THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 

 
 IniS h'>^l <^ hp Ig," 
 
 SOUTHERN BRANCH, 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 
 
 LIBRARY, 
 
 »LOS ANGELES, CALiF. 
 
 Form L-£
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 o ',:^ f-
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 'Picturesque S^tes 
 
 by 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
 Author of AN INLAND VOYAGE, TREASURE ISLAND, Etc. 
 
 New Edition 
 
 /f/^ ■ 
 
 London : Seeley c^^ Co. Essex Street, Strand 
 
 New York : Macmillan &= Co. 
 
 1889 
 
 
 S J J, 33 3^3J 
 
 > 3 3^,3' ' '1 ' 
 
 ' 3 3 3 3 3 3 ,
 
 < C t C <
 
 PR 
 
 5^3 
 
 --::^* 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY 
 
 II. OLD TOWN — THE LANDS 
 
 III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 
 
 IV. LEGENDS 
 
 V. GREYFRIARS .... 
 
 VI. NEW TOWN— TOWN AND COUNTRY 
 
 Vir. THE VILLA QUARTERS . 
 
 Vin. THE CALTON HILL .... 
 
 IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR 
 
 X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 21 
 
 43 
 
 59 
 
 76 
 
 98 
 117 
 
 122 
 161 
 
 1^10
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 The Old City from Salisbury Crags 
 Gate of Holyrood .... 
 The Castle ..... 
 
 CoWFEEDER Row AND HeAD OF WeST PoRT 
 
 Advocates' Close .... 
 
 Old Bow-Head, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh 
 
 High Street ..... 
 
 The Spire of St. Giles's . 
 
 John Knox's House in the High Street 
 
 The Canongate .... 
 
 Planestones Close, Canongate 
 
 Greyfriars ..... 
 
 Tombs in Greyfriars .... 
 
 Tombs in Greyfriars .... 
 
 The Grassmarket .... 
 
 The Royal Institution 
 
 In the Village of Dean 
 
 Princes Street Gardens 
 
 The Calton Hill .... 
 
 View from the Calton Hill 
 
 Salisbury Crags from the Burns Monumen 
 
 Queen Mary's Bath 
 
 Arthur's Seat . 
 
 Back of Greenside 
 
 Duddingstone . 
 
 Craigmillar Castle 
 
 Distant View of Edinburgh 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 7 
 
 13 
 23 
 
 27 
 
 31 
 36 
 
 45 
 
 49 
 61 
 
 63 
 
 77 
 
 83 
 88 
 
 91 
 
 lOI 
 
 107 
 113 
 123 
 125 
 128 
 131 
 133 
 
 13s 
 157 
 '59 
 J77
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Introductory. 
 
 * I ''HE 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 commandino; 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 j and away to the west, over 
 
 B
 
 2 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 
 w^inds 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 some- 
 times tempted to envy them their fate. For 
 all who love shelter and the blessings of the 
 sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilt- 
 ing against squalls, there could scarcely be 
 found a more unhomely and harassing place 
 of residence. Many such aspire angrily after
 
 m^ 
 
 IV 

 
 Introductory. 5 
 
 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 smokinsf out from 
 under them and vanishing into the tunnel on 
 a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the pas- 
 sengers 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 all 
 other cities in the sentiment which she inspires. 
 The rest may have admirers ; she only, a 
 famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. 
 And indeed, even by her kindest friends.
 
 6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 attrac- 
 tion 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 Holy- 
 rood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has
 
 Introductory. 7 
 
 lasted deep into the night, murder has been 
 done in its chambers. There Prince Charhe 
 
 Gate of Holyrood. 
 
 held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant 
 manner represented a fallen dynasty for some 
 hours. Now, all these things of clay are
 
 8 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself 
 is shown for sixpence to the vulgar ; but the 
 stone palace has outlived these changes. For 
 fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show 
 for tourists and a museum of old furniture ; 
 but on the fifty-first, behold the palace re- 
 awakened and mimicking its past. The Lord 
 Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits 
 amono; stao-e 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 
 amone the embers ; from time to time the old 
 volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly 
 abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metro- 
 politan trappings. Half a capital and half a 
 country town, the whole city leads a double 
 existence ; it has long trances of the one and
 
 Introductory. n 
 
 flashes of the other ; like the king of the Black 
 Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental 
 marble. There are armed men and cannon in 
 the citadel overhead ; you may see the troops 
 marshalled on the high parade ; and at night 
 after the early winter evenfall, and in the 
 morning before the laggard winter dawn, the 
 wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound 
 of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit be- 
 wigged 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 un- 
 sympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a 
 well-appointed circus tread the streets with a 
 better presence. And yet these are the Heralds 
 and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to
 
 10 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom 
 before two score boys, and thieves, and hack- 
 ney-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 arch- 
 ways. And lastly, one night in the spring- 
 time — or say one morning rather, at the peep 
 of day — late folic may hear the voices of many 
 men singing a psalm in unison from a church 
 on one side of the old High Street; and a little 
 after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of 
 many men singing a psalm in unison from 
 another church on the opposite side of the 
 way. There will be something in the words 
 about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it 
 is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. 
 And the late folk will tell themselves that all 
 this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly 
 ecclesiastical parliaments — the parliaments of
 
 Introductory. 1 1 
 
 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. PVom their 
 smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed 
 look down upon the open squares and gardens 
 of the wealthy ; and gay people sunning them- 
 selves along Princes Street, with its mile of 
 commercial palaces all beflagged upon some 
 great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
 
 12 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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. Egvptian and Greek temples, Vene- 
 tian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one 
 over another in a most admired disorder ; while, 
 above all, the brute mass of the Castle and the 
 summit of Arthur's Seat look down upon these 
 imitations with a becoming dignity, as the 
 works of Nature may look down upon the 
 monuments of Art. But Nature is a more in- 
 discriminate 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
 
 The Castle.
 
 Introductory. 15 
 
 same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eter- 
 nal rock and yesterday's imitation portico ; and 
 as the soft northern sunshine throws out every- 
 thing 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 ;
 
 1 6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 birds we might admit in profusion, the play of 
 the sun and winds, and a few gipsies encamped 
 in the chief thoroughfare ; but these citizens, 
 with their cabs and tramways, their trains and 
 posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered 
 tourists, they make free with historic localities, 
 and rear their young among the most picturesque 
 sites with a grand human indifference. To see 
 them thronging by, in their neat clothes and 
 conscious moral rectitude, and with a little air 
 of possession that verges on the absurd, is not 
 the least striking feature of the place.* 
 
 And the story of the town is as eccentric as 
 its appearance. For centuries it was a capital 
 
 * 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
 
 Introductory. Vf^'^'*^ 
 
 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 fouo;ht 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 clans- 
 men and retainers. Down in the palace John 
 Knox reproved his queen in the accents of 
 modern democracy. In the town, in one of 
 
 living. It is not their fault if the city calls for something more 
 specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out 
 of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a 
 Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them console 
 themselves — they do as well as anybody else j the population of (let 
 us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same ro- 
 mantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, 
 but that is of gold : / ha-ve not yet written a book about Glasgow.
 
 1 8 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 Geor2:e Heriot the 
 
 O 
 
 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, stift- 
 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 out- 
 let rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty 
 dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind 
 their horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding
 
 Introductory. lo 
 
 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 Aiken- 
 head was hanged for a piece of boyish incredu- 
 lity ; there, a ^qw 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 chim- 
 ney ; what had been a palace was used as a 
 pauper refuge ; and great mansions were so par-
 
 20 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 celled 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.
 
 21 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 
 
 ** I ""HE 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 depre- 
 ciation to throw cold water on the whole by 
 adroit over-commendation of a part, since every- 
 thing 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
 
 22 Picturaque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 malcino; of the other. 
 
 The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or 
 tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some sub- 
 sidence of the waters, bv the Castle clifFs which 
 fortify it to the west. On the one side of it 
 and the other the new towns of the south and 
 of the north occupy their lower, broader, and 
 more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the 
 Castle overtops the whole city and keeps an 
 open view to sea and land. It dominates for 
 miles on every side ; and people on the decks 
 of ships, or ploughing in quiet country places 
 over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle 
 battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town 
 blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A 
 city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, 
 from this distant aspect that she got her nick-
 
 
 Co<w feeder Roio and Head of Weit Port.
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 25 
 
 name of Auld Reekie. Perhaps it was given her 
 by people who had never crossed her doors : 
 day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, 
 they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, 
 and the long plume of smoke over the plain ; 
 so it appeared to them ; so it had appeared to 
 their fathers tilling the same field ; and as that 
 was all they knew of the place, it could be all 
 expressed in 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 situa- 
 tions, not in extent, but in height and density, 
 "public buildings were forced, wherever there 
 was room for them, into the midst of thorough ■ 
 fares ; thoroughfares were diminished into lanes ; 
 houses sprang up story after story, neighbour
 
 26 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 hano;s 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 fur- 
 niture may be in the pawnshop, but it com- 
 mands 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 th^ 
 quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneatl 
 with their broad squares and gardens ; he shall 
 have nothing overhead but a few spires, the
 
 yid-vccates' Close.
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 2g 
 
 stone top-gallants of the city ; and perhaps the 
 wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, 
 and brino; a smack of the sea, or of flowerins: 
 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 pic- 
 turesque 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 v/inter weather, the pavement is almost
 
 30 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above 
 washino; 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 icw 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
 
 Old Boio-Hcad, La-wnmaiRetf Eamburg/i,
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 33 
 
 powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, 
 with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even 
 in the chief thoroucrhfares Irish washings flutter 
 at the windows, and the pavements are encum- 
 bered 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 ^qw supervising 
 constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers 
 and broken men from higher ranks in society, 
 with some mark of better days upon them, like 
 a brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, 
 and where the traffic is mostly centred in five 
 or six chief streets, the same face comes often 
 
 D
 
 34 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, 
 
 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
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 35 
 
 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 cala- 
 mities ; 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 degringolades 
 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.
 
 36 
 
 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 It is true that the over-population was at least 
 as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and 
 
 High Street. 
 
 that now-a-days some customs which made Edin- 
 burgh notorious of yore have been fortunately 
 pretermitted. But an aggregation of comfort is
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 37 
 
 not distasteful like an aggregation of the reverse. 
 Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and 
 divines and lawyers, may have been crowded 
 into these houses in the past — perhaps the more 
 the merrier. The glasses clink around the china 
 punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, 
 there are peacocks' feathers on the chimney, and 
 the tapers burn clear and pale in the red fire- 
 light. That is not an ugly picture in itself, nor 
 will it become ugly upon repetition. All the 
 better if the like were going on in every second 
 room ; the land would only look the more in- 
 viting. Times are changed. In one house, 
 perhaps, twoscore families herd together ; and, 
 perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the 
 reach of want. The great hotel is given over to 
 discomfort from the foundation to the chimney- 
 tops ; everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, 
 scanty meals, and an air of sluttishness and dirt. 
 In the first room there is a birth, in another a
 
 38 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 dispensa- 
 tions 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 nut- 
 shell, and there is not so much as a blade of
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 3^ 
 
 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 niffht I went alons; 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 tick- 
 ing, 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 time- 
 pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it
 
 40 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 was little more than a fancy altogether, but 
 it was strangely impressive at the time, and 
 gave me an imaginative measure of the dis- 
 proportion between the quantity of living flesh 
 and the trifling walls that separated and con- 
 tained it. 
 
 There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every 
 circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of 
 the land in the Hioh Street. The buildino; 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 in- 
 habitants of the huge old human bee-hive dis- 
 cussed 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
 
 Old Town — The Lands. 41 
 
 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,
 
 42 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 !'
 
 43 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Parlia?nent Close. 
 
 ' I ''IME has wrought its changes most notably 
 around the precinct of St. Giles's Church. 
 The church itself, if it were not for the spire, 
 would be unrecognisable ; the Krames are all 
 gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its but- 
 tresses ; and zealous magistrates and a mis- 
 guided 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
 
 44 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 pas- 
 sage 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
 
 The Parliament Close. 
 
 45 
 
 Rhymer, and some day, when it is least ex- 
 pected, may take a thought to revisit the sunHt 
 upper world. That will be a strange moment 
 
 The Spire of St. Giles's. 
 
 for the cabmen on the stance besides St. Giles's, 
 when they hear the drone of his pipes reas- 
 cendino; from the bowels of the earth below 
 their horses' feet.
 
 46 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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, ac- 
 knowledged 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 ig- 
 norant of its history, I know only one token 
 that remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden
 
 The Parliament Close. 47 
 
 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, be- 
 strides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his 
 back turned, and, as you look, seems to be 
 trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous 
 neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two 
 will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of the 
 way of all but legal traffic. On one side the 
 south wall of the church, on the other the arcades 
 of the Parliament House, inclose this irregular 
 bight of causeway and describe their shadows 
 on it in the sun. At either end, from round 
 St. Giles's buttresses, you command a look into 
 the High Street with its motley passengers ; but
 
 48 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 after- 
 noon, 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,
 
 
 John Knox's House in the High Street,
 
 The Parliament Close. 51 
 
 when the Bishops were ejected from the Con- 
 vention in 1688, 'all fourteen of them gathered 
 together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in 
 the Parliament Close :' poor episcopal person- 
 ages 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 nation- 
 ality, 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.
 
 52 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 unsuit- 
 able 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 house- 
 holds, 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 por- 
 traits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by
 
 The Parliament Close. 53 
 
 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
 
 54 Picturesque Notes on Edinbui-gh. 
 
 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 vv^ho 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 propor- 
 tion 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.
 
 The Parliament Close. 55 
 
 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-subterra- 
 nean, full of stairs and galleries 3 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,
 
 56 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 you pass below the Outer Hall and hear over- 
 head, 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 sun- 
 beams 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.
 
 The Parliament Close. cy 
 
 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 funo-us, 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 to- 
 wards the earth's centre, but only to the bottom 
 of the hill and the foundations of the Parliament 
 House J 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
 
 5? Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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.
 
 59 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Legends. 
 
 ' I '^HE character of a place is often most 
 perfectly expressed in its associations. 
 An event strikes root and grows into a legend, 
 when it has happened amongst congenial sur- 
 roundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly 
 places, have the true romantic quality, and 
 become an undying property of their scene. 
 To a man like Scott, the different appearances 
 of nature seemed each to contain its own legend 
 ready made, which it was his to call forth : in 
 such or such a place, only such or such events 
 ought with propriety to happen ; and in this 
 spirit he made the Lady of the Lake for Ben 
 Venue, the Heart of Midlothian for Edin- 
 burgh, and the Pirate.^ so indifferently written
 
 6o Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 wil- 
 derness of city lamps keeps quavering and flaring 
 
 in the gusts.
 
 Legends. 
 
 6i 
 
 Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, 
 stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his 
 
 The Canongate. 
 
 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
 
 62 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 pro- 
 jected visit to the country, and afterwards de- 
 tained 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
 
 P/anestonei Close, Canongate,
 
 Legends. 65 
 
 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 
 
 F
 
 66 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 genera- 
 tions back they still stood dark and empty ; 
 people avoided them as they passed by ; the
 
 Legends. 67 
 
 boldest schoolboy only shouted through the key- 
 hole 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
 
 68 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never went 
 without his staff.' How it came about that 
 Angelical Thomas was burned in company with 
 his staff, and his sister in gentler manner 
 hanged, and whether these two were simply re- 
 ligious 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 suit- 
 able enough that out of this superstitious city 
 some such example should have been put forth : 
 the outcome and fine flower of dark and ve- 
 hement religion. And at least the facts struck 
 the public fancy and brought forth a remark- 
 able fomily 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 unseason- 
 able hours of night and morning, haunted the
 
 Legends. 6q 
 
 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 struc- 
 ture with the ground. And my father has often 
 been told in the nursery how the devil's coach, 
 drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, 
 would drive at night into the West Bow, and 
 belated people might see the dead Major through 
 the glasses. 
 
 Another legend is that of the two maiden 
 sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in the 
 most discreditable meaning of the term ; or 
 perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday's 
 fiction. But it is a story of some vitality, and 
 is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. 
 This pair inhabited a single room ; from the 
 facts, it must have been double-bedded ; and 
 it may have been of some dimensions : but when 
 all is said, it was a single room. Here our two 
 spinsters fell out — on some point of controversial
 
 yo Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 divinity belike : but fell out so bitterly that there 
 was never a word spoken between them, black 
 or white, from that day forv^^ard. 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 breath- 
 ing 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
 
 Legends. 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror ; he 
 could have shown them to us in their sicknesses 
 and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbins 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 to- 
 wards 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
 
 72 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 melancholy in man's annals — this will seem 
 only a figure of much that is typical of Scot- 
 land 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 Estab- 
 lished 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 prin- 
 ciple ; 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 j 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
 
 Legends. 73 
 
 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 Ox- 
 ford 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 babble- 
 ment 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
 
 74 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 de- 
 molished and turned once more into useful 
 building material, if people who think almost 
 exactly the same thoughts about religion would
 
 Legends. n^ 
 
 condescend to worship God under the same 
 roof! But there are the chalk lines. And 
 which is to pocket pride, and speak the fore- 
 most word ?
 
 76 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Greyfriars. 
 
 TT 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 j a few thorns
 
 
 Greyfriars.
 
 Grey friars. yn 
 
 are dotted here and there, and the ground falls 
 by terrace and steep slope towards the north. 
 The open shows many slabs and table tomb- 
 stones ; and all round the margin, the place is 
 girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums 
 appallingly adorned. 
 
 Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which 
 belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we 
 Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among na- 
 tions in the matter of grimly illustrating death. 
 We seem to love for their own sake the em- 
 blems of time and the great change ; and even 
 around country churches you will find a won- 
 derful 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 j he was brimful of rough 
 hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer was
 
 So Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 seized upon to be a text. The classical ex- 
 amples 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 hor- 
 rors, 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 orna- 
 ment 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.
 
 Greyfr'iars. 8 1 
 
 Round a great part of the circuit, houses of 
 a low class present their backs to the church- 
 yard. Only a few inches separate the living 
 from the dead. Here, a window is partly 
 blocked up by the pediment of a tomb ; there, 
 where the street falls far below the level of 
 the graves, a chimney has been trained up the 
 back of a monument, and a red pot looks 
 vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of 
 the graveyard finds its way into houses where 
 workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small 
 scale goes forward visibly at the windows. The 
 very solitude and stillness of the enclosure, 
 which lies apart from the town's traffic, serves 
 to accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon 
 the graves, you see children scattering crumbs 
 to feed the sparrows ; you hear people singing 
 or washing dishes, or the sound of tears and 
 castigation ; the linen on a clothespole flaps 
 against funereal sculpture j or perhaps the cat 
 
 G
 
 82 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 com- 
 placently 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 1 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 colour- 
 less precision of engraving. An open outlook 
 is to be desired from a churchyard, and a sight
 
 Greyfr,
 
 Grey friars. 85 
 
 of the sky and some of the world's beauty re- 
 h'eves 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 hang- 
 ing out their shirts and petticoats and angrily 
 taking: them in ao-ain, 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 
 holdins: in his hand a ticket with the date of 
 his demise. He looked most pitiful and ridicu- 
 lous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic 
 precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior for-
 
 86 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 gotten deity under a new dispensation ; the 
 burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the 
 rain dripped all round him 5 and the world 
 maintained the most entire indifference as to 
 who he was or whither he had gone. In an- 
 other, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but 
 horrible inside with damp and cobwebs, there 
 were three mounds of black earth and an un- 
 covered 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 
 
 friendlv kick. 'The auld !' I have 
 
 always an uncomfortable feeling in a grave- 
 yard, 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
 
 Grey friars. 87 
 
 one, and an insulting epithet in the other. The 
 proper inscription for the most part of man- 
 kind, I began to think, is the cynical jeer, eras 
 tibi. That, if anything, will stop the mouth 
 of a carper ; since it both admits the worst 
 and carries the war triumphantly into the 
 enemy's camp. 
 
 Greyfriars is a place of many associations. 
 There was one window in a house at the 
 lower end, now demolished, which was pointed 
 out to me by the gravedigger as a spot of 
 legendary interest. Burke, the resurrection 
 man, infamous for so many murders at five 
 shillings a-head, used to sit thereat, with pipe 
 and nightcap, to watch burials going forward 
 on the green. In a tomb higher up, which 
 must then have been but newly finished, John 
 Knox, according to the same informant, had 
 taken refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. 
 Behind the church is the haunted mausoleum
 
 88 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 of Sir George Mackenzie : Bloody Mackenzie, 
 Lord Advocate in the Covenanting troubles and 
 author of some pleasing sentiments on toleration. 
 
 'ij cr>---J'^ ^ 
 
 Greyfriars, 
 
 Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hos- 
 pital boy once harboured from the pursuit of the 
 police. The Hospital is next door to Grey- 
 friars — a courtly building among lawns, where, 
 on Founder's Day, you may see a multitude of
 
 Grey friars. 89 
 
 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 opportuni- 
 ties 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 emulatins; him in courao;e. 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 gar- 
 ments of the grave. It was thought a high 
 piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advo- 
 cate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. 
 * Bluidy Mackingie, come cot if ye dar' ! ' 
 sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir George 
 had other affairs on hand j and the author of
 
 90 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 an essay on toleration continues to sleep peace- 
 fully 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 churchyard that extends to Lauris- 
 ton, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge— fed 
 on bread and water and guarded, life for life, 
 by vigilant marksmen — lay five months look- 
 ing 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
 
 Grey friars. 
 
 91 
 
 Sir George, there stands a monument dedi- 
 cated, in uncouth Covenanting verse, to all 
 who lost their lives in that contention. There 
 
 The Grassmarket, 
 
 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,
 
 92 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 Covenanting slave in the American planta- 
 tions ; but can lay claim to a share in that 
 memorial and, if such things interest just men 
 among the shades, can boast he has a monu- 
 ment on earth as well as Julius Caesar or the 
 Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know 
 not. Far-scattered bones, indeed ! But if the 
 reader cares to learn how some of them — or 
 some part of some of them — found their way at 
 length to such honourable sepulture, let him 
 listen to the words of one who was their com- 
 rade 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 Renzvick 
 told me, that he was Witness to their Public Murder 
 at the G allow lee, between Leith and Edinburgh, when 
 he saw the Hangman hash and hagg off all their
 
 Grey friars. n-? 
 
 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. Retizvick 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 Grey- 
 friars, 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 loth of October 168 1, and 
 found the 7th Day of October 1726. That Piece of 
 Ground lay for some Years unlaboured ; and trench-
 
 ^4- Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 ing 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. 
 Schawls 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 
 Tzveedie, the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, 
 There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither 
 Gold nor Silver. Daniel Tzveedie, 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 con- 
 cerned 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 exe- 
 cuted, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the 
 Hour that most of them went to their resting
 
 Greyfriars. n^ 
 
 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 j and according to the Big- 
 ness of their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and 
 drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and 
 stuiFt 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 Cotvgate, and 
 turned up to the Church -yard, where they were 
 interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the
 
 96 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 misapprehen- 
 sion, 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 pro- 
 vidence 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 whole- 
 some heartsome spot in the field of the dead ; 
 and as we look upon it, a brave influence
 
 Grey friars. g 7 
 
 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.' 
 
 H
 
 98 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 
 
 TT 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 con- 
 demnable in architecture. Much may be said, 
 much indeed has been said, upon the text ; 
 but to the unsophisticated, who call anything 
 pleasing if it only pleases them, the New 
 Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only 
 gay and airy, but highly picturesque. An old 
 skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of 
 the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as 
 his most radiant notion for Paradise : ' The 
 new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the 
 matter of a point free.' He has now gone to
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 99 
 
 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 unthuiking, 
 open-air diversion. It was meant by nature 
 for the realisation of the society of comic operas.
 
 100 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 And you can imagine, if the climate were but 
 towardly, how all the world and his wife would 
 flock into these gardens in the cool of the 
 evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant 
 drinks, to see the moon rise from behind 
 Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires and 
 monuments and the green tree-tops in the 
 valley. Alas ! and the next morning the rain 
 is splashing on the window, and the passengers 
 flee along 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 ehosen, every street upon the northern slope
 
 New Town — Town and Country. loi 
 
 might have been a noble terrace and com- 
 manded an extensive and beautiful view. But 
 the space has been too closely built ; many of 
 
 - .^> 
 
 
 ti 
 
 The Royal Institution. 
 
 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
 
 102 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 and there at a crossing, that you can get a 
 look beyond the city upon its diversified sur- 
 roundings. 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 in- 
 cident, in a fanciful sort of way, is charac- 
 teristic 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
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 103 
 
 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 j it is another for the 
 citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to over- 
 look 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
 
 10 4 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 black under a moving ploughshare. I have 
 been tempted, in this connexion, to deplore 
 the slender faculties of the human race, with 
 its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and 
 its narrow range of sight. If you could see as 
 people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes 
 such as you can fancy for a superior race, if 
 you could take clear note of the objects of 
 vision, not only a iew 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 per- 
 haps some urchin, clambering in a country 
 elm, would put aside the leaves and show you 
 his flushed and rustic visage ; or a fisher racing
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 105 
 
 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
 
 lo6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 the same tall houses open upon both thorough- 
 fares. 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
 
 In the Village of Dean.
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 109 
 
 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 ? Hercu- 
 laneum 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
 
 no Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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
 
 New Town — Town and Country. iii 
 
 romance, and a sentiment as of foreicrn 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 impressive- 
 ness 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, ' subterranean passage,' 
 were in themselves an irresistible attraction, 
 and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the 
 heroes we loved and the black rascals we 
 secretly aspired to imitate. To scale the Castle 
 Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, and 
 lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself,
 
 112 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 j and the people
 
 New Town — Town and Country. 115 
 
 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
 
 Ii6 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent 
 a landscape. And when the Spring comes 
 round, and the hawthorn begins to flower, and 
 the meadows to smell of young grass, even in 
 the thickest of our streets, the country hill- 
 tops find out a young man's eyes, and set his 
 heart beating for travel and pure air.
 
 117 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The Villa garters. 
 
 TV /TR. 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 agree- 
 able 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 contro- 
 versial eloquence. 
 
 Day by day, one new villa, one new object 
 of offence, is added to another j all around
 
 1 1 8 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, 
 
 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 de- 
 signed 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
 
 The Villa garters. iig 
 
 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 at- 
 tempt 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 de-
 
 I20 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 formity ; and to do all this in what is, by 
 nature, one of the most agreeable neighbour- 
 hoods 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 sensi- 
 tive ; 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 Edin- 
 burgh were a living, autonomous body, it 
 would arise like one man and make night 
 hideous with arson j 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 icono-
 
 
 The Villa Quarters. 121 
 
 clasts 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 reason- 
 ably well-proportioned villa, not his own design ; 
 and let them reproduce that model to satiety.
 
 122 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The Calton Hill. 
 
 Or^HE 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, com- 
 pletes the circuit. You mount by stairs in 
 a cuttino; of the rock to find vourself in a 
 field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the 
 honours of situation and architecture ; Burns is 
 memorialised lower down upon a spur ; Lord 
 Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name 
 to the topgallant of the Calton Hill. This 
 latter erection has been differently and yet, in 
 both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and 
 a butterchurn j comparisons apart, it ranks
 
 The Calton Hill. 
 
 123 
 
 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 
 
 ifn 
 
 
 The Cahon Hill. 
 
 false air of a Modern Athens vv^hich has earned 
 for her so many slighting speeches. It w^as 
 meant to be a National Monument ; and its 
 present state is a very suitable monument to 
 certain national characteristics. The old Ob- 
 servatory — a quaint brow^n building on the 
 edge of the steep — and the new Observatory
 
 124 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 — 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 com- 
 memorated 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
 
 The Calton Hill. 127 
 
 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 in- 
 deed 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.
 
 128 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 
 
 
 SaPisbury Crags from the Burns Monument. 
 
 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
 
 The Calton Hill. iig 
 
 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 w^ith 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. 
 
 Lnmediately 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 
 
 K
 
 130 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 running at play and their shadows keeping step 
 with them. From the bottom of the valley, a 
 gigantic chimney rises almost to the level of the 
 eye, a taller and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's 
 Monument. Look a little farther, and there is 
 Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and 
 ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly 
 to and fro before the door like a mechanical 
 figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, 
 you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, 
 over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape 
 and where Oueen Mary herself, according to 
 gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her 
 loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Oueen's 
 Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, 
 St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salis- 
 bury 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,
 
 _, ■ ' "^' ■'■'■ 'I 

 
 The Calton Hill. 
 
 133 
 
 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 
 
 Arthur^s Seat. 
 
 instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of 
 Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a 
 pufFof 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
 
 134 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 out- 
 look ; 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 3 Leith camps on the sea-
 
 
 
 ■m r 
 
 m^^::^ 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 
 '/ts^j^^y^ 
 
 Back of Greemide.
 
 The Calton Hill 137 
 
 side 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 cither hand from the Ferry to 
 the May ; the towns of Fifeshire sit, each in 
 its bank of blowing smoke, along the opposite 
 coast ; and the hills inclose the view, except 
 to the farthest east, where the haze of the 
 horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies 
 the road to Norway : a dear road for Sir 
 Patrick Spens and his Scots Lords ; and yonder 
 smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is 
 Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a 
 queen for Scotland. 
 
 * O lang, lang, may the ladies sit, 
 Wi' their fans into their hand. 
 Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens 
 Come sailing to the land ! ' 
 
 The sight of the sea, even from a city, will
 
 1 38 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 multi- 
 tude 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 mani-
 
 The Calton Hill. 1^9 
 
 fold 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 com- 
 prehensive 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 follov/ 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
 
 140 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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.
 
 The Calton Mill. 14.1 
 
 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 darklino- on her 
 hills, innumerable spots of the bright element 
 shine far and near along the pavements and upon 
 the high facades. Moving lights of the railway 
 pass and re-pass below the stationary lights upon 
 the bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights 
 burn high up in the tall lands and on the Castle 
 turrets, they burn low down in Greenside or 
 along the Park. They run out one beyond 
 the other into the dark country. They walk in 
 a procession down to Leith, and shine singly far 
 along Leith Pier. Thus, the plan of the city 
 and her suburbs is mapped out upon the ground 
 of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing 
 full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle j 
 not the darkest night of winter can conceal her
 
 142 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 high station and fanciful design ; every evening 
 in the year she proceeds to ilhiminate herself 
 in honour of her ow^n beauty ; and as if to 
 complete the scheme — or rather as if some 
 prodigal Pharaoh w^ere 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.
 
 H3 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Winter and New Tear. 
 
 f I "^HE Scotch dialect is singularly rich in 
 terms of reproach against the winter wind. 
 Snell., blae^ n'lrly^ and scowther'ing^ 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
 
 144 Picturesque Notes on Eainhurgh. 
 
 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 blazino- 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-
 
 Winter and New Tear. 145 
 
 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 
 ennobhng by comparison ; and so there is no- 
 thing 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 
 
 L
 
 146 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 
 blealc 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 follow. 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;
 
 IV'inter and New Tear. i^n 
 
 and if you lie awake all night, you hear it 
 shrielcino; and ravino; 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
 
 148 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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
 
 Winter and New Tear. 1 40 
 
 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, marvel- 
 ling at the silence and the white landscape, 
 find a spell appropriate to the season in the 
 words. The reverberation of the snow in-
 
 1 50 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 creases the pale daylight, and brings all objects 
 nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth 
 and glittering, with here and there the black 
 ribbon of a dry-stone dyke, and here and there, 
 if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow 
 upon a shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden 
 creek, that a man might almost jump across, 
 between well - powdered Lothian and well- 
 powdered Fife. And the effect is not, as in 
 other cities, a thing of half a day ; the streets 
 are soon trodden black, but the country keeps 
 its virgin white ; and you have only to lift your 
 eyes and look over miles of country snow. An 
 indescribable cheerfulness breathes about the 
 city ; and the well-fed heart sits lightly and 
 beats gaily in the bosom. It is New-year's 
 weather. 
 
 New-year's Day, the great national festival, 
 is a time of family expansions and of deep 
 carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate
 
 Winter and New Tear. 151 
 
 for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniver- 
 sary falls upon a Sunday, when the public- 
 houses are inexorably closed, when singing and 
 even whistlino- 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
 
 152 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 steeple, before they had launched forth into a 
 secular bravura. 
 
 Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all 
 households. For weeks before the great morn- 
 ing, 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 tlie city ? For at this season, on 
 the threshold of another year of calamity and 
 stubborn conflict, men feel a need to draw
 
 Winter and Nevj Tear. 15-7 
 
 closer the links that unite them j they reckon 
 the number of their friends, like allies before a 
 war ; and the prayers grow longer in the morn- 
 ing as the absent are recommended by name 
 into God's keeping. 
 
 On the day itself, the shops are all shut as 
 on a Sunday ; only taverns, toyshops, and other 
 holiday magazines, keep open doors. Every 
 one looks for his handsel. The postmen and 
 the lamplighters have left, at every house in 
 their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, 
 asking and thanking in a breath; and it is cha- 
 racteristic 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
 
 154 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 heard upon all sides ; Auld Lang Syne is much 
 in people's mouths ; and whisky and short- 
 bread are staple articles of consumption. From 
 an early hour a stranger will be impressed by 
 the number of drunken men j 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 speech- 
 less, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries 
 of the New Year go meandering in and out
 
 Winter and New Tear. 1^5 
 
 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 festivi- 
 ties begin to find their way indoors and some- 
 thing like quiet returns upon the town. But 
 think, in these piled lands^ of all the sense- 
 less 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 \
 
 156 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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. Dud- 
 dingstone 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 de- 
 tected sinners, and the historical louping-on 
 stane^ from which Dutch-built lairds and
 
 
 I"
 
 If^inter and New Tear. 1 59 
 
 farmers climbed into the saddle. Here Prince 
 Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans ; 
 and here Deacon Brodie, or one of his eanw, 
 stole a plough coulter before the burglary in 
 Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the 
 
 t^^B' 
 
 Cra'igmillar Castle. 
 
 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
 
 i6o Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 ob- 
 scure 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.
 
 i6i 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 
 
 /^N 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 Linlithsow. 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 neio-h- 
 bourhood 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 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 des- 
 cends 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 pro- 
 gress of events, and the chisels are tinkling on 
 a new row of houses. The builders have at 
 leno-th 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
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 163 
 
 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 un- 
 bedevilled. 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 up- 
 wards, 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
 
 1 64 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 as far as Fife, and AUermuir 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 varie- 
 gated 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 wheel- 
 ings, the seabirds skim the tree tops and fish 
 among the furrows of the plough. These little 
 craft of air are at home in all the world, so 
 long as they cruise in their own element ; and 
 like sailors, ask but food and water from the 
 shores they coast. 
 
 Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 165 
 
 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. Ac- 
 cordingly, when he got about the level of 
 Fairmilehead, the ganger 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 i'
 
 l66 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 Kirlc 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
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 167 
 
 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. Ac- 
 cording 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 reio-ning 
 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
 
 1 68 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 buildino; 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
 
 To the Pent land Hills. 1 69 
 
 them no more than the wind about the hill- 
 tops ; and it was only after years of perse- 
 cution, 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 Ins 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 roots
 
 lyo Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 rufflino; 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 be- 
 hind unseen, is Swanston. 
 
 The place in the dell is immediately con- 
 nected with the city. Long ago, this sheltered 
 field was purchased by the Edinburgh magis- 
 trates for the sake of the springs that rise or
 
 To the Pentiand Hills. 171 
 
 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 capa- 
 cious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with 
 bins of the hewn stone. In process of time,
 
 172 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 drevi^ ciphering 
 upon the path ; and at riight, 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 morn- 
 ing ; the dresser was laden with cheese and 
 bannocks, milk and brandy ; and the wor-
 
 To the Pent land Hills. 173 
 
 shippers 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 High- 
 landers 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 
 hiwh delio;ht. * 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.
 
 174 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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 con- 
 siderable of hamlets, and consists of a few 
 cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of 
 them (a strange thing in Scotland) are models 
 of internal neatness ; the beds adorned with 
 patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow- 
 pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with 
 scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle 
 polished like silver. It is the sign of a con- 
 tented 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
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 175 
 
 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 cut, 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
 
 176 Picturesque Notes on Edi)iburgh. 
 
 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 her- 
 self, 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 fi2;ure in the land- 
 scape. 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
 
 iS'i Vif?.!'' C'l '"■'■M",W"i", 
 
 '^t:'4'i!h 
 
 li;' ■' 
 
 "1, 
 
 
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 To the Pentland Hills. 179 
 
 lines j 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 land- 
 scape. 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 whisper- 
 ing 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
 
 i8o Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 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
 
 To the Pentland Hills. 1 8 1 
 
 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
 
 1 82 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. 
 
 intervals of toil. For any such, if this book 
 fall in their way, here are a ievf 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 Strangewavs & Sons, Tower St., Cambridge Circus. 
 
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