Transcribed from the 1903 Seeley & Co. Ltd. edition by
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

EDINBURGH

Picturesque Notes
by
Robert Louis Stevenson

People’s Edition.

london
SEELEY & CO. Ltd., 38 Great Russell Street
1903

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.

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
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 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 another 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 grey 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
charges.  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 even-fall, 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
by-standers.  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 springtime—or
say one morning rather, at the peep of day—late folk may
hear 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 above 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 Bass Rock
upon dry land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its
war-like shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of
the new town.  From their smoky beehives, ten stories high,
the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gardens of the
wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes Street,
with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great
occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where
the washings of the Old Town flutter in the breeze at its high
windows.  And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
architecture!  In this one valley, where the life of the
town goes most busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above
and behind another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in
almost every style upon the globe.  Egyptian and Greek
temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over
another in a most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute
mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur’s Seat look
down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works
of Nature may look down the monuments of Art.  But Nature is
a more indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way
frightened of a strong effect.  The birds roost as willingly
among the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the
same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and
yesterday’s imitation portico; and as the soft northern
sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
distinctness—or easterly mists, coming up with the blue
evening, fuse all these incongruous features into one, and the
lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn
in the high windows across the valley—the feeling grows
upon you that this also is a piece of nature in the most intimate
sense; that this profusion of eccentricities, this dream in
masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a
city in the world of every-day reality, connected by railway and
telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by
citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend
church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily
paper.  By all the canons of romance, the place demands to
be half deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we might admit
in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few 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. [10]

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
Grahame of 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.

CHAPTER 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 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 over-tops the whole city and
keeps an open view to sea and land.  It dominates for miles
on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the
Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad
over the subjacent country.  A city that is set upon a
hill.  It was, I suppose, from this distant aspect that she
got her 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;
thorough—fares 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 children;
big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped
flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl; among these, a few
surpervising 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 centred 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 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 broad-cloth 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 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 dégringolades
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 firelight.  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, two-score 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
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 night!’

CHAPTER III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.

Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precincts
of St. Giles’s Church.  The church itself, if it were
not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the Krames are
all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttresses; 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 fair-way 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 besides 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 causeway. 
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 backed 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, enclose 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 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.

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 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, 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 whitewashed 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.

CHAPTER 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
surroundings.  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 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 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 Edinburgh 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 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 to 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 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?

CHAPTER 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 Roubiliac, which belong to the
heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy,
highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating
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 churchyard.  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 clothes-pole 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 afternoon, as many as 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 rain-drops; 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 grave-digger, 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 old 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 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, cras 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
refuge 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 fool-hardy 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 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 church-yard 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 Grassmarket, 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 plantations; 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 Cæsar 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 Gallowlee, between Leith and
Edinburgh, when he saw the Hangman hash and hagg 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. Schaw’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 aforesaid 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.’

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.’

CHAPTER 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 a 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 Princes 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 windows, and the
passengers flee along Princes 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-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 cars, 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
Princes 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 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 was
a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore than we were
accustomed to in Ainsworth’s novels; and these two words,
‘subterreanean 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 Princes
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 Broughton 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 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
hawthorns begin to flower, and the meadows to smell of young
grass, even in the thickest of our streets, the country hilltops
find out a young man’s eyes, and set his heart beating for
travel and pure air.

CHAPTER 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
measurement 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.

CHAPTER 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 top-gallant of
the Calton Hill.  This latter erection has been differently
and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a
butter-churn; 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 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 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,
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 too
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 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 Princes 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 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 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 enclose 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!’

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 sparsedly 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;
lamplighters 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 repass 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 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.

CHAPTER IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR.

The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach
against the winter wind.  Snell, blae,
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, Cauldhame 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 fire-side.  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 undress.  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 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 stoke of fate for this Calvinistic people, the year’s
anniversary fails 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 launced forth into a secular bravura.

Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all house-holds. 
For weeks before the great 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 postman
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 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!

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 joug; a place of penance for the
neck of detected sinners, and the historical louping-on
stane, 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.

CHAPTER X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS.

On 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 sea-birds 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 whisky.  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 his visits.  Accordingly, when he got about the level of
Fairmilehead, the gauger 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 whisky 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 accompaniment 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 Hunters’ 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 farmhouse; and from a
neighbouring dell, you can see smoke rising and leaves ruffling
in the breeze.  Straight 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
awakened, 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 water-house 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 path; 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 pipe-clay, 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 contemplates 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 engraved for this
collection; and you have only to look at the etching, [118] to see how near it is at hand. 
But hills and hill people are 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 Edinburgh 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.

london
Printed by Strangeways and Sons, Tower
St.  Cambridge Circus, W.C.

Footnotes:

[10]  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 it 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; I have not yet written a book
about Glasgow.

[118]  One of the illustrations of the
First Edition.