Edingburgh Picturesque Notes

by Robert Louis Stevenson


CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.



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

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one 
of the vilest climates under heaven.  She is liable to be 
beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched 
with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, 
and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward 
from the Highland hills.  The weather is raw and 
boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and 
a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring.  The 
delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak 
winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to 
envy them their fate.  For all who love shelter and the 
blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual 
tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a 
more unhomely and harassing place of residence.  Many 
such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the 
imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end.  
They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town 
with the Old - that windiest spot, or high altar, in this 
northern temple of the winds - and watch the trains 
smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel 
on a voyage to brighter skies.  Happy the passengers who 
shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the 
last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-
tops!  And yet the place establishes an interest in 
people's hearts; go where they will, they find no city of 
the same distinction; go where they will, they take a 
pride in their old home.

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

Again, meditative people will find a charm in a 
certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its 
odd and stirring history.  Few places, if any, offer a 
more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.  In the 
very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in 
nature - a Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden 
shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements 
and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the 
liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.  
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed 
look down upon the open squares and gardens of the 
wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes 
Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged 
upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley 
set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town 
flutter in the breeze at its high windows.  And then, 
upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture!  In this 
one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily 
forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind 
another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in 
almost every style upon the globe.  Egyptian and Greek 
temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled 
one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above 
all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of 
Arthur's Seat look down upon these imitations with a 
becoming dignity, as the works of Nature may look down 
the monuments of Art.  But Nature is a more 
indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way 
frightened of a strong effect.  The birds roost as 
willingly among the Corinthian capitals as in the 
crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight 
clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation 
portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out 
everything into a glorified distinctness - or easterly 
mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these 
incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to 
glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn in the 
high windows across the valley - the feeling grows upon 
you that this also is a piece of nature in the most 
intimate sense; that this profusion of eccentricities, 
this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-
scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day 
reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all 
the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the 
familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and 
have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper.  By 
all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half 
deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we might admit 
in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few 
gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these 
citizens with their cabs and tramways, their trains and 
posters, are altogether out of key.  Chartered tourists, 
they make free with historic localities, and rear their 
young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human 
indifference.  To see them thronging by, in their neat 
clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little 
air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the 
least striking feature of the place. *

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

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


CHAPTER II.
OLD TOWN - THE LANDS.


THE Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief 
characteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view, 
the liver-wing of Edinburgh.  It is one of the most 
common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the 
whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since 
everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of 
art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits 
as a whole.  The Old Town depends for much of its effect 
on the new quarters that lie around it, on the 
sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back 
it up.  If you were to set it somewhere else by itself, 
it would look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder and 
loftier edition.  The point is to see this embellished 
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and 
fantastic modern city; for there the two re-act in a 
picturesque sense, and the one is the making of the 
other.

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of 
diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the 
waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the 
west.  On the one side of it and the other the new towns 
of the south and of the north occupy their lower, 
broader, and more gentle hill-tops.  Thus, the quarter of 
the Castle over-tops the whole city and keeps an open 
view to sea and land.  It dominates for miles on every 
side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in 
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on 
the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town 
blowing abroad over the subjacent country.  A city that 
is set upon a hill.  It was, I suppose, from this distant 
aspect that she got her nickname of AULD REEKIE.  Perhaps 
it was given her by people who had never crossed her 
doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, 
they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and 
the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to 
them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the 
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, 
it could be all expressed in these two words.

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

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

These loiterers are a true character of the scene.  
Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have paused on their way 
to a job, debating Church affairs and politics with their 
tools upon their arm.  But the most part are of a 
different order - skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot 
children; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform 
of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl; 
among these, a few surpervising constables and a dismal 
sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from higher ranks 
in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like 
a brand.  In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where 
the traffic is mostly centred in five or six chief 
streets, the same face comes often under the notice of an 
idle stroller.  In fact, from this point of view, 
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of 
small towns.  It is scarce possible to avoid observing 
your neighbours; and I never yet heard of any one who 
tried.  It has been my fortune, in this anonymous 
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward 
travellers for some stages on the road to ruin.  One man 
must have been upwards of sixty before I first observed 
him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in 
broad-cloth of the best.  For three years he kept falling 
- grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted 
coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders 
growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his 
head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was 
standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in 
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment 
daubed with mud.  I fancy that I still can hear him 
laugh.  There was something heart-breaking in this 
gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have 
thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these 
calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by 
that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass 
quietly and honourably into the grave.

One of the earliest marks of these 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.

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

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

There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every 
circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the 
LAND in the High Street.  The building had grown rotten 
to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up 
so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and 
reverberations sounded through the house at night; the 
inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed 
their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had 
even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and 
returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-
respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, 
the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar 
and tumbled story upon story to the ground.  The physical 
shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock 
travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs.  
The church-bells never sounded more dismally over 
Edinburgh than that grey forenoon.  Death had made a 
brave harvest, and, like Samson, by pulling down one 
roof, destroyed many a home.  None who saw it can have 
forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered, 
there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle 
still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap 
picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney.  So, by 
this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty 
families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years.  
The LAND had fallen; and with the LAND how much!  Far in 
the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the 
sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted 
place.  And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in 
New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could 
exclaim with truth: 'The house that I was born in fell 
last night!'



CHAPTER III.
THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.



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

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

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

Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded 
Charles Second, made of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied 
charger.  The King has his backed turned, and, as you 
look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a 
dangerous neighbour.  Often, for hours together, these 
two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of the 
way of all but legal traffic.  On one side the south wall 
of the church, on the other the arcades of the Parliament 
House, enclose this irregular bight of causeway and 
describe their shadows on it in the sun.  At either end, 
from round St. Giles's buttresses, you command a look 
into the High Street with its motley passengers; but the 
stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the Parliament 
Close to Charles the Second and the birds.  Once in a 
while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all 
day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper; and to 
judge by their quiet demeanour, you would think they were 
waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets.  The fact is 
far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is 
upon trial for his life, and these are some of the 
curious for whom the gallery was found too narrow.  
Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there 
will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.  Once 
in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon 
mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the 
arcade listening to an agent; and at certain regular 
hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.

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

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

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

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

Besides the courts, there are installed under the 
same roof no less than three libraries: two of no mean 
order; confused and semi-subterranean, full of stairs and 
galleries; where you may see the most studious-looking 
wigs fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the very 
place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters.  
As the Parliament House is built upon a slope, although 
it presents only one story to the north, it measures 
half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after 
range of vaults extend below the libraries.  Few places 
are more characteristic of this hilly capital.  You 
descend one stone stair after another, and wander, by the 
flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars.  
Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, 
brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal 
feet.  Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on 
the other side are the cells of the police office and the 
trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the 
Justiciary Court.  Many a foot that has gone up there 
lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent.  Many 
a man's life has been argued away from him during long 
hours in the court above.  But just now that tragic stage 
is empty and silent like a church on a week-day, with the 
bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams 
on the wall.  A little farther and you strike upon a 
room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with 
PRODUCTIONS from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber: 
lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a 
shot-hole through the panel, behind which a man fell 
dead.  I cannot fancy why they should preserve them 
unless it were against the Judgment Day.  At length, as 
you continue to descend, you see a peep of yellow 
gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; 
next moment you turn a corner, and there, in a 
whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt industriously 
turning on its wheels.  You would think the engine had 
grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and 
would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from end 
to end with its mysterious labours.  In truth, it is only 
some gear of the steam ventilator; and you will find the 
engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into 
the sunlight.  For all this while, you have not been 
descending towards the earth's centre, but only to the 
bottom of the hill and the foundations of the Parliament 
House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open 
heaven and in a field of grass.  The daylight shines 
garishly on the back windows of the Irish quarter; on 
broken shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the 
brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human 
pigs.  There are few signs of life, besides a scanty 
washing or a face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, 
but they will return at night and stagger to their 
pallets.



CHAPTER IV.
LEGENDS.



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

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

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some 
memory lingers of the great plagues, and of fatal houses 
still unsafe to enter within the memory of man.  For in 
time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp and 
sudden, and what we now call 'stamping out contagion' was 
carried on with deadly rigour.  The officials, in their 
gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's cross on back 
and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a 
staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's 
justice to the fear of God's visitation.  The dead they 
buried on the Borough Muir; the living who had concealed 
the sickness were drowned, if they were women, in the 
Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged and 
gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had 
passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed.  And 
the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses.  
Two generations back they still stood dark and empty; 
people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest 
schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off; 
for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like 
a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and 
pustule through the city.  What a terrible next-door 
neighbour for superstitious citizens!  A rat scampering 
within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart.  
Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by 
our uncleanly forefathers to their own neglect.

And then we have Major Weir; for although even his 
house is now demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear 
herself of his unholy memory.  He and his sister lived 
together in an odour of sour piety.  She was a marvellous 
spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was 
known among devout admirers by the name of Angelical 
Thomas.  'He was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked 
down to the ground; a grim countenance, and a big nose.  
His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he 
never went without his staff.'  How it came about that 
Angelical Thomas was burned in company with his staff, 
and his sister in gentler manner hanged, and whether 
these two were simply religious maniacs of the more 
furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon 
their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the 
reach of our intention.  At least, it is suitable enough 
that out of this superstitious city some such example 
should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower 
of dark and vehement religion.  And at least the facts 
struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable 
family of myths.  It would appear that the Major's staff 
went upon his errands, and even ran before him with a 
lantern on dark nights.  Gigantic females, 'stentoriously 
laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter' at 
unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the 
purlieus of his abode.  His house fell under such a load 
of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until 
municipal improvement levelled the structure to the 
ground.  And my father has often been told in the nursery 
how the devil's coach, drawn by six coal-black horses 
with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the West Bow, 
and belated people might see the dead Major through the 
glasses.

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

Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history 
of the race - the most perverse and melancholy in man's 
annals - this will seem only a figure of much that is 
typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the 
Forth - a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass 
with strangers for a caricature.  We are wonderful 
patient haters for conscience sake up here in the North.  
I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments 
of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can 
hear each other singing psalms across the street.  There 
is but a street between them in space, but a shadow 
between them in principle; and yet there they sit, 
enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other's 
growth in grace.  It would be well if there were no more 
than two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family 
of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and 
run through the midst of many private homes.  Edinburgh 
is a city of churches, as though it were a place of 
pilgrimage.  You will see four within a stone-cast at the 
head of the West Bow.  Some are crowded to the doors; 
some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find 
new ones in the building.  Hence that surprising clamour 
of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath 
morning from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on 
the borders of the hills.  I have heard the chimes of 
Oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning, 
and beautiful it was to hear.  But in Edinburgh all 
manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one 
swelling, brutal babblement of noise.  Now one overtakes 
another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all 
strike on the pained tympanum at the same punctual 
instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of 
discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired 
to hold their peace.  Indeed, there are not many uproars 
in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells 
in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry 
of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate 
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own 
synagogue, against 'right-hand extremes and left-hand 
defections.'  And surely there are few worse extremes 
than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable 
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love.  
Shakespeare wrote a comedy of 'Much Ado about Nothing.'  
The Scottish nation made a fantastic tragedy on the same 
subject.  And it is for the success of this remarkable 
piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning 
on the hills above the Forth.  How many of them might 
rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly 
churches might be demolished and turned once more into 
useful building material, if people who think almost 
exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend 
to worship God under the same roof!  But there are the 
chalk lines.  And which is to pocket pride, and speak the 
foremost word?


CHAPTER V.
GREYFRIARS.


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

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

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

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

I shall never forget one visit.  It was a grey, 
dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and 
the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts 
and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the 
weather turned from wet to fair and back again.  A grave-
digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, 
accompanied me into one after another of the cells and 
little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of 
old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.  
In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human 
effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of 
his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket 
with the date of his demise.  He looked most pitiful and 
ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic 
precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten 
deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew 
familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round 
him; and the world maintained the most entire 
indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone.  In 
another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible 
inside with damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of 
black earth and an uncovered thigh bone.  This was the 
place of interment, it appeared, of a family with whom 
the gardener had been long in service.  He was among old 
acquaintances.  'This'll be Miss Marg'et's,' said he, 
giving the bone a friendly kick.  'The auld - !'  I have 
always an uncomfortable feeling in a graveyard, at sight 
of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best forgotten; 
but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.  
People had been at some expense in both these cases: to 
provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and 
an insulting epithet in the other.  The proper 
inscription for the most part of mankind, I began to 
think, is the cynical jeer, CRAS TIBI.  That, if 
anything, will stop the mouth of a carper; since it both 
admits the worst and carries the war triumphantly into 
the enemy's camp.

Greyfriars is a place of many associations.  There 
was one window in a house at the lower end, now 
demolished, which was pointed out to me by the 
gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest.  Burke, the 
resurrection man, infamous for so many murders at five 
shillings a-head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and 
nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green.  
In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly 
finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had 
taken refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation.  Behind the 
church is the haunted mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: 
Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the Covenanting 
troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on 
toleration.  Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's 
Hospital boy once harboured from the pursuit of the 
police.  The Hospital is next door to Greyfriars - a 
courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, 
you may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-
Ring and Round the Mulberry-bush.  Thus, when the 
fugitive had managed to conceal himself in the tomb, his 
old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him 
food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to 
smuggle him abroad.  But his must have been indeed a 
heart of brass, to lie all day and night alone with the 
dead persecutor; and other lads were far from emulating 
him in courage.  When a man's soul is certainly in hell, 
his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; 
some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate 
come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave.  It was 
thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord 
Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear.  
'Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye dar'!' sang the fool-
hardy urchins.  But Sir George had other affairs on hand; 
and the author of an essay on toleration continues to 
sleep peacefully among the many whom he so intolerantly 
helped to slay.

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


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

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


CHAPTER VI.
NEW TOWN - TOWN AND COUNTRY.


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

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

Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once 
saw a butterfly at the Town Cross; and the sight inspired 
him with a worthless little ode.  This painted country 
man, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in 
such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what 
moral considerations a youthful poet would supply.  But 
the incident, in a fanciful sort of way, is 
characteristic of the place.  Into no other city does the 
sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a 
butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-
away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of 
theatre tricks in the way of scenery.  You peep under an 
arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land 
you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy 
tenement in a lane:- and behold! you are face-to-face 
with distant and bright prospects.  You turn a corner, 
and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.  
You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the 
Baltic.

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

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

It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume 
lent the authority of his example to the exodus from the 
Old Town, and took up his new abode in a street which is 
still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) known as 
Saint David Street.  Nor is the town so large but a 
holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a 
mile of his own door.  There are places that still smell 
of the plough in memory's nostrils.  Here, one had heard 
a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on 
summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you 
have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present 
residence.  The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but 
partly memories of the town.  I look back with delight on 
many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among 
lilacs full of piping birds; many an exploration in 
obscure quarters that were neither town nor country; and 
I think that both for my companions and myself, there was 
a special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment 
as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on 
the butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few 
rustic cottages embedded among streets and squares.  The 
tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the 
trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards 
upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many 
ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were 
certainly things of paramount impressiveness to a young 
mind.  It was a subterranean passage, although of a 
larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's 
novels; and these two words, 'subterreanean passage,' 
were in themselves an irresistible attraction, and seemed 
to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and 
the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate.  To 
scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, 
and lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was 
to taste a high order of romantic pleasure.  And there 
are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my 
mind under a very strong illumination of remembered 
pleasure.  But the effect of not one of them all will 
compare with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old 
Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with 
which I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water 
Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton Market.  
They were more rural than the open country, and gave a 
greater impression of antiquity than the oldest LAND upon 
the High Street.  They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, 
had a quaint air of having wandered far from their own 
place; they looked abashed and homely, with their gables 
and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and 
running mill-streams; there were corners that smelt like 
the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils; 
and the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they 
might have done in Colinton or Cramond.

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


CHAPTER VII.
THE VILLA QUARTERS.


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

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

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

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

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


CHAPTER VIII.
THE CALTON HILL.


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

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

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

Immediately underneath upon the south, you command 
the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts 
of the new Jail - a large place, castellated to the 
extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a 
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the 
Castle.  In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners 
taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other, 
schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step 
with them.  From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic 
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller 
and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument.  Look a 
little farther, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its 
Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry 
pacing smartly too and fro before the door like a 
mechanical figure in a panorama.  By way of an outpost, 
you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over 
which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where 
Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white 
wine to entertain her loveliness.  Behind and overhead, 
lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to 
Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of 
Salisbury Crags: and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark 
and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of 
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue 
of its bold design.  This upon your left.  Upon the 
right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one 
above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk 
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. - 
Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same 
instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's 
flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke 
followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at 
the Castle.  This is the time-gun by which people set 
their watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms 
upon the Pentlands. - To complete the view, the eye 
enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a 
broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the 
New: here, full of railway trains and stepped over by the 
high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green 
with trees and gardens.

On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt 
in itself nor has it so exceptional an outlook; and yet 
even here it commands a striking prospect.  A gully 
separates it from the New Town.  This is Greenside, where 
witches were burned and tournaments held in former days.  
Down that almost precipitous bank, Bothwell launched his 
horse, and so first, as they say, attracted the bright 
eyes of Mary.  It is now tesselated with sheets and 
blankets out to dry, and the sound of people beating 
carpets is rarely absent.  Beyond all this, the suburbs 
run out to Leith; Leith camps on the seaside with her 
forest of masts; Leith roads are full of ships at anchor; 
the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith Island; 
the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the 
May; the towns of Fifeshire sit, each in its bank of 
blowing smoke, along the opposite coast; and the hills 
enclose the view, except to the farthest east, where the 
haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea.  There lies 
the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and 
his Scots Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of 
Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a 
queen for Scotland.


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


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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX.
WINTER AND NEW YEAR.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a 
Sunday; only taverns, toyshops, and other holiday 
magazines, keep open doors.  Every one looks for his 
handsel.  The postman and the lamplighters have left, at 
every house in their districts, a copy of vernacular 
verses, asking and thanking in a breath; and it is 
characteristic of Scotland that these verses may have 
sometimes a touch of reality in detail or sentiment and a 
measure of strength in the handling.  All over the town, 
you may see comforter'd schoolboys hasting to squander 
their half-crowns.  There are an infinity of visits to be 
paid; all the world is in the street, except the daintier 
classes; the sacramental greeting is heard upon all 
sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and 
whisky and shortbread are staple articles of consumption.  
From an early hour a stranger will be impressed by the 
number of drunken men; and by afternoon drunkenness has 
spread to the women.  With some classes of society, it is 
as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New-year's Day 
as to go to church on Sunday.  Some have been saving 
their wages for perhaps a month to do the season honour.  
Many carry a whisky-bottle in their pocket, which they 
will press with embarrassing effusion on a perfect 
stranger.  It is inexpedient to risk one's body in a cab, 
or not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the 
driver.  The streets, which are thronged from end to end, 
become a place for delicate pilotage.  Singly or arm-in-
arm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the 
votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and 
cannoning one against another; and now and again, one 
falls and lies as he has fallen.  Before night, so many 
have gone to bed or the police office, that the streets 
seem almost clearer.  And as GUISARDS and FIRST-FOOTERS 
are now not much seen except in country places, when once 
the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron 
railings, the festivities begin to find their way indoors 
and something like quiet returns upon the town.  But 
think, in these piled LANDS, of all the senseless 
snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets!

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



CHAPTER X.
TO THE PENTLAND HILLS.


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

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

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

Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, 
now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery of whisky.  It 
chanced, some time in the past century, that the 
distiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the 
visiting officer of excise.  The latter was of an easy, 
friendly disposition, and a master of convivial arts.  
Now and again, he had to walk out of Edinburgh to measure 
the distiller's stock; and although it was agreeable to 
find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it 
was unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his 
visits.  Accordingly, when he got about the level of 
Fairmilehead, the gauger would take his flute, without 
which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it 
together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own 
delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene.  His 
favourite air, it seems, was 'Over the hills and far 
away.'  At the first note, the distiller pricked his 
ears.  A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing 'Over the 
hills and far away?'  This must be his friendly enemy, 
the gauger.  Instantly horses were harnessed, and sundry 
barrels of whisky were got upon a cart, driven at a 
gallop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy glen 
behind Kirk Yetton.  In the same breath, you may be sure, 
a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the whitest napery 
prepared for the back parlour.  A little after, the 
gauger, having had his fill of music for the moment, came 
strolling down with the most innocent air imaginable, and 
found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely 
unawares by his arrival, but none the less glad to see 
him.  The distiller's liquor and the gauger's flute would 
combine to speed the moments of digestion; and when both 
were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with 
'Over the hills and far away' to an accompaniment of 
knowing glances.  And at least, there is a smuggling 
story, with original and half-idyllic features.

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

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


'THAT NICHT A CHILD MIGHT UNDERSTAND
THE DEIL HAD BUSINESS ON HIS HAND.'


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

The road goes down through another valley, and then 
finally begins to scale the main slope of the Pentlands.  
A bouquet of old trees stands round a white farmhouse; 
and from a neighbouring dell, you can see smoke rising 
and leaves ruffling in the breeze.  Straight above, the 
hills climb a thousand feet into the air.  The 
neighbourhood, about the time of lambs, is clamorous with 
the bleating of flocks; and you will be awakened, in the 
grey of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog or 
the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes.  This, 
with the hamlet lying behind unseen, is Swanston.

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

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

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

* One of the illustrations of the First Edition.

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

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