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

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




CHAPTER IV

LEGENDS


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

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

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and 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 key-hole and made off; for within, it
was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow
forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible
next-door neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within
would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was
a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own
neglect.

And then we have Major Weir; for although even his house is now
demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He
and his sister lived together in an odour of sour piety. She was a
marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known
among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall,
black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim countenance,
and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas
was burned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner
hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon their
old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our
intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this
superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the
outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the
facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of
myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and
even ran before him with a lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females,
"stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at
unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his
abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to
sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled 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 most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
something worse--a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out--on some
point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor
separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture--he had a
Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be
overstepped for ever.

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




CHAPTER V

GREYFRIARS


It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new
and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an
antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The
Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their
gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall Castle and the tallest of
the Castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh
points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another
instance, how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars
stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there,
and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The
open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin,
the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly
adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the
heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest
among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to
love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and
even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for
the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep
consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and
any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries;
and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.
You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin
mottoes--some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on
a scroll from angels' trumpets--on the emblematic horrors, the figures
rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in
which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and
their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth.
Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest apprentice,
whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and
the combined effect of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is
serious to the point of melancholy.

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

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

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

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
resurrection-man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head,
used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going
forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but
newly finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken
refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the church is the haunted
mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in
the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once
harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
Greyfriars--a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you
may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his
body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other
the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred
garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock
at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy
Mackenzie, 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 _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in one of its own
inscriptions--an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed a critical
eye--is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie
persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that
extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge--fed on bread
and water, and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen--lay five
months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might
have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of
the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
George, there stands a monument, dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no
moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is
not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much
as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American plantations;
but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such things
interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth
as well as Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know
not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how
some of them--or some part of some of them--found their way at length to
such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions,
but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography:--

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

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




CHAPTER VI

NEW TOWN: TOWN AND COUNTRY


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

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

Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once saw a butterfly at
the Town Cross; and the sight inspired him with a worthless little ode.
This painted 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 of far-away trees upon
your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of
scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if
they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back window of a grimy
tenement in a lane:--and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and
bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down
into the Highland hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking
for the Baltic.

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

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

It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of
his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode
in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated)
known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday
schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door.
There are places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils.
Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken
on summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you have seen a
waving wheatfield on the site of your present residence. The memories of
an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with
delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs
full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters that were
neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and
myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a
sentiment as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the
butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded
among streets and squares. The tunnel to the Scotland Street Station,
the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards
upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous
edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of
paramount impressiveness to a young mind. It was a subterranean passage,
although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
novels; and these two words, "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 illumination of
remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare
with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow
changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as
Cannon-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 _land_ upon the High Street.
They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a quaint air of having
wandered far from their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with
their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running
null-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 play-grounds of our boyhood. But we have some
possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills, unless it be a
cataclysm of nature, which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay
all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills
and the Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children. Our
windows, at no expense to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a
landscape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to
flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set
his heart beating for travel and pure air.




CHAPTER VII

THE VILLA QUARTERS


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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII

THE CALTON HILL


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

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

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