CHAPTER V.
GREYFRIARS.


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superseded by half-a-dozen others.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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


CHAPTER VI.
NEW TOWN - TOWN AND COUNTRY.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


CHAPTER VII.
THE VILLA QUARTERS.


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

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

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

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

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


CHAPTER VIII.
THE CALTON HILL.


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IX.
WINTER AND NEW YEAR.



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

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

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

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

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

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