Edinburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson
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EDINBURGH



CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.



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

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

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

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

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

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


CHAPTER II.
OLD TOWN - THE LANDS.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER III.
THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV.
LEGENDS.



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

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

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

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

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

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