From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and pickpockets
have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every
Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend
mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of which there are no fewer
than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green
tail-coat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to
match. I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings,
there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines,
is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. Another piece of Sunday
business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a
woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing,
catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had
waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had
the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a
canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a
respectable lady must study to conform.

Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours
cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes
the papers in a cafГ©. The _Courrier_(such is the name of one) should
leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voyage, and arrive at
Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares
not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and
again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking the
advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous business of
stage-coaching than we are used to see it.

As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill-top rises and
falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
new and farther ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all
sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier,
bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little
more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere
proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines,
and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The
country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding; an upland rather
than a mountain district; and the most striking as well as the most
agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will
find many corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble
choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at her freshest,
and looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course
of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and thence
downward till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing; a place
for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps suggested by
the sound of its passage over the stones; for it is a great warbler, and
at night, after I was in bed in Monastier, I could hear it go singing
down the valley till I fell asleep.

On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble as the
best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence the population is, in its
way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire
manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, with an "_OГ№'st-ce
que vous allez?_" only translatable into the Lowland "Whau'r ye gaun?"
They keep the Scottish Sabbath. There is no labour done on that day but
to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so
pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared
from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation;
and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of
Catholic _Monthly Visitor_ on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I
remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby,
gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood
with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in
devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some
straw, to represent the worldly element.

Again, this people is eager to proselytize; and the postmaster's
daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until
she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on
between a Scots-woman and a French girl; and the arguments in the two
cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior
virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clinched the business with a
threat of hell-fire. "_Pas bong prГЄtres ici_," said the Presbyterian,
"_bong prГЄtres en Г‰cosse_." And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the
same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the
bayonet. We are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our
good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerrilla missions, that
each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I
call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
imagination.

Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.
And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate. It is
certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the
seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least
40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure
and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders
grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called
Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed parents: a drake who had
fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan
in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of
Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bare-headed and barefoot, and
with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary!
Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life! I thought he might as
well have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure: one to drink, another to
marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in
public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As
for his old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour.
"I had always bread for him," he said; "he ran away to annoy me. He
loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was swelling
with pride over his travelled offspring, and he produced a letter out of
his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper
rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. "This comes from America," he
cried, "six thousand leagues away!" And the wine-shop audience looked
upon it with a certain thrill.

I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.
_OГ№'st-ce que vous allez?_ was changed for me into _Quoi, vous rentrez
au Monastier ce soir?_ and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There was
one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me
whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were
filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion, the
dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's head on
English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in English Journals.
The language, in particular, filled them with surprise.

"Do they speak _patois_ in England?" I was once asked; and when I told
them not, "Ah, then, French?" said they.

"No, no," I said, "not French."

"Then," they concluded, "they speak _patois_."

You must obviously either speak French or _patois_. Talk of the force of
logic--here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but
proceeding to give illustrations of ray native jargon, I was met with a
new mortification. Of all _patois_ they declared that mine was the most
preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a
new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to
rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I
looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable
bewilderment. "Bread," which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing
monosyllable in England, was the word that most delighted these good
ladies of Monastier; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page
of Pickwick; and they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I
presume, for winter evenings. I have tried it since then with every sort
of accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.

They were of all ages: children at their first web of lace, a stripling
girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid married women,
and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards
decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and
ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the
subject of our talk. Life, since the fall in wages, had begun to appear
to them with a more serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes
laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge
aright; and one of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the
party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy,
or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous
twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me
with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible gaiety
of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a
real attachment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait,
in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily
composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would
always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her
sitting in judgment over the last. "No, no," she would say, "that is not
it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try
again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in
a somewhat touching manner. We should not meet again, she said; it was a
long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old
lady, that who knows? I have said good-bye to people for greater
distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again.

One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
oldest, and with hardly an exception. In spite of their piety, they
could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing
so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman
of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by
way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young,
dressed like a lady and avoided _patois_ like a weakness, commonly
addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the
swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a
village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet
ended when I had finished it and took my departure. It is true she had
a right to be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the
worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to
hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river,
and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and
silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed
unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest
countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised the ear.

The _Conductor_, as he is called, _of Roads and Bridges_ was my
principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken
more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was his
specialty to have a generous taste in eating. This was what was most
indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I found in his
company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and special knowledge
are the great social qualities, and what they are about, whether white
sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether secondary question.

I used to accompany the _Conductor_ on his professional rounds, and grew
to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an
entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the wayside
with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we
visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the apothecary's father,
was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was
gathering materials for the "Marquis de Villemer"; and I have spoken
with an old man, who was then a child running about the inn kitchen, and
who still remembers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he
spoke French imperfectly; for this reason George Sand chose him for
companion, and whenever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in
_patois_, she would make him repeat it again and again till it was
graven in her memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her
fancy; and it would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in
her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of letters and had never so
much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering with
this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far
from beautiful: the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little
to Velaisian swine-herds!

On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
Mount MГ©zenc and the borders of ArdГЁche, I began an improving
acquaintance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at
having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the
supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called "the gallantry" of
paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a
man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am
afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one
night a company of _bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manГЁge avec des
chaises_, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that
this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming
from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by
six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and
filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to
go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at
length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily
into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil _qui s'amusait
Г  faire Г§a_.

I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.

The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
than formerly. "_C'est difficile_," he added, "_Г  expliquer_."

When we were well up on the moors and the _Conductor_ was trying some
road-metal with the gauge--

"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing?"

We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.

"It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he.

For every summer, the flocks out of all ArdГЁche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.

Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
intentions.

The _Conductor_ told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
these uncouth timidities.

The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
are snowed up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
and airless hovel, and equally without work or diversion. The father may
carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until
the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It
is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these
mountain habitations. A clock and an almanack, you would fancy, were
indispensable in such a life....




EDINBURGH
PICTURESQUE NOTES
EDINBURGH




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY


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

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

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

Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few
places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye.
In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike
shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon
the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning
themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all
beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set
with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze
at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most
busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by
the accidents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the
globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires,
are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look
down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of
Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way frightened of a
strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the Corinthian
capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and
daylight close the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and
as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified
distinctness--or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse
all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter
along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across
the valley--the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of
nature in the most intimate sense; that this profusion of
eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a
drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality,
connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe,
and inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and
attend church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By
all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and
leaning towards decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of
the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare;
but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and
posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free
with historic localities, and rear their young among the most
picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging
by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a
little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
striking feature of the place.[1]

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

[1] These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town; and a
proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news
caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded
fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small
blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business habit.
Church-going 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 the way of inhabitants. A man in a
frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has
the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
console themselves--they do as well as anybody else; the population of
(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same
romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but
that is of gold: _I have not yet written a book about Glasgow._




CHAPTER II

OLD TOWN: THE LANDS


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

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

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

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

These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
different order--skulking jail-birds; unkempt, barefoot 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 have been upwards of sixty
before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE


Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St.
Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would
be unrecognizable; 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 fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either
side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of
the _lands_, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.

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

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

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

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

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

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