OINBURGH 
 
 IS sreveNsoi 
 
Glass_ 
 
 A '63 
 
 Book . £: 3 S ^(a 
 

 i( 
 
EDINBURGH 
 

John Knox's House, lii^li Street. 
 
EDINBURGH 
 
 V - y BY 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON 
 
 WITH 24 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
 
 JAMES HERON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLKS SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 LONDON : SEF.LKY, SF.RVICE U CO I,TD 
 I912 
 
/^^zv 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. I. INTRODUCTORY 
 
 II. OLD TOWN THE LANDS 
 
 III. THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 
 
 IV. LEGENDS 
 V. GREYFRIARS 
 
 VI. NEW TOWN TOWN AND COUNTRY 
 
 VII, THE VILLA QUARTERS . 
 
 VIII. THE CALTON HILL 
 
 IX. WINTER AND NEW YEAR 
 
 X. TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 
 
 17 
 
 37 
 
 57 
 
 75 
 
 93 
 
 113 
 
 133 
 
 139 
 
 159 
 
 .83 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 JOHN KNOx's HOUSE, HIGH STREET . FrOlltlspiece V 
 
 LADV stair's close, LAWNMARKET . . 20 ■ 
 
 QUEEN MARV'S BATH HOUSE, HOLYROOD . . 29, 
 
 JAMEs' COURT, LAWNMARKET . . ' . 40 
 
 CARDINAL Beaton's house, formerly in the 
 
 COWGATE . . . . 49 . 
 
 CATHEDRAL OF S F. GILES AS IT WAS IN THE 
 
 EARLY PART OF LAST CENTURY . 60v 
 
 THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH . . . 69 - 
 
 PLAYHOUSE CLOSE, CANONGATE . . . 82 ' 
 12 
 
List of Illustrations 
 
 HEAD OF THE WEST HOW . . .87 
 
 CANDLEMAKER ROW, CREYFRIARS . I02^ 
 
 THE FOOT OF CANONGATE . . 1 07 
 
 PRINCES STREET, EDINBURGH . . 122- 
 
 HOLYROOD PALACE FROM THE CALTON HILL . I 27. 
 
 EDINBURGH FROM THE CALTON HILL . I42 
 
 THE CASTLE FROM THE GRASSMARKET . . 147/ 
 
 THE CASFLE FROM PRINCES STREET GARDENS I 52. 
 
 DUDDINGSTON LOCH AND ARTHUr's SEAT. l6l- 
 
 HIGH SCHOOL WYND, LOOKING TOWARDS THE COW- 
 GATE . . . . . l66' 
 
 CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE . . . 17I . 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF HUNTLy's HOUSE, BAKEHOUSE 
 
 CLOSE, CANONGATE . . 1 76 ' 
 
 •3 
 
List of Illustrations 
 
 PAGI 
 
 THE PENTLAND HILLS FROM SWANSTON . . 185 V 
 
 DUDDINGSTON CHURCH FROM THE LOCH . . 1 90"^ 
 
 THE CASTLE FROM THE VENNEL . . . 195^ 
 
 THE HAMLET OF SWANSTON . . . 20I^ 
 
 H 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
C II APT !<: R I 
 
 INTRODDCrOKY 
 
 T\\]i nncicnt and famous mctrojK)lis of 
 tlic North sits overlooking a windy 
 estuary Irom the slope and summit of 
 three hills. No situation could he more com- 
 manding for the head city of a kingdom ; none 
 !)etter chosen lor noMe prospects. I'Vom iier 
 tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks 
 far and wide on the sea and hroad champaigns. 
 1\) the east you may catch at sunset the spark 
 of the May lighthouse, where the I-'irth expands 
 into the (icrman Ocean ; and away to the 
 west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can 
 see the first snows upon Ben Ledi. 
 
 But Fdinhurgh pays cruelly for her high 
 seat in one of the vilest climiites under heaven. 
 She is liable to be be:iten upon by :ill the winds 
 
 '7 
 
Introductory 
 
 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 
 ScMiiewhere-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 ot the winds — and 
 watch the trains smoking out from under them 
 and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to 
 i8 
 
Lady Stair's Close, I.awnmarket. 
 
Introductory 
 
 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 hnd no city of the 
 same distinction ; go where they will, they 
 take a pride in their old home. 
 
 Venice, it has been said, differs from all 
 other cities in the sentiment which she inspires. 
 The rest may have admirers ; she only, a 
 famous fiir 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 attrac- 
 tion is romantic in the narrowest meaning of 
 the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so 
 much beautiful as interesting. She is pre- 
 eminently Gothic, and all the more so since 
 
 21 
 
Introductory 
 
 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 changes. For 
 fifty weeks together, it is no more than a 
 show for tourists and a museum of old furni- 
 ture ; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace 
 
Introductory 
 
 reawakened and mimicking its past. The 
 Lord Commissioner, a kind of state 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 
 
 23 
 
Introductory 
 
 the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges 
 sit bewigged in what was once the scene of 
 imperial deHberations. 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 trouser below, and the men 
 themselves trudging in the mud among unsym- 
 pathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well- 
 appointed circus tread the streets with a better 
 presence. And yet these are the Heralds and 
 Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to 
 proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom 
 before two - score boys, and thieves, and 
 hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the 
 bell of the University rings out over the hum 
 of the streets, and every hour a double tide of 
 students, coming and going, rills the deep 
 archways. And lastly, one night in the spring- 
 time — or say one morning rather, at the peep 
 of day — late folk may hear the voices of many 
 men singing a psalm in unison from a church 
 24 
 
Introductory 
 
 on one side of the old High Street ; and a 
 httle after, or perhaps a Httle before, the sound 
 of many men singing a psalm in unison from 
 another church on the opposite side of the 
 way. There will be something in the words 
 about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it 
 is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. 
 And the late folk will tell themselves that all 
 this singing denotes the conclusion of two 
 yearly ecclesiastical parliaments — the parliaments 
 of Churches which are brothers in many ad- 
 mirable 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 
 
 25 
 
Introductory 
 
 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, build- 
 ings 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 imita- 
 26 
 
Introductory 
 
 tions with a becoming dignity, as the works 
 of Nature may look down upon the monu- 
 ments of Art. But nature is a more indis- 
 criminate patroness than we imagine, and in 
 no way frightened of a strong effect. The 
 birds roost as wilHngly 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 every- 
 thing into a glorified distinctness — or easterly 
 mists, coming up with, the blue evening, fiise 
 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 eccen- 
 tricities, this dream in masonry and living 
 rock, is not a drop-scene in a theatre, but a 
 city in the world of everyday reality, connected 
 by railway and telegraph-wire with all the 
 
 27 
 
Introductory 
 
 capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens 
 of the famiHar 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 pic- 
 turesque 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 
 28 
 
QucTii Mary's Bath House, Holyrood. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Introductory 
 
 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. 
 
 excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a 
 subject of reproach ; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, 
 and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is 
 not their fault if the city calls for something more specious by way of 
 inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or 
 Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a 
 Bcntham. And let them console themselves — they do as well as any- 
 body else ; the population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as 
 rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I 
 would say only one word, but that is of gold : / have not yet written a 
 hook about G/asgow. 
 
 D 31 
 
Introductory 
 
 Down in the palace John Knox reproved his 
 queen in the accents of modern democracy. 
 In the town, in one "of those Httle 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 
 psalms ' to see Edinburgh consumed with fire 
 from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah. 
 There, in the Grassmarket, stifF-necked, cove- 
 nanting heroes offered up the often unneces- 
 sary, 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 
 32 
 
Introductory 
 
 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 after- 
 wards, David Hume ruined Philosophy and 
 Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen ; 
 and thither, in yet a few years more. Burns 
 came from the plough-tail, as to an academy 
 of gilt unbelief and artificial letters. There, 
 when the great exodus was made across the 
 valley, and the New Town began to spread 
 abroad its draughty parallelograms, and rear its 
 long frontage on the opposing hill, there was 
 such a flitting, such a change of domicile and 
 dweller, as was never excelled in the history 
 of cities : the cobbler succeeded the earl ; the 
 beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chim- 
 ney ; what had been a palace was used as a 
 pauper refuge ; and great mansions were so 
 
 33 
 
Introductory 
 
 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. 
 
 34 
 
OLD TOWN 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 OLD TOWN : THE LANDS 
 
 THE Old Town, it is pretended, is the 
 chief characteristic, and, from a 
 picturesque point of view, the Hver- 
 wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most 
 common forms of depreciation to throw cold 
 water on the whole by adroit over-commenda- 
 tion 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 
 
 Z7 
 
OLI Town 
 
 cnilKllislutl Slirliiig planted in the midst of a 
 larj'v, ;u live, and lanlastie modern eity ; lor 
 tlKTe llie (wo reael in a pictnresque sense, 
 and (lie one is (he making ol the other. 
 
 'The Old Town oeeupies a sloping ridge 
 or (ail ol tlihnial ma((er, protected, in some 
 suhsidiiue ol the waters, hy the Castle elites 
 vvhieh lortily it to (he west. On the one 
 siile ol it and the other the new towns ol the 
 south anil ol (he nordi oeeupy their lower, 
 hroailer, ami m()re gentle hill-tops. Thus, 
 the tpiarter ol the ('astle overtops the whole 
 (.ity ami kieps an open view to sea and laml. 
 it tlominates lor miles on every side ; and 
 people on the tieiks ol ships, or ploughing 
 in ipiiet eountr\ phues over in File, ean see 
 the banner on (he Castle battlements, and the 
 smoke ol the OKI ['own Mowing abroad over 
 the subjaeent et>untrv. A eity that is set 
 ujnin a hill. It was, 1 suppose, Irom this 
 distant aspeet that she gi)t her niekname ot 
 u'lu/i/ Ri\-kii\ Perhaps it was given her by 
 
^\ 
 
J.iim-: 
 
Olil Town 
 
 |>c*()plc who liail never ( rosscd her doors : 
 tlay after day, from tlicir various rustic Pis^>;ahs, 
 tl)cy had seen (he pile ol hiiilchii}'^ on the hill 
 top, and till- loiij'^ phnnc ol sinoki- ovci (he 
 plain; so il .ipptMiid to (Ik in; so il had 
 iip|)iMri'd to then l.illuis (illini' thf same held ; 
 and as that was all they knew ol (hi- plai r, it 
 loidd he all expressed in tlu'se two words, 
 
 liuKi'd, even on a ncaici view, (he Old 
 'I'own is propi-rly smoked ; and (honjdi it is 
 well washed with rain all (In- year round, i( 
 has a grim and soo(y aspec ( amon|'_ its yonnju-r 
 sid)url)s. It [Mivv, undii" the law that re^Milates 
 the growth ol walled (ities in precarious situa- 
 tions, not m cxlciil, hut m hcij'hl and density. 
 l^ihlic l)uildinj',s were loried, wherever there 
 was room for them, into the midst ol thoroujdi 
 fares ; thoroughlares were diminished into 
 lanes ; houses sprang up story al(ci story, 
 neighhour mountings upon neigJd)om's shoidder, 
 as in somi- I'.l k k ll(»le ol (;al(u((a, un(il (li<- 
 population slept louKcen or Idlcen deep in a 
 
 1 . 4 1 
 
Old Town 
 
 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 clifl^ 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 hillside ; 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 
 
 42 
 
Old Town 
 
 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 ot clean air, have been let in ! 
 And what a picturesque world remains un- 
 touched ! 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 
 
 43 
 
Old Town 
 
 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 plentiRil 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 
 
 44 
 
Old Town 
 
 Church affairs and poHtics 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 supervising constables and a dismal 
 sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from 
 higher ranks in society, with some mark of 
 better days upon them, like a brand. In a 
 place no larger than Edinburgh, and where 
 the traffic is mostly centred in five or six 
 chief streets, the same face comes often 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 
 
 45 
 
Old Town 
 
 have been upwards of sixty before I first 
 observed him, and he made then a decent, 
 personable figure in broadcloth of the best. 
 For three years he kept falling — grease coming 
 and buttons going from the square-skirted 
 coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the 
 shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant 
 and grey upon his head ; and the last that 
 ever I saw of him, he was standing at the 
 mouth of an entry with several men in mole- 
 skin, 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 calami- 
 ties ; 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 degrin- 
 golades is, that the victim begins to disappear 
 
 46 
 
Old Town 
 
 from the New Town thoroughfiires, and takes 
 to the High Street, Hke 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 aggre- 
 gation 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 
 
 47 
 
The Lands 
 
 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 
 48 
 
Cardinal Beaton's House, formerly in tlic 
 Cowgate. 
 

 
 
 i 
 
 ^/ 
 
 7 
 
The Lands 
 
 without hurt. And even if God tempers His 
 dispensations to the young, and all the ill docs 
 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 abed but the policeman, and 
 stopped by hazard before a tall la?i(l. The 
 
 ^ 51 
 
Tl'he Lands 
 
 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 fincied, the dense life within 
 made itself faintly audible in my ears, family 
 after fmiily contributing its quota to the general 
 hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to 
 its time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. 
 Perhaps it was little more than a fancy alto- 
 gether, but it was strangely impressive at the 
 time, and gave me an imaginative measure of 
 tlie disproportion between the quantity of living 
 rtcsh and the trifling walls that separated and 
 contained it. 
 
 There was nothing £inciful, 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 
 
 52 
 
The Lancfs 
 
 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 to- 
 gether 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 
 
 53 
 
The Lands 
 
 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 
 ghmpsc into tlie hfe of thirty famiHes, all 
 suddenly cut off from the revolving years. 
 The lafid Jiad filien ; 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 : 
 ' I'he house that I was born in fell last 
 niirht ! ' 
 
 54 
 
THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 
 
 TIME has wrought its changes most 
 notably around the precinct of St. 
 Giles's Church. The church itself, 
 if it were not for the spire, would be unre- 
 cognisable ; 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 
 
 57 
 
The T^arliament Close 
 
 either side of the ehurch, but a great porthole, 
 knocked in the main Hne of the la7ids^ gives 
 an outlook to the north and the New Town. 
 
 There is a silly story of a subterranean 
 passage between the Castle and Holy rood, 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. 
 
 5« 
 
e'athcJnil ot" St. C.ik 
 m the early p; 
 
 hist Ccnturw 
 
71^6' T^arliament Close 
 
 That will be a strange moment for the cabmen 
 on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they 
 hear the drone of his pipes reascending from 
 the bowels of the earth below their horses' 
 feet. 
 
 But it is not only pipers who have vanished ; 
 many a solid bulk of masonry has been like- 
 wise 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 name- 
 father to a noble book. The walls are now 
 down in the dust ; there is no more squalor 
 carccris for merry debtors, no more cage for 
 the old, acknowledged prison-breaker ; but the 
 sun and the wind play freely over the founda- 
 tions of the jail. Nor is this the only memo- 
 rial 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 
 
 G 6i 
 
I'he T^arliament Close 
 
 as utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths ; 
 and for those ignorant of its history, I know 
 only one token that remains. In the Par- 
 liament 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, be- 
 strides a tun-bellied charger. The King has 
 his back turned, and, as you look, seems to be 
 trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous 
 neighbour. Often, for hours together, these 
 two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out 
 of the way of all but legal traffic. On one 
 side the south wall of the church, on the other 
 the arcades of tlie Parliament House, enclose 
 this irregular bight of causeway and describe 
 their shadows on it in the sun. At either 
 
 62 
 
The T^arliament Close 
 
 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 loiter- 
 ing 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 fir otherwise ; within in the Justiciary 
 Court a man is upon trial for his life, and 
 these are some of the curious for whom the 
 gallery was found too narrow. Towards after- 
 noon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there will 
 be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. 
 Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and 
 gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant 
 nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening 
 to an agent ; and at certain regular hours a 
 whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space. 
 The Parliament Close has been the scene 
 
 63 
 
I'he T^arliament Close 
 
 of marking incidents in Scottish history. Thus, 
 when the Bishops were ejected from the Con- 
 vention in 1688, *all fourteen of them gathered 
 together with pale faces and stood in a cloud 
 in the Parliament Close ' ; poor episcopal 
 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 RobtJison Crusoe as he looked out 
 of window. 
 64 
 
T'hc T^arliament Close 
 
 One of the pious in the seventeenth century, 
 going to pass his trials (examinations as we 
 now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the 
 Parhament 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 civilisa- 
 tion 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 
 
 65 
 
T^he T^arliament Close 
 
 three vast fires. This is the Salle cles pas 
 perdus of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a fero- 
 cious 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, 
 66 
 
The Tarliament Close 
 
 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 pro- 
 portion 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 
 
 67 
 
The T^arliament Close 
 
 after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to 
 deHghted brethren. 
 
 Besides the courts, there are installed under 
 the same roof no less than three libraries : two 
 of no mean order ; confused and semi-sub- 
 terranean, 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 
 
 68 
 
The 
 
 Caiioiigatc Tol booth. 
 

 ■m 
 
 I'f'i! 
 
 .^TT'L 
 
 «i^ 
 
 OT <W, 
 
 H- 
 
The Tarliaynent Close 
 
 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 firther 
 and you strike upon a room, not empty like 
 the rest, but crowded with procluctio7is 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 Judg- 
 ment 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 
 
 7^ 
 
'The T*arliament Close 
 
 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 descend- 
 ing 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 pigsty fit for 
 human pigs. There are few signs of life, be- 
 sides a scanty washing or a face at a window : 
 the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at 
 night and stagger to their pallets. 
 
 72 
 
LEGENDS 
 
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 be- 
 come 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 Midiot/iian for Edinburgh, 
 and the Pirate^ so indifferently written but so ro- 
 mantically conceived, for the desolate islands and 
 
 75 
 
Legends 
 
 roaring tideways of the North. The common 
 run of mankind have, from generation to genera- 
 tion, an instinct almost as deHcate 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 adven- 
 tures, 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 quaver- 
 ing 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 
 
 76 
 
Legends 
 
 Burke and Hare ; over drugs and violated graves, 
 and the resurrection-men smothering their vic- 
 tims 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 /a?tcis^ 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 
 
 77 
 
Lc(ycri(h 
 
 o 
 
 light. Soltly he clambered out of bed and up to 
 a false wiinlovv vvhieh 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 rminer, 
 a cock-hght, an apprehension in a cupboard in 
 Amsterdam, and a last step into the air oft his 
 own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the 
 career of Dcac(Hi William Brodie to an end. 
 But still, by the mind's eye, he may be seen, a 
 man harassed behnv 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 fivour, per- 
 haps some memory lingers of the great plagues, 
 anil of fital lunises still unsafe to enter within the 
 memory ot man. For in time of pestilence the 
 discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what 
 
 7« 
 
Legends 
 
 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 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 sup- 
 posed, 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 
 I 79 
 
Legends 
 
 scampering within would send a shudder through 
 the stoutest heart. Here, if you Hke, 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 ordi- 
 narily 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 
 80 
 

Phivh 
 
 C'lost', CaiKingiitc. 
 
Legenas 
 
 of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough 
 that out of this superstitious city some such 
 example should have been put forth : the out- 
 come 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 stafl^ went upon his errands, and even 
 ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. 
 Gigantic females, ' stentoriously laughing and 
 gaping with tehees of laughter ' at unseasonable 
 hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus 
 of his abode. His house fell under such a load 
 of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until 
 municipal improvement levelled the structure with 
 the ground. And my father has often been told 
 in the nursery how the devil's coach, drawn by 
 six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive 
 at night into the West Bow, and belated people 
 might see the dead Major through the glasses. 
 
 Another legend is that of the two maiden 
 sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in the 
 
 83 
 
Legends 
 
 most discreditable meaning of the term ; or 
 perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday's 
 fiction. But it is a story of some vitaHty, 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 whit'^, 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 to- 
 gether 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, 
 84 
 
Legends 
 
 exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny ; and at night, 
 in the dark watches, each could hear the breath- 
 ing of her enemy. Never did four walls look 
 down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters 
 rivalling in unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for 
 Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture 
 — he had a Puritanic vein, which would have 
 htted 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 
 
 85 
 
Legends 
 
 one fine d;iy, at a word, a look, a visit, or the 
 approach ol titath, ihcir hearts woultl melt and 
 the clialk hoiintlary he overstepped lor ever. 
 
 Alas ! to those who know the ecelesiastical 
 history ol (he raee — the niost perverse and 
 melaiuholy in man's annals — this will seem only 
 a figure of miieh that is typieal of Seotland and 
 her high-seateil capital ahove the Forth — a figure 
 so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers 
 for a eariealure. We are wonderful patient 
 haters lor eonseiente' sake up here in the North. 
 I spoke, in the lust of these papers, of the Par- 
 liamenis of the l^stahlished and I'ree Churches, 
 and how they can hear each other singing psalms 
 across the street. J'herc is hut a street between 
 them in space, hut a shadow between them in 
 jtrinciplc ; and yet there they sit, enehantcil, 
 aiul in tlamnatory accents pray for each other's 
 growth in grace. It would be well if there were 
 no more than two ; but the sects in Scotlanil 
 form a large family of sisters, ami the chalk lines 
 are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of 
 
I If.ui 
 
 ihv West How. 
 
Legends 
 
 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 sym- 
 phony 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 
 
 89 
 
Legends 
 
 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. Shake- 
 speare 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 ? 
 90 
 
GREYFRIARS 
 
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 even- 
 ings ; 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 
 
 93 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 aris- 
 tocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. 
 
 Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which 
 belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we 
 Scots 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 ; 
 
 94 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, 
 the signihcance 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 fethers to set forth their sorrow for the dead 
 and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is 
 not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may 
 have been executed by the merriest apprentice, 
 whistling as he plied the mallet ; but the original 
 meaning of each, and the combined effect of so 
 many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious 
 to the point of melancholy. 
 
 Round a great part of the circuit, houses of 
 a low class present their backs to the church- 
 yard. Only a few inches separate the living 
 from the dead. Here, a window is partly 
 blocked up by the pediment of a tomb ; there, 
 where the street falls far below the level of the 
 
 95 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 grave- 
 yard finds its way into houses where workmen 
 sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes 
 forward visibly at the windows. The very soli- 
 tude 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 com- 
 
 96 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 placently blinking, as if they had fed upon 
 strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with 
 the saints, as we may hope, and cared little for 
 the company about his grave : but I confess the 
 spectacle had an ugly side for me ; and I was 
 glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where 
 the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and 
 the spire of the Assembly Hall stood deployed 
 against the sky with the colourless precision of 
 engraving. An open outlook is to be desired 
 from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and 
 some of the world's beauty relieves a mind from 
 morbid thoughts. 
 
 I shall never forget one visit. It was a 
 grey, dropping day ; the grass was strung with 
 raindrops ; and the people in the houses kept 
 hanging out their shirts and petticoats and 
 angrily taking them in again, as the weather 
 turned from wet to fair and back again. A 
 gravedigger, and a friend of his, a gardener from 
 the country, accompanied me into one after 
 another of the cells and little courtyards in 
 
 97 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 '11 be Miss Marg'et's,' said he, giving the 
 
 bone a friendly kick. ' The auld ! ' I 
 
 98 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 have always an uncomfortable feeling in a grave- 
 yard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate 
 memories best forgotten ; but I never had the 
 impression so strongly as that day. People had 
 been at some expense in both these cases : to 
 provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the 
 one, and an insulting epithet in the other. The 
 proper inscription for the most part of mankind, 
 I began to think, is the cynical jeer, eras tibi. 
 That, if anything, will stop the mouth of a 
 carper ; since it both admits the worst and 
 carries the war triumphantly into the enemy's 
 camp. 
 
 Greyfriars is a place of many associations. 
 There was one window in a house at the lower 
 end, now demolished, which was pointed out to 
 me by the gravedigger as a spot of legendary 
 interest. Burke, the resurrection man, infamous 
 for so many murders at five shillings a head, 
 used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to 
 watch burials going forward on the green. In 
 a tomb higher up, which must then have been 
 
 L 99 
 
Grey friars 
 
 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 Cove- 
 nanting 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 play- 
 ing 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 
 
 100 
 
■| -'^m-M: 
 
 r^ 
 
 0f"t 
 
C;UKik'iii;ik(.T Row, ( JrcytViii 
 
 k 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 Mackenyie, come oot if ye 
 daur ! ' sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir 
 George had other affairs on hand ; and the 
 author of an essay on toleration continues to 
 sleep peacefully among the many whom he so 
 intolerantly helped to slay. 
 
 For this i7ifelix campus, as it is dubbed in 
 one of its own inscriptions — an inscription over 
 which Dr. Johnson passed a critical eye — is in 
 many ways sacred to the memory of the men 
 whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on 
 the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was 
 signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long 
 arm of the churchyard that extends to Lauriston, 
 the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge — fed on 
 bread and water and guarded, life for life, by 
 
 103 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 vigilant marksmen — lay five months looking for 
 the scaffold or the plantations. And while the 
 good work was going forward in the Grass- 
 market, idlers in Greyfriars might have heard 
 the throb of the military drums that drowned 
 the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all : for 
 down in the corner farthest from Sir George 
 there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth 
 Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in 
 that contention. There is no moorsman shot 
 in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell ; 
 there is not one of the two hundred who were 
 drowned off the Orkneys \ nor so much as a 
 poor, over-driven. Covenanting slave in the 
 American 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 
 104 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 
 Pieasaunce-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 P/easaunce ; 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! 
 
Greyfr 
 
 riars 
 
 Alexander Tweedie, a Friend, being with them, who at 
 that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to 
 bury them in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in 
 Linen), where they lay 45 Years except 3 Days, being 
 executed upon the loth of October 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 con- 
 sumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these Yards, caused 
 lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his Summer- 
 house : Mr. Schawls mother was so kind, as to cut out a 
 Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days 
 there, where all had Access to see them. Alexander 
 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 con- 
 cerned grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of 
 our Martyrs. There were Six of us concluded to bury 
 them upon the Nineteenth Day of October 1726, and 
 every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day and 
 Hour, being Wednesday, the Day of the Week on which 
 most of them were 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 
 106 
 
The Foot of Caiiongatt 
 
OlM 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 
 t^/ 
 
 ,^^--^ 
 
 fS 
 
 k ^' ,~- 
 
 
 
 
 / ., • ....:^ 
 
 mS 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 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 un- 
 heard-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 
 
 109 
 
Greyfriars 
 
 not they come to lie beside a martyrs' monu- 
 ment, 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 j 
 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.' 
 
NEW TOWN 
 
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 the matter of a point 
 free.' He has now gone to that sphere where 
 all good tars are promised pleasant weather in 
 
 JI3 
 
!J^w 'Town 
 
 the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly some- 
 what higher. But there are bright and temperate 
 days — with soft air eoming from the inland hills, 
 military musie 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 
 oi 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, 
 114 
 
!J^w 'Town 
 
 to sip pleasant drinks, to sec the moon rise from 
 behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires 
 and monuments and the green tree-tops in the 
 valley. Alas I and the next morning the rain 
 is splashing on the window, and the passengers 
 flee along Princes Street before the galloping 
 squalls. 
 
 It cannot be denied that the original design 
 was faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully 
 proht 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 com- 
 manded 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 
 
 '15 
 
Town and Country 
 
 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 surround- 
 ings. But perhaps it is all the more surprising 
 to come suddenly on a corner and see a per- 
 spective of a mile or more of falling street, 
 and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue 
 arm of the 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 countryman, 
 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 
 
 ii6 
 
Town and Country 
 
 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 pro- 
 spects. 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 
 held grows black under a moving ploughshare. 
 I have been tempted, in this connexion, to 
 
 117 
 
'Town and Country 
 
 deplore the slender faculties of the human race, 
 with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, 
 and its narrow range of sight. If you could 
 see as people are to see in heaven, if you had 
 eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, 
 if you could take clear note of the objects of 
 vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles 
 from where you stand : — think how agreeably 
 your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly 
 your thoughts would be diversified, as you 
 walked the Edinburgh streets ! For you might 
 pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst 
 of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye 
 of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon 
 a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands ; or per- 
 haps some urchin, clambering in a country 
 elm, would put aside the leaves and show you 
 his flushed and rustic visage ; or a fisher racing 
 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. 
 
'Town and Country 
 
 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. 
 Rut at the Dean Bridge you may behold a 
 
 N 1 19 
 
'Town and Country 
 
 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 com- 
 modious 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 clear V 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 
 
A,Si5 
 
Princes Street, Kdinhurgh. 
 
Town a Nil Country 
 
 at least ; but thc^ 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 ; 
 
 123 
 
Town and Country 
 
 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 Edin- 
 , burgh 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 excur- 
 sions 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 train 
 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 thoroughferes above, were certainly things 
 of paramount impressiveness to a young mind. 
 124 
 
Town and Country 
 
 It was a subterranean passage, although of a 
 larger bore than we were accustomed to in 
 Ainsworth's novels ; and these two words, 
 * subterranean passage,' were in themselves an 
 irresistible attraction, and seemed to bring us 
 nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and 
 the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. 
 To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes 
 Street Gardens, and lay a triumphal hand 
 against the rampart itself, 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 illumina- 
 tion 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 fice of this earth, 
 with which I explored such corners as Canon- 
 mills 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 laful 
 
 125 
 
'Town and Country 
 
 upon the High Street. They too, Hkc Fergus- 
 son'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 ot builders can 
 utterly abolish or destroy. Nothing can abolish 
 
 126 
 
Holymod I'al.uc from the Calion Mill. 
 
Town and Country 
 
 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 land- 
 scape. 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 
 hnd out a young man's eyes, and set his heart 
 beating for travel and pure air. 
 
 129 
 
THE VILLA QUARTERS 
 
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 archi- 
 tecture, 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 Newing- 
 ton and Morningside, the dismallest structures 
 
 133 
 
'The Villa garters 
 
 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 arrange- 
 ments 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 \ 
 
 134 
 
The Villa garters 
 
 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 fill 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 commonplace 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 proht, 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 sensi- 
 tive ; but these things offend the plainest taste. 
 It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the 
 
 135 
 
The Villa garters 
 
 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 archi- 
 tect in the world to point out any reasonably 
 well-proportioned villa, not his own design ; and 
 let them reproduce that model to satiety. 
 
 136 
 
THE CALTON HILL 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CALTON HILL 
 
 THE cast of new Edinburgh is guarded by 
 a craggy hill, of no great elevation, 
 which the town embraces. The old 
 London road runs on one side of it ; while the 
 New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, 
 completes the circuit. You mount by stairs in a 
 cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of 
 monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of 
 situation and architecture ; Burns is memorialised 
 lower down upon a spur ; Lord Nelson, as befits 
 a sailor, gives his name to the topgallant of the 
 Calton Hill. This latter erection has been 
 differently and yet, in both cases, aptly compared 
 to a telescope and a butter-churn ; comparisons 
 apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handi- 
 works. But the chief feature is an unfinished 
 p 139 
 
rhe Calton Hill 
 
 range of columns, ' the Modern Ruin ' as it has 
 been called, an imposing object from fir and near, 
 and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that 
 fiilse 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 Canon- 
 gate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's 
 master in his art, who died insane while yet a 
 stripling ; and if Dugald Stewart has been some- 
 what too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh 
 poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously 
 
 140 
 
■'&'i'MSiBtM 
 
 J 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 
 — ^"- 
 
 ^j3 
 
 m^\\ J 
 
 
 m 
 
 ^^•^ J 
 
 -^'-' 
 
 ^ 
 
 t^ 
 
Edinbur<>:li from the Calton Hi 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 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 Fcrgusson 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 
 
 H3 
 
I'he Calton Hill 
 
 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 organi- 
 sations and greatly the reverse to the majority of 
 mankind. It brings with it a fiint, floating haze, 
 a cunning decolouriser, although not thick enough 
 to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies 
 more thickly to windward at the far end of Mussel- 
 burgh 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 
 
 144 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 comm:ind 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 joyRilly 
 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 firther, and there is 
 Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and 
 ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly 
 to and fro before the door like a mechanical 
 figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, 
 you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, 
 over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape 
 and where Queen Mary herself, according to 
 gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her 
 loveliness. Behind and overhead, lie the Queen's 
 Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. 
 
 H5 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 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 flag- 
 staff 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, ftiU of railway trains and stepped over by 
 the high North Bridge upon its many columns, 
 and there, green with trees and gardens. 
 146 
 
The Castle from the Grassmarket. 
 
^^1^ 
 
 J^^ 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 :i>^ 
 
 -.# 
 
 r, r c 
 
 -»; ' ^- 
 
 '^t 
 
 li^'r 
 
 yf^"f^r^ 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so 
 abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional an out- 
 look ; and yet even here it commands a striking 
 prospect. A gully separates it from the New 
 Town. This is Greenside, where witches were 
 burned and tournaments held in former days. 
 Down that almost precipitous bank Bothwell 
 launched his horse, and so first, as they say, 
 attracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now 
 tessellated 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 Inchkcith 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 
 
 149 
 
"The Calton Hill 
 
 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 e'er 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 Scots- 
 men 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 Auld- 
 hame, 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 
 150 
 
mMmm^ 
 
The Castle tVoni Princes Street (iard 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 the west of the Inchcape, is that Forflirshire coast 
 where Mucklebackit sorrowed for his son. 
 
 These are the main features of the scene 
 roughly sketched. How they are all tilted by 
 the inclination of the ground, how each stands 
 out in delicate relief against the rest, what mani- 
 fold detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate 
 and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a 
 person on the spot, and turning swiftly on his 
 heels, to grasp and bind together in one com- 
 prehensive look. It is the character of such a 
 prospect, to be full of change and of things 
 moving. The multiplicity embarrasses the eye ; 
 and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to 
 grow absorbed with single points. You remark 
 a tree in a hedgerow, or 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 
 Q 153 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 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 per- 
 haps a bird goes dipping evenly over the house- 
 tops, like a gull across the waves. And here 
 you are in the meantime, on this pastoral hill- 
 side, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by 
 monumental buildings. 
 
 Return thither on some clear, dark, moon- 
 less night, with a ring of frost in the air, and 
 only a star or two set sparsely in the vault of 
 heaven ; and you will find a sight as stimulat- 
 ing 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 neigh- 
 bour ; and yet from all around you there come 
 up the dull hum of the city, the tramp of 
 
 154 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 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 fir and near along the 
 pavements and upon the high fa9ades. 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 
 
 »55 
 
The Calton Hill 
 
 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 
 qwvl 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 out- 
 post 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 dark- 
 ness like a star : a martial swan- song, fitly 
 rounding in the labours of the day. 
 
 156 
 
WINTER AND NEW YEAR 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 WINTER AND NEW YEAR 
 
 THE Scots dialect is singularly rich in 
 terms of reproach against the winter 
 wind. Sncll^ blae^ ^^i^^y-^ and scow- 
 thering^ 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 fice 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 
 lulinburgh, Cauldhame and Blaw-weary, that 
 would promise but starving comfort to their 
 
 '59 
 
IVinter and !]\(cw Year 
 
 inhahiumts. The inclemency of heaven, which 
 has thus endowed the language of Scotland with 
 words, has also largely modihed the spirit of its 
 poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate 
 teach men the love of the hearth and the senti- 
 ment of the fimily ; 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 pota- 
 tions : — to get indoors (Hit (^f the wind and to 
 swallow something hot to the stomach, are 
 benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt I 
 
 And this is not only so in country districts 
 where the shepherd must wade in the snow all 
 day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and 
 nowhere more apparently stated than in the 
 works of our Edinburgh poet, Fergusson. He 
 was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly 
 slunk from the robustious winter to an inn 
 fireside. Love was absent from his life, or only 
 present, if you prefer, in such a form that even 
 the least serious of Burns's amourettes was 
 
 i6o 
 
Duddiiiuston Locli iiiid Arthur's Scat. 
 
t* 
 
 Wj 
 
Winter and U^w Year 
 
 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 itsel£ 
 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 tempera- 
 ment, 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 
 
 163 
 
JVinter and !}{ew Year 
 
 and depression of our Edinburgh winters 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 
 164 
 

 k 
 
 1 
 
 ■V" 
 
 Lw^^ 
 
 m-- 
 
 Qkl 
 
 i|¥n 
 
 
 ^.' ^^ 
 
High Scliool Wyinl, looking towards the Cowgate. 
 
Winter and J\(ew Year 
 
 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 divi- 
 sions : 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 up- 
 holds their drooping fellow-townsmen. There 
 is yet another class who do not depend on 
 
 167 
 
Winter and U^w Year 
 
 corporal advantages, but support the winter in 
 virtue of a brave and merry heart. One shiver- 
 ing 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 
 
 i68 
 
JJ^ inter and O^w Year 
 
 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 fiiirly ! ' And the children, 
 marvelling at the silence and the white land- 
 scape, find a spell appropriate to the season in 
 the words. The reverberation of the snow in- 
 creases the pale daylight, and brings all objects 
 nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and 
 glittering, with here and there the black ribbon 
 of a dry-stone dyke, and here and there, if there 
 be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a 
 shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden creek, 
 that a man might almost jump across, between 
 well-powdered Lothian and well-powdered Fife. 
 And the effect is not, as in other cities, a thing 
 of half a day ; the streets are soon trodden 
 black, but the country keeps its virgin white ; 
 and you have only to lift your eyes and look 
 over miles of country snow. An indescribable 
 
 169 
 
Winter and !}(ew Year 
 
 cheerfulness breathes about the city ; and the 
 well-fed heart sits lightly and beats gaily in the 
 bosom. It is New-year's weather. 
 
 New-year's Day, the great national festival, 
 is a time of family expansions and of deep 
 carousal. Sometimes, by a sore stroke of fate 
 for this Calvinistic people, the year's anniversary 
 falls upon a Sunday, when the public-houses 
 are inexorably closed, when singing and even 
 whistling is banished from our homes and high- 
 ways, and the oldest toper feels called upon to 
 go to church. Thus pulled about, as if between 
 two loyalties, the Scots 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 
 
 170 
 
Craiemillar Castle. 
 
ftl 
 
 ^ ..^. 
 
JJ^ niter and 0\(ew Yair 
 
 the hddlc, his foot already raised to mark the 
 time, and his nerves braced for execution ; for 
 hardly had the twelfth stroke sounded from the 
 earliest steeple, before they had launched forth 
 into a secular bravura. 
 
 Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all 
 households. For weeks before the great morn- 
 ing, confectioners display stacks of Scots 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 )()ck or 
 Jean in the city ? For at this season, on the 
 threshold of another year of calamity and 
 
 •73 
 
JVinter and U^w Year 
 
 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 some- 
 times 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 school- 
 boys 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 
 
 174 
 
h 
 
 
 
 ' .'W 
 
 
 ■ i : 
 
 
 ■■«. 
 
 
 
The Marquis ot Huntly's House, Bakehouse Close 
 Canongate. 
 
IVinter and U^w Year 
 
 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 embar- 
 rassing effusion on a perfect stranger. It is not 
 expedient 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, 
 s 177 
 
Winter and !?{ew Year 
 
 that the streets seem almost clearer. And as 
 guisards and Jirst-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 
 178 
 
Winter and !?{ew Year 
 
 urchin can slide the whole way to school ; and 
 the profession of errand-boy is transformed into 
 a holiday amusement. As for skating, there is 
 scarce any city so handsomely provided. Dud- 
 dingston 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 
 jougs, a place of penance for the neck of 
 detected sinners, and the historical iouping-on 
 siane, 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 
 
 179 
 
JVinter and ?\(ew Year 
 
 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. 
 
 i8o 
 
TO THE PENTLAND HILLS 
 
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, 
 
 '83 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 and yet most of the elements are common to 
 all parts ; and the southern district is alone dis- 
 tinguished by considerable summits and a wide 
 view. 
 
 From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish 
 army encamped before Flodden, the road de- 
 scends a long hill, at the bottom of which and 
 just as it is preparing to mount up on the other 
 side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into 
 the open country. Even as I write these words, 
 they are becoming 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. 
 
The Pentlaiid Hills from Swanston. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 •'^*'" 
 
 )f/V '"■ _v-' 
 
 
 
 ^.<fi^. 
 
 / i" 
 
 ^;%li«'f-4! 
 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 hxed. People of a willing 
 fency were persuaded, and sought to persuade 
 others, that this stone was never dry. And no 
 wonder, they would add, for the two men had 
 only stolen fourpence between them. 
 
 For about two miles the road climbs up- 
 wards, a long hot walk in summer time. You 
 reach the summit at a place where four ways 
 meet, beside the toll of Fairmilehead. The 
 spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and 
 aspect. The hills are close by across a valley : 
 Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible 
 as far as Fife, and Allermuir the tallest on this 
 side : with wood and tilled field running high 
 up on their borders, and haunches all moulded 
 into innumerable glens and shelvings and varie- 
 gated with heather and fern. The air comes 
 briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the 
 
 T 187 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 elevation and rustically scented by the upland 
 plants ; and even at the toll you may hear the 
 curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, 
 when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the 
 birds of sea and mountain hunt and scream 
 together in the same field by Fairmilehead. 
 The winged, wild things intermix their wheel- 
 ings, the 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 
 i88 
 

Duddiiigstoii Church from the Loch. 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 agreeable to hnd his business lead him in a 
 friend's direction, it was unfortunate that the 
 friend should be a loser by his visits. Accord- 
 ingly, when he got about the level of Fairmile- 
 head, the gauger would take his flute, without 
 which he never travelled, from his pocket, fit it 
 together, and set manRilly 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 
 
 191 
 
To the Tcntland Hills 
 
 innocent air imaginable, and found the good 
 people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares 
 by liis 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 accompani- 
 ment 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 held. 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 1 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 
 192 
 
To the Tcntland Hills 
 
 passes by, a certain landed proprietor is held 
 bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, 
 and sound a Hourish according to the measure 
 of his knowledge in that art. Ilajipily 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 pisser-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 ujion 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, over- 
 threw crockery in the dead hours of the morning, 
 and danced unholy dances on the roof Every 
 
 193 
 
'To the Tentland Hills 
 
 kind of spiritual disinfectant was put in requisi- 
 tion ; 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 facili- 
 ties to the makers of sun-myths ; and without 
 exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchant- 
 ing 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 
 194 
 
The Castle from the \'ennel. 
 

 1 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 neigh- 
 bouring dell, you can see smoke rising and 
 leaves rufBing 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 con- 
 nected with the city. Long ago, this sheltered 
 field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates 
 for the sake of the springs that rise or gather 
 
 197 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 
 198 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 up 
 on 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 exer- 
 cises, 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 
 
 u 199 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 hills, 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-pots, and ending in a 
 miniature ravine, all trellis-work and moss and 
 tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun 
 under fathoms of broad foliage. 
 
 The hamlet behind is one of the least con- 
 siderable of hamlets, and consists of a few 
 
 200 
 
The Hamlet of Swanston. 
 
 1 
 
To the Tcntland Hills 
 
 cottages on ;i green IksIiIc ;i Inirn. Some of 
 them (a strange thing in Seotland) are models 
 of internal neatness ; the beds adorned with 
 patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow- 
 pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with 
 serubbing or pipe-elay, 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. I lousc- 
 work 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 fmished picture ; the snow 
 and the winil may do their worst, she has made 
 herself a pleasant corner in the worltl. The city 
 might be a thousand miles away, and yet it was 
 from close by that Mr. Hough jxiinted the distant 
 view of Kdinburgh, 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 ; 
 
 > Published in the first Edition. 
 
 203 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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, un- 
 mindful of their master's excitations. 
 
 Kirk Yetton forms the north-eastern angle 
 of the range ; thence, the Pentlands trend off 
 to south and west. From the summit you look 
 over a great expanse of champaign sloping to 
 the sea, and behold a large variety of distant 
 hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of 
 Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, more 
 or less mountainous in outline, more or less 
 blue with distance. Of the Pentlands them- 
 selves, 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 
 
 204 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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 hgure in the landscape. All 
 around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smok- 
 ing 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 on 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 
 
 205 
 
To the Tentland Htlls 
 
 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 voice- 
 less 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 fenciful, 
 
 206 
 
Tg the Tentland Hills 
 
 you will be reminded of the gauger in the 
 story. And the thought of this old excise- 
 man, 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, 
 
 207 
 
To the Tentland Hills 
 
 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. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 
 at the Edinburgh University Press