the winds — and
watch the trains smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to
brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for

2 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops ! And yet the place establishes
an interest in people's hearts ; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction ;
go where they will, they take a pride in their old home.

Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment which she inspires.
The rest may have admirers ; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. And
indeed, even by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like
her for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically,
if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in
the narrowest meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as
interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set herself off with
some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, and above all, she is a
curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands
gray and silent in a workman's quarter and among breweries and gas works. It is a house
of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors,
played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has
lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his
phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours.
Now, all these things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for
sixpence to the vulgar ; but the stone palace has outlived these changes. For fifty weeks
together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a museum of old furniture ; but on the
fifty-first, behold the palace reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner,
a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers ; a coach and six and clattering escort
come and go before the gate ; at night, the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the
workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical.
There is a spark among the embers ; from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh
has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital
and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence ; it has long trances of the one
and flashes of the other ; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental
marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead ; you may see the troops
marshalled on the high parade ; and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning
before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums
and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial deliberations.
Close by in the High Street perhaps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon ; and you
see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade ; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser below, and
the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a
well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds
and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom
before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell
of the University rings out over the hum of the streets, and every hour a double tide of
students, coming and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the spring-
time— or say one morning rather, at the peep of day — late folk may hear the voices of many
men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High Street ; and a little
after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another
church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about the dew
of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk-
will tell themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical
parliaments — the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but not
specially like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.

Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy between the aspect of
the city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of
contrasts to the eye. In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature — a

Introductory. 3

Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of
battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike shadow over the liveliest and brightest
thoroughfare of the new town. From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed
look down upon the open squares and gardens of the wealthy ; and gay people sunning them-
selves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great
occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter
in the breeze at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture !
In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily forward, there may be seen, shown
one above and behind another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon
the globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over
another in a most admired disorder ; while, above all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit

THE CASTLE.

of Arthur's Seat look down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of Nature
may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness than
we imagine, and in no way frightened of a strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among
the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag ; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe
the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico ; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out
everything into a glorified distinctness — or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening,
fuse all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and
faint lights to burn in the high windows across the valley — the feeling grows upon you that this
also is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense ; that this profusion of eccentricities, this
dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of
every-day reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and
inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and have sold

4 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

their immortal portion to a daily paper. By all the canons of romance, the place demands to
be half deserted and leaning towards decay ; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of the
sun and winds, and a few gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare : but these citizens, with
their cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists,
they make free with historic localities, and rear their young among the most picturesque sites
with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious
moral rectitude, and with a little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
striking feature of the place.*

And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For centuries it was a capital
thatched with heather, and more than once, in the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up
in flame to heaven, a beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not
only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of
trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room
to cross swords, and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated
with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace John Knox reproved
his queen in the accents of modern democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops
plastered like so many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar
autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith.
Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves
around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the
moors, sat day and night with 'tearful psalmns' to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven,
like another Sodom or Gomorrah. There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes,
offered up the often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade
eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of
drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahameof Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town
beating to arms behind their horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a
man at the head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland
to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of
boyish incredulity ; there, a few years afterwards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, an
undisturbed and well-reputed citizen ; and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came from the
plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, when the great
exodus was made across the valley, and the new town began to spread abroad its draughty
parallelograms and rear its long frontage on the opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a
change of domicile and dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities : the cobbler
succeeded the earl ; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney ; what had been a
palace was used as a pauper refuge ; and great mansions were so parcelled out among the least
and lowest in society, that the hearthstone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.

* These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our
rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for
wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations ? Small blame to them if they keep
ledgers : 'tis an excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach ; decency
of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is
not their fault if the city calls for something more specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks
out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham.
And let them console themselves — they do as well as anybody else ; the population of (let us say) Chicago
would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one
word, but that is of gold : / have not yet written a book about Glasgow.

II.

OLD TOWN— THE LANDS.

The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a picturesque
point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most common forms of
depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since
everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be
judged upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect on the

COWFEEDER ROW AND HEAD OF WEST PORT.

new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back
it up. If you were to set it somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling
in a bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished Stirling planted in the
midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern city ; for there the two re-act in a picturesque
sense, and the one is the making of the other.

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some
subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the west. On the one side
of it and the other the new towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader,
and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the whole city and

C

6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on every side ; and people on
the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on
the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the subjacent
country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this distant aspect that
she got her nickname of Auld Reekie. Perhaps it was given her by people who had never
crossed her doors : day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile
of building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain ; so it appeared to
them ; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field ; and as that was all they knew
of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words.

Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked ; and though it is well
washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among its younger
suburbs. It grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious
situations, not in extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced, wherever
there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares ; thoroughfares were diminished
into lanes ; houses sprang up story after story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's
shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen
deep in a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, have
long since been burnt out ; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten windows
at a flight ; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would
still put many natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the gazer's
head, planted on the steep hill-side ; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawn-
shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland hills. The poor man may roost
up there in the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his
window ; he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad
squares and gardens ; he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants
of the city ; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack
of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring.

It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary improvements
of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a conservator of the discomforts of others ;
indeed, it is only our good qualities we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in driving
streets through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept away, and some
associations turned out of house and home. But what slices of sunlight, what breaths of
clean air, have been let in ! And what a picturesque world remains untouched ! You go
under dark arches, and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
hand on either wall ; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the pavement is almost as
treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing from the windows ; the houses bulge
outwards upon flimsy brackets ; you see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner ; at the top of
all, a gable and a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court where
the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and perhaps a church
spire shows itself above the roofs. Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old
mansion still erect, with some insignia of its former state — some scutcheon, some holy or
courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and well-born
people had their lodging ; and as you look up, out-pops the head of a slatternly woman from
the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old
war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered
heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even in the
chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered
with loiterers.

These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have
paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs and politics with their tools upon their
arm. But the most part are of a different order — skulking jail-birds ; unkempt, bare-foot

Old Town — The Lands. 7

children ; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel petticoat and short
tartan shawl : among these, a few supervising constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers
and broken men from higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like
a brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is mostly centered in five
or six chief streets, the same face comes often under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from
this point of view, Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns.
It is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours ; and I never yet heard of any one who

— *VG£t r^cTLJc

OLD BOW-HEAD, LAWNMARKET, EDINBURGH.

tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous accidental way, to watch more than one
of these downward travellers for some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been
upwards of sixty before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure
in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept falling — grease coming and buttons going
from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed,
the hair falling scant and grey upon his head ; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was
standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk, and his
old black raiment daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was

S Putmrsque Notes on Edinburgh.

something heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age ; you would have
thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities ; you would have thought that
he was niched by that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably
into the grave.

One of the earliest marks of these dcgringolades is, that the victim begins to disappear from
the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods.
And such an one is the type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over
the door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window. The old man,
when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the gentleman three years before ;
and that was just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.

It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies,
and that now-a-days some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been
fortunately pretermitted. But an aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation
of the reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and lawyers, may have been
crowded into these houses in the past- — perhaps the more the merrier. The glasses clink around
the china punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the chimney,
and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red fire-light. That is not an ugly picture in itself,
nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
room ; the land would only look the more inviting. Times are changed. In one house, perhaps,
twoscore families herd together ; and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want.
The great hotel is given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere
a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttishness and dirt. In the first room
there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and
the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling to dwelling, and
children have a strange experience from the first : only a robust soul, you would think, could
grow up in such conditions without hurt. And even if God tempers his dispensations to the
young, and all the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of such a
way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily circumstanced. Social inequality
is nowhere more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller
along Princes Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true, there
is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by way of contrast,
sometimes the opposition is more immediate ; sometimes the thing lies in a nutshell, and
there is not so much as a blade of grass between the rich and poor. To look over the
South Bridge and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
from another in the twinkling of an eye.

One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the policeman, and
stopped by hazard before a tall land. The moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone
blankly on the upper windows ; there was no light anywhere in the great bulk of building ;
but as I stood there it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from
the interior ; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on their backs.
And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, family-
after family contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune
to its timepieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy
altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an imaginative measure
of the disproportion between the quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated
and contained it.

There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror and reality, in the
fall of the land in the High Street. The building had grown rotten to the core ; the entry
underneath had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass ; cracks and
reverberations sounded through the house at night ; the inhabitants of the huge old human
bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair ; some had even left their

Old Tozon — The Lands. 9

dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect ;
when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a
hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock was felt
far and near ; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the
suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey
forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest ; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof
destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable : here
it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms ; here the kettle still stood on the
hob, high overhead ; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney.
So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off
from the revolving years. The land had fallen ; and with the land, how much ! Far in the
country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the
chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New
Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth : ' The house that I was
born in fell last niqiit !'

IO

III.

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.

Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St. Giles's Church-
The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable ; the K mines are all
gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttressess ; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious.
As St. Giles's must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so
the neighbourhood was bustling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most
overbuilt ; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fairway left along
the High Street with an open space on either side of the church, but a great porthole,
knocked in the main line of the lands, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.

There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle and Holyrood, and
a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made his entrance by
the upper end, playing a strathspey ; the curious footed it after him down the street, following
his descent by the sound of the chanter from below ; until all of a sudden, about the level of
St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault
with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was
removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt ; but the piper has never again
been seen or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land
of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to
revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance
beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
earth below their horses' feet.

But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of masonry has been
likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into the cause-
way. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and
namefather to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust ; there is no more squalor
carceris for merry debtors, no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker ; but the sun
and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial
that the pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay
behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of the
present Parliament House. It has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths ;
and for those ignorant of its history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament
Close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the resting-place
of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image, the indefatigable, undissuadable
John Knox. He sleeps within call of the church that so often echoed to his preaching.

Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made of lead,
bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned, and, as you look, seems to
be trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together,
these two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the Parliament House,
inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe their shadows on it in the sun. At
either end, from round St. Giles's buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with
its motley passengers ; but the stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the Parliament

The Parliament CIo

1 1

Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a patient crowd may be
seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper ; and to judge-
by their quiet demeanour, you would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-
tickets. The fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon trial for his
life, and these are some of the curious for whom the gallery was found too narrow Towards
afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought
forth. Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant
nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent ; and at certain regular hours
a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.

JOHN KNOXS HOUSE, HIGH STREET, EDINBURGH.

The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish history. Thus,
when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in 1688, 'all fourteen of them gathered
together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in the Parliament Close :' poor episcopal
personages who were done with fair weather for life ! Some of the west-country Societarians
standing by, who would have ' rejoiced more than in great sums ' to be at their hanging,
hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads together. It was not magnanimous
behaviour to dethroned enemies ; but one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the
boots, and they had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the 'woeful
Union,' it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from the last of Scottish
parliaments : people flushed with nationality, as Boswell would have said, ready for riotous

1 2 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the author of ' Robinson Crusoe ' as he looked out of
window.

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his trials (examinations as
we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a vision of the
mouth of Hell. This, and small wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the
vision unsuitable to the locality ; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation
than a court of law ? Hither come envy, malice and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out
in public tourney ; crimes, broken fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim,
gravitate to this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell told
the first hour after ruin ? I think I see them pause to count the strokes, and wander on again
into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof, hung with legal
portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows of painted glass, and warmed by
three vast fires. This is the Salle des pas perdus of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious
custom, idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or in pairs
or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum of talk and footfalls,
the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh cause and call upon the names of those
concerned. Intelligent men have been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a
rag of business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps be made the
Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory. There is nothing
required, you would say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To
breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a
case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a
man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon,
and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the
inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
and count it the most arduous form of idleness.

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges of the First Appeal sit singly,
and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by three or four. Here, you may see
Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone
of judicial proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their Lordships do
not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. The broadest of broad Scotch
is now banished from the bench ; but the courts still retain a certain national flavour. We
have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and
relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry : point after point must be rightly
examined and reduced to principle ; judge after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to
delighted brethren.

Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than three libraries ;
two of no mean order ; confused and semi-subterranean, full of stairs and galleries ; where
you may see the most studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the very
place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the Parliament House is built
upon a slope, although it presents only one story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at
least upon the south ; and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few
places are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone stair after
another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you
pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering
of legal feet. Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket : on the other side are the
cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the Justiciary
Court. Many a foot that has gone up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the
descent. Many a man's life has been argued away from him during long hours in the court
above. But just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a week-day,

The Parliament Close. 1 3

with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams on the wall. A little
farther and you strike upon a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with productions
from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door
with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I cannot fancy why
they should preserve them, unless it were against the Judgment Day. At length, as you
continue to descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise
ahead ; next moment you turn a corner, and there, in a white-washed passage, is a machinery
belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had grown there of
its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from
end to end with its mysterious labours. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam
ventilator; and you will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the
sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending towards the earth's centre, but
only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations of the Parliament House ; low down, to
be sure, but still under the open heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines
garishly on the back-windows of the Irish quarter ; on broken shutters, wry gables, old
palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human pigs. There
are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a face at a window : the dwellers are
abroad, but they will return at night and stagger to their pallets.

H

IV.

LEGENDS.

The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its associations. An
event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has happened amongst congenial sur-
roundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true romantic quality, and become
an undying property of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature
seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to call forth : in such or
such a place, only such or such events ought with propriety to happen ; and in this spirit he
made the ' Lady of the Lake' for Ben Venue, the 'Heart of Midlothian' for Edinburgh, and
the ' Pirate,' so indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for the desolate islands and
roaring tideways of the North. The common run of mankind have, from generation to
generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of Scott ; but where he created new things, they
only forget what is unsuitable among the old ; and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition
becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may-
go back upon dark passages in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
about the fire : tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic, not only of the old life, but
of the very constitution of built nature in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror
to horror, when the wind pipes around the tall lands, and hoots adown arched passages, and
the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering and flaring in the gusts.

Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his
blood within a step or two of the crowded High Street. There, people hush their voices over
Burke and Hare ; over drugs and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their
victims with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously fresh. A
great man in his day was the Deacon ; well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a
cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song with taste. Many a citizen was proud to
welcome the Deacon to supper, and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would
have been vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned.
Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burglar, but the one I have in my mind
most vividly gives the key of all the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards
heaven in one of these great lands, had told him of a projected visit to the country, and
afterwards detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the night in' town. The good man
had lain some time awake ; it was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell ; when suddenly
there came a creak, a jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, was
his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is characteristic of the town and the town's
manners that this little episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow-Street runner, a cock-fight, an apprehension
in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step into the air off his own greatly-improved gallows
drop, brought the career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye, he
may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking from a magistrate's supper-
room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the great plagues,
and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the memory of man. For in time of pestilence
the discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what we now call ' stamping out contagion ' was
carried on with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's
cross on back and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a staff, perambulated the

Legends.

city, adding the terror of man's justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried
on the Borough Muir ; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if they were
women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged and gibbeted at their own
doors ; and wherever the evil had passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And
the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses. Two generations back, they still stood
dark and empty ; people avoided them as they passed by ; the boldest schoolboy only shouted
through the keyhole and made off; for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a

PLANESTONES CLOSE, CANONGATE.

basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens ! A rat scampering within would send a shudder
through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly
forefathers to their own neglect.

And then we have Major Weir ; for although even his house is now demolished, old Edin-
burgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He and his sister lived together in an odour of
sour piety. She was a marvellous spinster ; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. ' He was a tall, black man, and
ordinarily looked down to the ground ; a grim countenance, and a big nose. His garb was still

1 6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never went without his staff.' How it came about that
Angelical Thomas was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more furious order, or
had real as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond
the reach of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this superstitious city
some such example should have been put forth : the outcome and fine flower of dark and
vehement religion. And at least the facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a
remarkable family of myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands,
and even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females, ' stentoriously
laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter ' at unseasonable hours of night and morning,
haunted the purlieus of his abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one
dared to sleep in it, until municipal improvement levelled the structure with the ground.
And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's coach, drawn by six coal-
black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the West Bow, and belated people might
see the dead Major through the glasses.

Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in
the most discreditable meaning of the term ; or perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday's
fiction. But it is a story of some vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar.
This pair inhabited a single room ; from the facts, it must have been double-bedded ; and it may
have been of some dimensions : but when all is said, it was a single room. Here our two
spinsters fell out — on some point of controversial divinity belike : but fell out so bitterly that
there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that day forward. You
would have thought they would separate : but no ; whether from lack of means, or the Scottish
fear of scandal, they continued to keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn
upon the floor separated their two domains ; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace, so that
each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating the territory of the other.
So, for years, they coexisted in a hateful silence ; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly
visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny ; and at night, in the dark watches, each could hear
the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an uglier spectacle than
these sisters rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a
cabinet picture — he had a Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
horror ; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions,
thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy
emphasis ; now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
evening ; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far
below them towards the firth, and the field-paths where they had wandered hand in hand ; or, as
age and infirmity grew upon them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to
tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in enmity with
years ; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would
melt and the chalk boundary be overstepped for ever.

Alas ! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race — the most perverse and
melancholy in man's annals — this will seem only a figure of much that is typical of Scotland and
her high-seated capital above the Forth — a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with
strangers for a caricature. We are wonderful patient haters for conscience sake up here in
the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments of the Established and Free
Churches, and how they can hear each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a
street between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle ; and yet there they sit,
enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other's growth in grace. It would be well if
there were no more than two ; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the
chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private homes. Edinburgh is
a city of churches, as though it were a place of pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast

Legends. 1 7

at the head of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors ; some are empty like
monuments ; and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that surprising
clamour of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath morning, from Trinity and
the sea-skirts to Morningside on the borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford
playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But in
Edinburgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one swelling, brutal babblement of
noise. Now one overtakes another, and now lags behind it ; now five or six all strike on the
pained tympanum at the same punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
discord ; and now, for a second, all seem to have conspired to hold their peace. Indeed, there
are not many uproars in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh :
a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin ; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against ' right-hand extremes and
left-hand defections.' And surely there are few worse extremes than this extremity of zeal ;
and few more deplorable defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote
a comedy of ' Much Ado about Nothing.' The Scottish nation made a fantastic tragedy on
the same subject. And it is for the success of this remarkable piece that these bells are
sounded every Sabbath morning on the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest
silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned once
more into useful building material, if people who think almost exactly the same thoughts
about religion would condescend to worship God under the same roof ! But there are the
chalk lines. And which is to pocket pride, and speak the foremost word ?

i8

V.

GREYFRIARS.

It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars : a new and semi-
rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been
superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must have had a pleasant time on
summer evenings ; for their gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the
tallest of the castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of
view ; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how strangely the city
lies upon her hills. The enclosure is of an irregular shape ; the double church of Old and
New Greyfriars stands on the level at the top ; a few thorns are dotted here and there, and
the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The open shows many slabs
and table-tombstones ; and all round the margin, the place is girt by an array of aristocratic
mausoleums appallingly adorned.

Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the heroic order of graveyard
art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illus-
trating death. We seem to love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great
change ; and even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of skulls,
and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day. Every
mason was a pedestrian Holbein : he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved to put
its terrors pithily before the churchyard loiterer ; he was brimful of rough hints upon
mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments and
reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries ; and now, when the elegance is
not so apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look with a smile on the
profusion of Latin mottoes — some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on
a scroll from angels' trumpets — on the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from
the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their
sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of
mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice, whistling as he
plied the mallet ; but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect of so many of
them in this quiet enclosure, is serious to the point of melancholy.

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their backs to the church-
yard. Only a few inches separate the living from the dead. Here, a window is partly
blocked up by the pediment of a tomb ; there, where the street falls far below the level of
the graves, a chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks
vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way into houses where
workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes forward visibly at the windows.
The very solitude and stillness of the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves
to accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children scattering crumbs
to feed the sparrows ; you hear people singing or washing dishes, or the sound of tears and
castigation ; the linen on a clothespole flaps against funereal sculpture ; or perhaps the cat slips
over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as there is nothing else astir, these
incongruous sights and noises take hold on the attention and exaggerate the sadness of the
place.

Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen, one winter afternoon, as many as

Grcyfriars.

•19

thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the Master Builder, all sleek and fat and
complacently blinking, as if they had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with the
saints, as we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave ; but I confess the
spectacle had an ugly side for me ; and I was glad to step forward and raise my eyes to
where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood
deployed against the sky with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to
be desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world's beauty relieves
a mind from morbid thoughts.

I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey, dropping day ; the grass was strung with
raindrops ; and the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts and petticoats and

angrily taking them in again, as the weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A
gravedigger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into
one after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of
old days to enclose their bones from neighbourhood. In one, under a sort of shrine, we
found a forlorn human effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed
stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most
pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or
an inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation ; the burdocks grew familiarly about his
feet, the rain dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire indifference
as to who he was or whither he had gone. In another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally
but horrible inside with damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an
uncovered thigh bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family with whom

20

Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

the gardener had been long in service. He was among old acquaintances. ' This'll be Miss

Marg'et's,' said he, giving the bone a friendly kick. 'The auld !' I have always an

uncomfortable feeling in a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories
best forgotten ; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day. People had been at
some expense in both these cases : to provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and
an insulting epithet in the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began
to think, is the cynical jeer, eras tibi. That, if anything, will stop the mouth of a carper ;
since it both admits the worst and carries the war triumphantly into the enemy's camp.

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a house at the lower
end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by the gravedigger as a spot of legendary
interest. Burke, the resurrection man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a-head,
used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green. In a
tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly finished, John Knox, according to the
same informant, had taken refuse in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is

the haunted mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie : Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the
Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on toleration. Here, in the last
century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once harboured from the pursuit of the police. The
Hospital is next door to Greyfriars — a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day,
you may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the Mulberry-bush.
Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in the tomb, his old schoolmates had a
hundred opportunities to bring him food ; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to
smuggle him abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day and night
alone with the dead persecutor ; and other lads were far from emulating him in courage. When
a man's soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly ; some
time or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the
grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and
challenge him to appear. ' Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye dar' !' sang the foolhardy urchins.
But Sir George had other affairs on hand ; and the author of an essay on toleration continues
to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so intolerantly helped to slay.

For this infelix campus, as it is dubbed in one of its own inscriptions — an inscription over

Greyfriars. 2 1

which Dr. Johnson passed a critical eye — is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men
whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was signed
by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that extends to Lauriston, the
prisoners from Bothwell Bridge — fed on bread and water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant
marksmen — lay five months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
work was going forward in the Grass Market, idlers in Greyfriars might have heard the throb of
the military drums that drowned the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all : for down in the
corner farthest from Sir George, there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no moorsman shot in a snow
shower beside Irongray or Co'monell ; there is not one of the two hundred who were drowned
off the Orkneys ; nor so much as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American planta-
tions ; but can lay claim to a share in that memorial and, if such things interest just men among
the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth as well as Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs.
Where they may all lie, I know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed ! But if the reader cares to
learn how some of them — or some part of some of them — found their way at length to such
honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was their comrade in life and their
apologist when they were dead. Some of the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some
digressions, but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography : —

' The never to be forgotten Mr. James Renwick told me, that he was Witness to their Public Murder
at the Gallmcke, between Leith and Edinburgh, when he saw the Hangman hash and hag off all their
Five Heads, with Patrick Foreman's Right Hand : Their Bodies were all buried at the Gallows Foot ;
their Heads, with Patrick's Hand, were brought and put upon five Pikes on the Pleasaunce-Port. . . .
Mr. Renwick told me also that it was the first public Action that his Hand was at, to conveen Friends* and
lift their murthered Bodies, and carried them to the West Churchyard of Edinburgh} — not Greyfriars,
this time, — ' and buried them there. Then they came about the City .... and took down these Five
Heads and that Hand; and Day being come, they went quickly up the Pleasaunce ; and when they came
to Lauristoun Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury
their Heads with their Bodies, which they designed; it being present Death, if any of them had been found.
Alexander Tweedie, a Friend, being with them, who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to
bury them in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45 Years except 3 Days, being
executed upon the 10th of October 1681, and found the 7th Day of October 1726. That Piece of Ground
lay for some Years unlaboured ; and trenching it, the Gardner found them, which affrighted him ; the Box
was consumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
Summer-house : Mr. ScAaw's mother was so kind, as to cut out a Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay
Twelve Days there, where all had Access to see them. Alexander Tweedie, the foresaid Gardner, said, when
dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor Silver. Daniel Tweedie, his Son, came
along with me to that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush above them, and
farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard. . . .
Many came' — to see the heads — 'out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many concerned grave Men and
Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs. There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the
Nineteenth Day of October 1726, and every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day and Hour, being
Wednesday, the Day of the Week on which most of them were executed, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being
the Hour that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make a compleat Coffin for them in
Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly
we kept the foresaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half of it below them, their
nether Jaws being parted from their Heads ; but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were
Witness to the Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his Hammer ; and according
to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them,
and stufft the Coffin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the chief Parts of the City as was done
at the Revolution ; but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such Show of
them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing unheard-of
Dispensation : But took the ordinary Way of other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east the Back
of the Wall, and in at Bristo-Port, and down the Way to the Head of the Cowgate, and turned up to the
Church-yard, where they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest Multitude of People
Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and others, that ever I saw together.'

G

(•VLlHRAliV •')

22 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

And so there they were at last, in ' their resting graves.' So long as men do their duty,
even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will be leading pattern lives ; and whether or
not they come to lie beside a martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven
somewhere in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we temper the
thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what ground, is of small account ; if it be
only the bishop who was burned for his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart
and makes us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a wholesome
heartsome spot in the field of the dead ; and as we look upon it, a brave influence comes to us
from the land of those who have won their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker's
got ' cleanly off the stage.'

VI.

NEW TOWN— TOWN AND COUNTRY.

It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old ; and the
most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very emblem of what is
condemnable in architecture. Much may be said, much indeed has been said, upon the
text ; but to the unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the New
Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly picturesque. An old
skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the sublime and beautiful, once propounded
as his most radiant notion for Paradise : ' The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the
matter of a point free.' He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are promised
pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly somewhat higher. But there are
bright and temperate days — with soft air coming from the inland hills, military music sounding
bravely from the hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on the palaces of Prince's Street —
when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands in sentiment with the
old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has been much tumbled round Orcadian skerries, what
scene could be more agreeable to witness ? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air of
festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if it were a trifle too good
to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It has the scenic quality that would best set off a
life of unthinking, open-air diversion. It was meant by nature for the realisation of the society
of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but towardly, how all the world
and his wife would flock into these gardens in the cool of the evening, to hear cheerful music, to
sip pleasant drinks, to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires
and monuments and the green tree-tops in the valley. Alas ! and the next morning the
rain is splashing on the window, and the passengers flee along Prince's Street before the
galloping squalls.

It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and short-sighted, and did not
fully profit by the capabilities of the situation. The architect was essentially a town bird,
and he laid out the modern city with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery alone.
The country did not enter into his plan ; he had never lifted his eyes to the hills. If he had
so chosen, every street upon the northern slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded
an extensive and beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built ; many of the
houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on what is not worth
observation, and standing discourteously back-foremost in the ranks ; and in a word, it is too
often only from attic windows, or here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look beyond
the city upon its diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more surprising, to come
suddenly on a corner, and see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that
woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.

Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at the Town Cross ;
and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode. This painted country man, the dandy
of the rose garden, looked far abroad in such a humming neighbourhood ; and you can fancy
what moral considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a fanciful sort of
way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city does the sight of the country enter
so far ; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees
upon your walk ; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under
an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-

24 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

window of a grimy tenement in a lane : — and behold ! you are face-to-face with distant and
bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.
You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.

For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one thing ; it is another
for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to overlook the country. It should be a genial
and ameliorating influence in life ; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
unconcern : that he can watch from day to day, as he trots ofFiceward, how the Spring green
brightens in the wood or the field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I have been
tempted, in this connexion, to deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-
whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people
are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, if you could
take clear note of the objects of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where
you stand : — think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts
would be diversified, as you walked the Edinburgh streets ! For you might pause, in some
business perplexity, in the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin,
clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed and rustic
visage ; or a fisher racing seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in
the wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.

To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque ; nor because the Old Town bears
a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town shall look commonplace. Indeed,
apart from antique houses, it is curious how much description would apply commonly to either
The same sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the
same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to be observed in both. Thus
the broad and comely approach to Prince's Street from the east, lined with hotels and public
offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the Low Calton ; if you cast a glance over the parapet,
you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street ; and the same tall
houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the New Town passing overhead above its
own cellars ; walking, so to speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the
human race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel order.
The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between gardens ; the
crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most commodious streets and crescents in
the modern city ; and a handsome bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon,
private carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card-cases pass to and fro about the duties of
society. And yet down below, you may still see, with its mills and foaming weir, the little
rural village of Dean. Modern improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct ;
and the extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its growth ; Edinburgh
herself has embraced a good few ; but it is strange to see one still surviving — and to see it
some hundreds of feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
Herculaneum ? Herculaneum was dead at least ; but the sun still shines upon the roofs of Dean ;
the smoke still rises thriftily from its chimneys ; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at
the gurgling water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps
whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony — for all the world as if Edinburgh were still
the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile
or so in the green country.

It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of his example to
the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode in a street which is still (so oddly
may a jest become perpetuated) known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large
but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are
places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird

New Town — Town and Country.

25

on a hawthorn ; there, another was taken on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream ;
and you have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories
of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on many
an escalade of garden walls ; many a ramble among lilacs full of piping birds ; many an
exploration in obscure quarters that were neither town nor country ; and I think that both for
my companions and myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment
as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the butt-end of some former hamlet,
and found a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and squares. The tunnel to the
Scotland Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two
guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open
thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It

IN' THE VILLAGE OF DEAN.

was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
novels ; and these two words, 'subterranean passage,' were in themselves an irresistible attraction,
and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly
aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle Rock from West Prince's Street Gardens, and lay a
triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And
there are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong
illumination of remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare with
the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth,
with which I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at
Rroughton Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater impression
of antiquity than the oldest land upon the High Street. They too, like Fergusson's butterfly
had a quaint air of having wandered far from their own place ; they looked abashed and

II

26 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running mill-streams;
there were corners that smelt like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils ; and
the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.

In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this haunting flavour of the country.
The last elm is dead in Elm Row ; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace on
all the borders of the city. We can cut down the trees ; we can bury the grass under dead
paving-stones ; we can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters ; and we may forget
the stories and the playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some possessions that not even
the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills,
unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her
florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills and the Firth, we have a
famous heritage to leave our children. Our windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully
stained to represent a landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins
to flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of our streets, the
country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set his heart beating for travel and pure air.

27

VII.

THE VILLA QUARTERS.

Mr. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I have heard
it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show. Many however find a grand air
and something settled and imposing in the better parts ; and upon many, as I have said, the
confusion of styles induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of our
recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is
a subject which makes one envious of his large declamatory and controversial eloquence.

Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to another ; all around
Newington and Morningside, the dismallest structures keep springing up like mushrooms ;
the pleasant hills are loaded with them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed
and carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
character. They are not houses ; for they were not designed with a view to human habitation,
and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of
man. They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measure-
ment is in clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style of art, only
to a form of business much to be regretted.

Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the windows bears no
rational relation to the size of the front ? Is there any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk ?
Does a hard-working, greedy builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage
of equal plainness ? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green timber
employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design ; and there is no reason why a
chimney should be made to vent, because it is so situated as to look comely from without.
On the other hand, there is a noble way of being ugly : a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of
Lucifer. There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without being
contemptible ; and we know that ' fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' But to aim at
making a common-place villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular ; to attempt
the homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure ; not to have any theory
but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip all competitors in the art of conceiving and
rendering permanent deformity ; and to do all this in what is, by nature, one of the most
agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain : — what are we to say, but that this also is a distinction,
hard to earn although not greatly worshipful ?

Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive ; but these things offend the plainest
taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the town ; and as this eruption keeps
spreading on our borders, we have ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before
we gain the country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous body,
it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson ; the builders and their
accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of yore, with the trowel in one hand
and the defensive cutlass in the other ; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had
been consummated, right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at once.

Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use asking them
to employ an architect ; for that would be to touch them in a delicate quarter, and its use
would largely depend on what architect they were minded to call in. But let them get any
architect in the world to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa, not his own
design ; and let them reproduce that model to satiety.

28

VIII.

THE CALTON HILL.

The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great elevation, which
the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side of it ; while the New
Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes the circuit. You mount by stairs in a
cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the
honours of situation and architecture ; Burns is memorialised lower down upon a spur ; Lord
Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the topgallant of the Calton Hill. This latter
erection has been differently and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a
butterchurn ; comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But the
chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, ' the Modern Ruin ' as it has been called, an
imposing object from far and near, and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air
of a Modern Athens which has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant
to be a National Monument ; and its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
national characteristics. The old Observatory — a quaint brown building on the edge of the
steep — and the new Observatory — a classical edifice with a dome — occupy the central portion
of the summit. All these are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.

The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the dead. You see
Dugald Stewart rather more, handsomely commemorated than Burns. Immediately below, in
the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane
while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously acclaimed,
the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgotten. The votaries of
Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in Scotland and more remarkable for number than
discretion, eagerly suppress all mention of the lad who handed on to him the poetic impulse
and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in his manner and
the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged his debt in a fragment of
autobiography, but erected a tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was
worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain ; and although I think I have read nearly all
the biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of nature was not
violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one,
to have a bigger thing to gape at ; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without
disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think to please the great originals ;
and whoever puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better than dedicate his labours to
the memory of Burns, who will be the best delighted of the dead.

Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best ; since you can see the
Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from
Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east wind
which are so common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea,
with a little of the sea freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is
delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse to the majority of
mankind. It brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolourizer, although not thick
enough to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to windward at
the far end of Musselburgh Bay ; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and
the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.

Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High School
and the towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, castellated to the extent of folly,

The Calton Hill.

29

standing by itself on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the
Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string of
nuns ; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step with them.
From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a
taller and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing
smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of
an outpost, you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers
made their escape and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine
to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's
Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags ; and

kS.lB

<"■<!- VtV>

queen mary's bath.

thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon your
left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one above another to
where the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. —
Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon ; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to
the summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke followed by
a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which
people set their watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands. — To
complete the view, the eye enfilades Prince's Street, black with traffic, and has a broad look
over the valley between the Old Town and the New : here, full of railway trains and
stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green with trees
and gardens.

On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional

I

$o Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking prospect. A gully separates it from
the New Town. This is Greenside, where witches were burned and tournaments held in
former days. Down that almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his horse, and so first,
as they say, attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tesselated with sheets and blankets
out to dry, and the sound of people beating carpets is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the
suburbs run out to Leith ; Leith camps on the seaside with her forest of masts ; Leith roads
are full of ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith Island; the

ftfey

BACK OF GREElNSIDE.

Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May ; the towns of Fifeshire sit, each in
its bank of blowing smoke, along the opposite coast ; and the hills inclose the view, except
to the farthest east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies the
road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots Lords; and yonder smoke
on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a queen for

Scotland.

' O lang, lang, may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land !'

TJie Calton Hill. 3 1

The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and sea disaster. The
sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but
crowding to the tail of the harbour with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for
brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their last fishing.
Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have gone down in the North
Sea ! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London smack went ashore and wreckers cut the
rings from ladies' fingers ; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star
of guidance ; and the lee shore to the east of the Inchcape, is that Forfarshire coast where
Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son.

These are the main features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are all tilted
by the inclination of the ground, how each stands out in delicate relief against the rest,
what manifold detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a
matter for a person on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind together
in one comprehensive look. It is the character of such a prospect, to be full of change and
of things moving. The multiplicity embarrasses the eye ; and the mind, among so much,
suffers itself to grow absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or
follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed by
distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps ; you have a glimpse upon a
thoroughfare where people are densely moving ; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks
running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs.
At one of the innumerable windows, you watch a figure moving ; on one of the multitude of
roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke ;
bells are heard, far and near, faint and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping
evenly over the housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the meantime,
on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by monumental buildings.

Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and
only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of heaven ; and you will find a sight as
stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect ; the patient
astronomer, flat on his back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your
only neighbour ; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of the city, the
tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle of carriages and the continuous,
keen jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or so before, the gas was turned on ; lamp-
lighters scoured the city ; in every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and
gleamed forth into the dusk. And so now, although the town lies blue and darkling on her
hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far and near along the pavements and
upon the high facades. Moving lights of the railway pass and re-pass below the stationary
lights upon the bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall lands and
on the Castle turrets, they burn low down in Greenside or along the Park. They run out
one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk in a procession down to Leith, and
shine singly far along Leith Pier. Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is mapped
out upon the ground of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and
exposes it before a candle ; not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high station and
fanciful design; every evening in the year she proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her
own beauty ; and as if to complete the scheme — or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were
beginning to extend it to the adjacent sea and country — half way over to Fife, there is an
outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another on the May.

And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and bugles begin
to recall the scattered garrison ; the air thrills with the sound ; the bugles sing aloud ; and
the last rising flourish mounts and melts into the darkness like a star : a martial swan-song,
fitly rounding in the labours of the day.

32

IX.

WINTER AND NEW YEAR.

The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the winter wind. Sue//,
b/ae, nirly, and scowthering, are four of these significant vocables ; they are all words that
carry a shiver with them ; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am
persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland and the northern
hills ; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and as I set my face northwards, feel its
smarting kisses on my cheek. Even in the names of places there is often a desolate,
inhospitable sound ; and I remember two from the near neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Cauld-
hame and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their inhabitants. The
inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the language of Scotland with words, has
also largely modified the spirit of its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men
the love of the hearth and the sentiment of the family : and the latter, in its own right,
inclines a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all our singers have a stave or
two for blazing fires and stout potations: — to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow
something hot to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt !

And this is not only so in country districts where the shepherd must wade in the snow
all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere more apparently stated than in
the works of our Edinburgh poet, Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and
willingly slunk from the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his
life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least serious of Burns's
amourettes was ennobling by comparison ; and so there is nothing to temper the sentiment
of indoor revelry which pervades the poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his
native town, and the manners of its youth to the present day, this spirit has perhaps done
something to restrict his popularity. He recalls a supper-party pleasantry with something
akin to tenderness ; and sounds the praises of the act of drinking as if it were virtuous,
or at least witty, in itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the
revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of a rich existence.
It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that kept Fergusson in this round of sordid
pleasures. A Scot of poetic temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by
nature into the public- house. The picture may not be pleasing ; but what else is a man to
do in this dog's weather ?

To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body, can the gloom
and depression of our Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some constitutions there is
something almost physically disgusting in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather ; the wind
wearies, the sickly sky depresses them ; and they turn back from their walk to avoid
the aspect of the unrefulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days
are so short that a man does much of his business, and certainly all his pleasure, by the
haggard glare of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so
drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered how they found the heart to un-
dress. And meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open meadow ;
and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving overhead with a noise of
shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly that there are times when
the heart turns sick in a man's inside ; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the

Winter and New Year. 33

warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long struggling with
the seas.

As the weather hardens towards frost, the world begins to improve for Edinburgh
people. We enjoy superb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of the city stamped in indigo
upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may still be cold, but there is a briskness in
the air that stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They
fall into two divisions : one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom Winter
has gotten by the vitals ; the other well lined with New-year's fare, conscious of the
touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping through it by the glow of his internal fires.
Such an one I remember, triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could
vanquish. ' Well,' would be his jovial salutation, ' here's a sneezer !' And the look of these
warm fellows is tonic, and upholds their drooping fellow-townsmen. There is yet another
class who do not depend on corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave
and merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too high a wind,
and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in
the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies were seen coming eastward in the teeth of
the wind. If the one was as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven.
They were miserably clad ; and the pavement was so cold, you would have thought no
one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if you please,
while the elder sang a tune to give them music. The person who saw this, and whose
heart was full of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to
him ever since, and which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.

At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping country, are sheeted
up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours, nurses pluck their children out of bed
and run with them to some commanding window, whence they may see the change that
has been worked upon earth's face. ' A' the hills are covered wi' snaw,' they sing, ' and
Winter's noo come fairly !' And the children, marvelling at the silence and the white
landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the words. The reverberation of the
snow increases the pale daylight, and brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands
are smooth and glittering, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry-stone dyke, and
here and there, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a shoulder. The Firth
seems a leaden creek, that a man might almost jump across, between well-powdered Lothian
and well-powdered Fife. And the effect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day ; the
streets are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white ; and you have only
to lift your eyes and look over miles of country snow. An indescribable cheerfulness breathes
about the city ; and the well-fed heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-
year's weather.

New-year's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family expansions and of deep
carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary
falls upon a Sunday, when the public-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even
whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper feels called upon
to go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between two loyalties, the Scotch have to decide
many nice cases of conscience, and ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the
annual observance. A party of convivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung
suspended in this manner on the brink of their diversions. From ten o'clock on Sunday
night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments ; and as the hour of liberty drew
near, each must have had his music open, his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot
already raised to mark the time, and his nerves braced for execution ; for hardly had
the twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had launched forth into a
secular bravura.

Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before the great

K

34 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

morning, confectioners display stacks of Scotch bun — a dense, black substance, inimical to
life — and full moons of shortbread adorned with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honour
of the season and the family affections. ' Frae Auld Reekie,' ' A guid New Year to ye a','
' For the Auld Folk at Hame,' are among the most favoured of these devices. Can you
not see the carrier, after half-a-day's journey on pinching hill-roads, draw up before a
cottage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor Glen among the rowans, and the old people
receiving the parcel with moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city ? For at
this season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn conflict, men feel a
need to draw closer the links that unite them ; they reckon the number of their friends,
like allies before a war ; and the prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are
recommended by name into God's keeping.

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday ; only taverns, toyshops, and other
holiday magazines, keep open doors. Every one looks for his handsel. The postmen and the
lamplighters have left, at every house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and
thanking in a breath ; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these verses may have sometimes
a touch of reality in detail or sentiment and a measure of strength in the handling. All over
the town, you may see comforter'd schoolboys hasting to squander their half-crowns. There are

?^^SDSf«^^^-

DUDDIN'GSTONE.

an infinity of visits to be paid ; all the world is in the street, except the daintier classes ; the
sacramental greeting is heard upon all sides ; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths ;
and whisky and shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a stranger
will be impressed by the number of drunken men ; and by afternoon, drunkenness has spread to
the women. With some classes of society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on
New-year's Day as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for
perhaps a month to do the season honour. Many carry a whisky-bottle in their pocket,
which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a perfect stranger. It is inexpedient
to risk one's body in a cab, or not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver.
The streets, which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate pilotage.
Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries of the New
Year go meandering in and out and cannoning one against another ; and now and again, one
falls and lies as he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police office,
that the streets seem almost clearer. And as guisards and first-footers are now not much
seen except in country places, when once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at
the Tron railings, the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet
returns upon the town. But think, in these piled lands, of all the senseless snorers, all the
broken heads and empty pockets !

Winter and Nciv Yea >-. 3 5

Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing ; and one riot obtained
the epic honours of military intervention. But the great generation, I am afraid, is at an end ;
and even during my own college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skating and sliding,
on the other hand, are honoured more and more; and curling, being a creature of the national
genius, is little likely to be disregarded. The patriotism that leads a man to eat Scotch bun
will scarce desert him at the curling-pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the
proper home of sliders ; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to school ; and the
profession of errand boy is transformed into a holiday amusement. As for skating, there
is scarce any city so handsomely provided. Duddingstone Loch lies under the abrupt southern
side of Arthur's Seat ; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the reeds ; in
winter, a field of ringing ice. The village church sits above it on a green promontory ;
and the village smoke rises from among goodly trees. At the church gates, is the historical
jong, a place of penance for the neck of detected sinners, and the historical louping-on static,
from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here Prince Charlie
slept before the battle of Prestonpans ; and here Deacon Brodie, or one of his gang, stole
a plough coulter before the burglary in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch,
the ground rises to Craigmillar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is worth a
climb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's Seat ; but it is tenfold
more so on a day of skating. The surface is thick with people moving easily and swiftly and
leaning over at a thousand graceful inclinations ; the crowd opens and closes, and keeps
moving through itself like water ; and the ice rings to half a mile away, with the flying steel.
As night draws on, the single figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir and
coming and going of black clusters, is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first
torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and
this is followed by another and another, until the whole field is full of skimming lights.

36

X.

TO THE PENTLAND HILLS.

Ox three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the
sea, there to, the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow. On
the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on
Arthur's Seat. The character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity
of hedges ; by many stone walls of varying height ; by a fair amount of timber, some of it
well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage ; by here and
there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen ;
and from almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack of variety,
and yet most of the elements are common to all parts ; and the southern district is alone
distinguished by considerable summits and a wide view.

From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army encamped before Flodden, the road
descends a long hill, at the bottom of which and just as it is preparing to mount upon the
other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into the open country. Even as I write
these words, they are being antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are tinkling
on a new row of houses. The builders have at length adventured beyond the toll which held
them in respect so long, and proceed to career in these fresh pastures like a herd of colts
turned loose. As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a
man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders ;
for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green
country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-
haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a
flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy
were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never dry. And no
wonder, they would add, for the two men had only stolen fourpence between them.

For about two miles the road climbs upwards, a long hot walk in summer time. You
reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the toll of Fairmilehead. The
spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and aspect. The hills are close by across a
valley : Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and Allermuir the
tallest on this side : with wood and tilled field running high upon their borders, and haunches
all moulded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. The
air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation and rustically scented by
the upland plants ; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At
certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the birds of sea and mountain
hunt and scream together in the same field by Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things
intermix their wheelings, the seabirds skim the tree tops and fish among the furrows of the
plough. These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they cruise in
their own element ; and like sailors, ask but food and water from the shores they coast.

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a
distillery of whiskey. It chanced, some time in the past century, that the distiller was on
terms of good-fellowship with the visiting officer of excise. The latter was of an easy,
friendly disposition and a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of
Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock ; and although it was agreeable to find his business
lead him in a friend's direction, it was unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by

To the Pent land Hills. 3 7

his visits. Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gaugcr would
take his flute, without which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it together, and set
manfully to playing, as if for his own delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene.
His favourite air, it seems, was ' Over the hills and far away.' At the first note, the distiller
pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead ? and playing ' Over the hills and far away ? '
This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger. Instantly, horses were harnessed, and sundry
barrels of whiskey were got. upon a cart, driven at a gallop round Hill End, and buried in
the mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was
put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back parlour. A little after, the
gauger, having had his fill of music for the moment, came strolling down with the most
innocent air imaginable, and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares
by his arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and the gauger's
flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion ; and when both were somewhat
mellow, they would wind up the evening with 'Over the hills and far away' to an accom-
paniment of knowing glances. And at least, there is a smuggling story, with original and
half-idyllic features.

A little further, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a field. The country-
people call it General Kay's monument. According to them, an officer of that name had
perished there in battle at some indistinct period before the beginning of history. The date
is reassuring ; for I think cautious writers are silent on the General's exploits. But the
stone is connected with one of those remarkable tenures of land which linger on into the
modern world from Feudalism. Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed
proprietor is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a flourish
according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily for a respectable family,
crowned heads have no great business in the Pentland Hills. But the story lends a character
of comicality to the stone ; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself.

The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of Comiston, a
belated carter beheld a lady in white, ' with the most beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet,'
who looked upon him in a very ghastly manner and then vanished ; and just in front is the
Hunters' Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in person.
Satan led the inhabitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four corners of the building with
lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and windows, overthrew crockery in the dead hours
of the morning, and danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant
was put in requisition ; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh and prayed by
the hour ; pious neighbours sat up all night making a noise of psalmody ; but Satan minded
them no more than the wind about the hill-tops ; and it was only after years of persecution,
that he left the Hunter's Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind.
What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation, the neighbourhood
offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths ; and without exactly casting in one's lot
with that disenchanting school of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter
wind in the last story. ' That nicht,' says Burns, in one of his happiest moments, —

' That nicht a child might understand
The deil had business on his hand.'

And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms,
they will be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in the world : the wind will beat
on doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a
clamour like the judgment-day.

The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to scale the main
slope of the Pentlands. A bouquet of old trees stands round a white farm-house ; and from
a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight

I.

o

S Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.

above, the hills climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of lambs,
is clamorous with the bleating of flocks ; and you will be wakened, in the grey of early
summer mornings, by the barking of a dog or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the
echoes. This, with the hamlet lying behind unseen, is Swanston.

The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago, this sheltered
field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the sake of the springs that rise or
gather there. After they had built their waterhouse and laid their pipes, it occurred to
them that the place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial magistrates
and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment ; and Edinburgh could soon
boast of a municipal Pleasure House, The dell was turned into a garden ; and on the knoll
that shelters it from the plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills.
They brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's which they were then restoring,
and disposed them on the gables and over the door and about the garden ; and the quarry
which had supplied them with building material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with
beds of roses. So much for the pleasure of the eye ; for creature comfort, they made a capacious
cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn stone. In process of time, the trees
grew higher and gave shade to the cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the
dell into a thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed themselves from the pursuit of municipal
ambition ; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and in and out among the hollies ;
authoritative canes drew ciphering upon the walk ; and at night, from high upon the hills,
a shepherd saw lighted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city dignitaries
raised in song.

The farm is older. It was first a grange of Whitekirk Abbey, tilled and inhabited by
rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into the hands of a true-blue Protestant
family. During the covenanting troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the
Pentlands, the farm doors stood hospitably open till the morning ; the dresser was laden
with cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy ; and the worshippers kept slipping down from
the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the supper-room between two dances of a
modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell
upon Swanston in the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a little
child ; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he remembered, when
he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth speech. The churn stood full of
cream in the dairy, and with this they made their brose in high delight. ' It was braw
brose,' said one of them. At last, they made off, laden like camels with their booty ; and
Swanston Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not know
what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs low upon the hill, the
house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy
nothing more perfect than the garden, laid out in alleys and arbours and bright, old-fashioned
flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trellis-work and moss and tinkling waterfall,
and housed from the sun under fathoms of broad foliage.

The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and consists of a few
cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a strange thing in Scotland) are models
of internal neatness ; the beds adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern
plates, the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle polished
like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in country places, where there is little matter
for gossip and no street sights. Housework becomes an art ; and at evening, when the cottage
interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife folds her hands and contem-
plates her finished picture ; the snow and the wind may do their worst, she has made herself
a pleasant corner in the world. The city might be a thousand, miles away : and yet it was
from close by that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been etched
for this collection : and you have only to look at the plate, to see how near it is at hand. But

To the Pent land Hills. 39

hills and hill people arc not easily sophisticated ; and if you walk out here on a summer
Sunday, it is as like as not the shepherd may set his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved
countenance ; they look formidable at the charge, but their hearts are in the right place ; and
they will only bark and sprawl about you on the grass, unmindful of their master's excitations.

Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle of the range ; thence, the Pentlands trend off
to south and west. From the summit you look over a great expanse of champaign sloping
to the sea and behold a large variety of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills
of Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more or
less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field of wild heathery
peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst ; and to that side the view is as desolate as if
you were looking into Galloway or Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of
travel. Far out in the lowlands PZdinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear
days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles ; the Castle rises darkly in the midst ;
and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold figure in the landscape. All around, cultivated
fields, and woods, and smoking villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface
of the land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines ; little ships are tacking in
the Firth ; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as a parish, travels before the wind ;
the wind itself ruffles the wood and standing corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across
the landscape. So you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, and look down from afar upon
men's life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming thoroughfares,
not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill. The sea surf, the cries of ploughmen,
the streams and the mill-wheels, the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert
through the plain ; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance ;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of a train, the world
has fallen into a dead silence and the business of town and country grown voiceless in your
ears. A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so
much to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness ; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene
makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses pleasant reflections on the destiny
of man. The spiry habitable city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the
straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may be never
so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view that spirits up
your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful labour.

Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof and a smoking chimney, where two
roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging wood. If you are fanciful, you
will be reminded of the gauger in the story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once
lipped and fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain air, and the
words of the song he affected, carry your mind ' Over the hills and far away' to distant countries ;
and you have a vision of Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood,
but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings.
For every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign
ports ; the limit of a parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire ; and as a man
sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city sends abroad an influence and
a portrait of herself. There is no Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but
he or she carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle cliffs, some-
snow scene, some maze of city lamps, indelible in the memory and delightful to study in the
intervals of toil. For any such, if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures.
It would be pleasant, if they should recognise a house where they had dwelt or a walk that
they had taken.

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