AROUND THE CLOCKIN EUROPEEDINBURGH
IN EUROPE
1 P.M. TO 2 P.M.
Upthere on the gusty heights of Edinburgh no one ever inquires the time at one o’clock in the afternoon. Precisely at the second, a ball flutters to the top of the Nelson flagstaff on Calton Hill and a cannon booms from a battery at Castle Rock; and watches are then set by merchants all over town, by shepherds on the shaggy Pentland Hills, and sailors on ships in the lee of Leith. And one o’clock is the very best time Edinburgh could have fixed upon to encourage her people to look up and about and behold her at her finest. It is luncheon-hour, and when the sun is kindly, “Auld Reekie” is just about as garish and stimulating as it is possible for a town of such dignified traditions and questionable climate ever to become. The air freshens in from blustering Leith, and fair Princes Street wears its most beguiling smiles. One thrills with the joy of being alive in so brave and bonny a world, with the bluebells and heather of Old Scotland about him and this town of song and story at his feet. He gazes at the cheerful crowds movingleisurely along the valley gardens elegant with statues and flowered lawns, or across at the frowzy heads in rickety garret windows away up among the palsied gables of ancient High Street, and he knows that over there is the Canongate of stern tradition and the storied St. Giles’ and black Holyrood, and beyond them he sees the Salisbury Crags, a gaunt palisade halfway up to lofty Arthur’s Seat. He has just arrived, perhaps, with the glow on his face of all he has read and heard of this famed place, and the bugles are singing on Castle Hill and the Edinburgh bells are ringing.
There is little opportunity for preliminary impressions while arriving. The train darts up a valley before you have finished with the suburban cottages of the laboring men, and with an ultimate shriek of relief abruptly dives into its cave, as it were, and deposits you unceremoniously in the esplanaded Waverley Station, with flowered walks above and a market just at hand. The wise traveler gathers up his luggage and fares eagerly forth to Princes Street, as a matter of course. There, on the way to his hotel, he finds a good part of Edinburgh idling pleasantly after luncheon, for Princes Street is the dear delight of the loiterer be he old or young, Robin or Jean. He is studied as he passes through the crowds, curiously, smilingly, critically, tolerantly. His clothing may excite disapproval, his baggage amusement, and his intentions speculation.Curiosity “takes the air” at noon. Arrived in a moment at a Princes Street hotel and duly registered, he is handed a curious disk of white cardboard the size of an after-dinner coffee-cup’s top, upon which is blazoned the number of the room to which he has just been assigned. Preceded by a chambermaid gowned in black and aproned in white and followed by a porter with his traps, he advances grandly to his quarters, according to the tag, and hurries to a window for his first keen impression of the “Modern Athens.”
EDINBURGH, PRINCES STREET
EDINBURGH, PRINCES STREET
Just why it should be called an “Athens” would scarcely be apparent from a Princes Street hotel window. The literary rights to the title might be conceded, but the stranger will need to view the town from some neighboring height to appreciate the physical similarity between the two cities and to observe the suggestiveness of the Castle and the reminder of the Acropolis in the “ruin”-crowned summit of Calton Hill. What he does see from his window is sufficiently inspiring. At his feet stretches Princes Street which he has heard called the finest avenue in Europe, and along its other side terraces of vivid turf, set with shade trees and statues and flowered walks, drop down in graceful steps to the lawns in the bottom of the valley that was once the North Loch’s basin and where now, to Edinburgh’s chagrin, are the railroad tracks. Across these gardens vaults a boulevard styled “The Mound,” and on their farther side is the gray old Castle on its precipitous crag with a soft sweep of green braes at its base. Onthe Castle side of the valley the far-famed High Street turns the venerable backs of its tall, tottering, weather-blackened rookeries on the frivolity of Princes Street, and scornfully gives its laundry to the breeze in hundreds of heaped and crooked gable-windows. Centuries before any of us were born those fantastic and whimsical family nests were lined up as we see them to-day. One could fancy them a row of colossal, prehistoric giraffes with their tails all our way, nibbling imaginary tree-tops on High Street. The stranger will lean out of his window and look down Princes Street and start with delight to see that “sublimest monument to a literary genius,” the lace-like Gothic spire to Scott, where, under a springing canopy of arches and aspiring needles studded with statues of the immortal characters he created, sits the great Sir Walter himself in snowy Carrara, with his favorite hound at his feet. And one’s heart warms to this romantic Edinburgh so beloved of him and of the fiery Burns, the passionate Chalmers, the gentle Allan Ramsay, and Jeffrey of the brilliant “far-darting” criticisms. Here, in their time, mused Robert Fergusson and David Livingstone and Smollett and Hume and Goldsmith and De Quincey and “Kit North” and Carlyle; and but yesterday has added the name of Stevenson, not the least loved of them all. What inspiration this region must have kindled to have given to Art such sons as Gordon, Drummond, Nasmyth, Wilkie, Raeburn,and Faed! Could the roster of old Greyfriars Burying-Ground be called, one would marvel at the number of great names there memorialized that are familiar and beloved to the remotest, out-of-the-way corners of the earth. And so the new arrival closes his window more slowly than he raised it and steals reverently down into the street to meet this Edinburgh face to face.
You might think, to hear Americans talk at home, that every other Edinburgh man carries a dirk or a claymore under a tartan and wears a ferocious red beard like the pictures of Rob Roy; that people go about in plaid shawls and tam o’shanters, and that most society functions end up with a Highland fling. One may see at wayside railroad stations, as in our own country, wild, hair-blown lassies with flaming cheeks running in from the hills to have a look at the train; but with some such mild exception, if it is one, the Scots on their native heath are, of course, precisely what we are used to elsewhere. Types apart, the man of the streets of Edinburgh looks entirely familiar—shrewd and combative, rugged and perhaps hard, slouchy and indifferent in the matter of dress, hobnailed and be-capped. There is something tremendously genuine and wholesome about him. He is merry and brisk and lively, often; but you would not call him ever quite gay—at least with that sparkle that dances in the eyes you look into on the Paris boulevards. You could scarcely, for instance, imagine a Scotchman singing a barcarolle!Best of all they are honest and sincere, and one takes to them at once. Here are the lassies and laddies you have long sung about, fresh-faced and debonair. Cheerful fearlessness shines out of their frank blue eyes, and they look to dare all things and be utterly unafraid. The square foreheads of the older men, the austere cheek bones and strong chins, unscroll history to the observer and make him think of savage broils along the border, of fierce finish-fights throughout the wild Highlands, and of the deathless Grays of Waterloo. You may defeat a Scotchman, but he will never admit it, and if he is all-Scotch he will not even know it. They are brave, witty, and devoted, and many a person will take issue with Swift for finding their conversation “hardly tolerable,” and with Lamb for pronouncing their “tediousness provoking” and for giving them up in despair of ever learning to like them.
The new arrival plunges into Princes Street, accepts inspection good-naturedly, and soon feels entirely at home. He may even find the day bright and cheerful, in spite of apprehension over the dictum of Stevenson that this climate is “the vilest under heaven.” The street is quite unusual—one side a terraced valley, the other a splendid line of shops, clubs, and hotels, with gay awnings. Paris and London novelties fill the windows. A throng of vehicles bustles up and down—motor-busses, double-decked trolley cars, taxi-cabs, hired Victorias, two-wheeled carts, brewery wagons, stationlorries, tourists’chars-à-bancswith drivers in scarlet liveries, private carriages and bicycles. The stream of people on either pavement is of the holiday cheeriness that comes with the luncheon recess from office and shop, though here and there one may occasionally discover some “sour-looking female in bombazine” that recalls R. L. S.’s “Mrs. McRankin” and who appears as ready as she to inquire whether we attend to our “releegion.” The restaurants are plying a brisk trade, contenting their tarrying guests, speeding the parting and hailing the coming. Whole coveys of pretty shop-girls with brilliant cheeks, wholesome and vivacious, come chattering and laughing out of tea- and luncheon-rooms and flutter back to work with frequent enthusiastic stops before alluring windows. Workmen in tweed caps and clerks in straw hats pass by, to or from their occupations, and always with lingering looks toward the Princes Street Gardens, so that one can accurately guess whether they are coming from or going to office by applying the reliable Shakespearean formula—
“Love goes to Love as schoolboys from their books,And Love from Love to school with heavy looks.”
“Love goes to Love as schoolboys from their books,And Love from Love to school with heavy looks.”
“Love goes to Love as schoolboys from their books,And Love from Love to school with heavy looks.”
“Love goes to Love as schoolboys from their books,
And Love from Love to school with heavy looks.”
The air is rhythmic with the up-and-down slur of this speech of “aye” and “na.” Curious faces flash past. Threadbare lawyers argue pompously as they saunter back arm in arm toward Parliament Close, and theruddy-cheeked girls, by contrast, seem so distracting that a foreigner rages at the sentiment that “kissing is out of season when the gorse is out of bloom.” Occasionally, even at so early an hour, there is evidence of the passion for drink. “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut” flashes to mind, and one fancies the unsteady ones are trying to hum, “We are na fou, we’re no that fou, but just a drappie in our ee.” When night comes on, sober men in the streets have reason to frown censoriously; and if it be a Saturday night, they may even feel lonesome.
A passing regiment is a welcome interruption and a brave spectacle. It is always hailed with shouts of joy. All Edinburgh turns in its bed Sunday mornings at nine to see the Black Watch come out from the Castle for “church parade” at St. Giles’s. Nothing stirs Princes Street on any week day like a military display. It is a thrilling moment to a stranger, perhaps, when he has his first glimpse of a young Tommy Atkins, and he stops stock-still to take in the bright scarlet, tailless jacket, the tight trousers, the “pill-box” perilously cocked over an ear, and the inevitable “swagger cane” with which he slaps his leg as he braves it along. But what is that to the passing of a company of Highlanders! Along they come, kilts and plaids, sporrans swinging, claymores rattling, and jolly Glengarry bonnets poised rakishly to the falling point. Ten pipers are droning and three drummers are pounding; and one watches, as they pass, for the holly sprig, or what-not, they wear intheir bonnets as a badge of the clan. The best show is made by the King’s Highlanders from up Balmoral way; and splendid they are in royal Stuart tartan, with the oak leaf and thistle in their bonnets and each man carrying a Lochaber axe. If there is anything more inspiriting than cheery bagpipe music at such a time, no one to laugh foolishly at it and every one to love it, and the men stepping proudly and the crowd applauding,—I, for one, do not know it.
Keenness of impressions, as we all know, may depend on the most trivial circumstances of time and place. I recall, for example, a sharp and thrilling musical experience in Scotland, with the instrument nothing more than the despised and humble mouth-organ. Perhaps it was the mood, perhaps the setting, perhaps the unexpectedness of it; there was so little and yet so much. At all events, I shall not soon forget the sparkle and stir of “The British Grenadiers” as it ripped the sharp night air of quiet Melrose to the approach of three English soldiers, one with the mouth-organ and the others whistling in time as they marched briskly along. I shall always remember the rhythmic beat of their feet as they swung across the murky, deserted square, the loudness, the thrill, and the lilt of that historic melody, and the flicker of a lamp in a window here and there and the pleasant sting of the keen night air.
There is no better place for a stranger to “get his bearings” in Edinburgh than out on that valley-spanningboulevard they call “The Mound.” He then has the Old Town to one side and the New Town to the other, and on opposite corners, as if to maintain the balance, the Castle and Calton Hill. He also takes note of the several bridges that clamp the town together, as it were; and he may look down into the gardens before him and watch the children playing as far as the promenade-covered Waverley Station, or he may turn and look the other way and see quite as many more all the way along the pleasant green to the old battle-scarred West Kirk of St. Cuthbert’s where De Quincey lies in his quiet grave. Thus he will find himself of a sunny afternoon between the pleasant horns of a most agreeable dilemma. He must choose whether to spend his first hour in the New Town or the Old. If he remembers what Ruskin said he will fly from the New; but then he may go there, after all, if he recalls the opinion of the old skipper cited by Stevenson, whose most radiant conception of Paradise was “the New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free.” He must decide whether his present inclination is for latter-day city features, like conventional streets lined with substantial gray stone buildings looking all very much alike, for the fashionables of Charlotte Square and Moray Place and the bankers and brokers of St. Andrew Square, or the historic ground of crowded old High Street and the Castle and Holyrood. He would find in the New Town some old places, too, for it is one hundred and fifty years old,and there are the literary associations of the last century and the house on Castle Street where Scott lived more than a quarter-century—“poor No. 39,” as he called it in his Journal—and wrote the early Waverley Novels, and rejoiced along with his mystified friends in the tremendous success of “The Great Unknown.” He would find it a rapidly modernizing city; no longer may the children salute the lamplighter on his nightly rounds with “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!” But he would find the most interesting things there the oldest things, and they all in the Antiquarian Museum—and what a show! John Knox’s pulpit, the banners of the Covenanters, the “thumbikins” that “aided” confession and the guillotine “Maiden” that rewarded it, the pistols Robert Burns used as an exciseman, and the sea-chest and cocoanut cup of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe; and there, too, is Bonnie Prince Charlie’s blue ribbon of the Garter and the ring Flora Macdonald gave him when they parted. If historic paraphernalia is alluring, however, the scenes of its associations are much more so; and our friend would doubtless hesitate no longer, but turn to the Old Town and trudge up the steep way to the Castle.
“You tak’ the high roadAnd I’ll tak’ the low road,And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—
“You tak’ the high roadAnd I’ll tak’ the low road,And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—
“You tak’ the high roadAnd I’ll tak’ the low road,And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—
“You tak’ the high road
And I’ll tak’ the low road,
And I’ll get to Scotland afore ye”;—
and if the song had kept to geography it would probably have added, “And we’ll meet at the bonny Castle o’Auld Reekie.” Such, at least, has been a Scotch custom for thirteen hundred years; and with every reason. Through the long and cruel centuries it has gathered to its flinty gray bosom memories of every possible phase of national mutation, desperate or glorious, gloomy or gay. One approaches it with awe. So long has it gripped the summit of that impregnable rock, half a thousand feet sheer on three of its sides, that it has blended into the life and color of its foundations, like a huge chameleon, until one could scarcely say where rock leaves off and castle begins. A stern and pitiless object, tolerating only here and there a grassy crevice at its base, and a clinging tree or two. In the great “historic mile” of High Street, lifting gradually from Holyrood to this rugged elevation, one feels the illusion of an enormous scornful finger extended dramatically westward toward the traditional rival, Glasgow. There is no need to see Highland regiments drilling on its broad esplanade, or to enter its sally-port or penetrate the dungeons in its rocky depths to have confidence that the royal regalia of “The Honours of Scotland” are safe enough here, on the red cushions in their iron cage. One enters, and there settles upon him a feeling of sharing in every grim tradition since the doughty days “when gude King Robert rang.” It is not a visit; it is an initiation.
Quite worthy of this savage stronghold is the inspiring outlook from its parapets over hills and rivers and storied glens. One turns impatiently from “MonsMeg,” which may have been a big gun in some past day of little ones, to gaze afar over the carse of Stirling and the trailing silver links of the Forth to where the snow shines in the clefts of Ben Ledi, or out over the Pentland Hills where the “Sweet Singers” awaited the Judgment. The sportsman will think of the grouse-shooting at Loch Earn; the sentimentalist will reflect that when night settles over Aberdeenshire the pipers will strike up their strathspeys and there will be Scotch reels by torchlight. Scotland seems unrolled at your feet and Scottish songs rush to mind until you fairly bound the region in verse and story: To the north and northwest, “Bonnie Dundee,” the glens of “Clan Alpine’s warriors true,” Bannockburn and “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “The Banks of Allan Water”; to the north and east, the Firth of Forth where the fishwives’ “puir fellows darkle as they face the billows”; to the west and southwest, “The banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Tam o’Shanter’s” land, “Sweet Afton” and “Bonnie Loch Leven” whence “the Campbells are comin’”; and to the south, “The braes of Yarrow,” “Norham’s castled steep, Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep, and Cheviot’s mountains lone,” and, most sung of all, “The Border”:—
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody frayWhen the blue bonnets came over the border.”
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody frayWhen the blue bonnets came over the border.”
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody frayWhen the blue bonnets came over the border.”
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody fray
When the blue bonnets came over the border.”
The afternoon sun rests brightly on the pretty glenin the foreground where lie the dismal, bat-flown ruins of Rosslyn Castle, loopholed for archers and shadowed in ancient yews that have overhung the Esk for a thousand years, and on the delicate chapel of stone-lace where the barons of Rosslyn await the Judgment in full armor with finger-tips joined in prayer. And there, too, are the cool, dark thickets of Hawthornden, recalling the ever-popular
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,And I will follow thee.”
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,And I will follow thee.”
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,And I will follow thee.”
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love,
And I will follow thee.”
One cannot forbear a smile as he surveys the noble bridge that spans the Forth and recalls the insistent pride of Edinburgh in the same. Here is an achievement over which all visitors are expected to exclaim in amazement—and engineers, I presume, invariably do. On this point your Edinburgh man is immovable. He scorns to elaborate and he will not descend to eulogy. He merely indicates it with a reverent inclination of the head, and turns and looks you in the eye; you are supposed to do the rest. Personally, while I give the great structure its dues, which are many, I like what flows under it more.
And there is one thing about the Forth that Edinburgh people never forget, nor do the visitors who find it out: “Caller herrin’!” It must have taxed the resources of even such a genius as Lady Nairne, whose home one may see if he looks beyond Holyrood to the villas ofDuddingston, to have written two such dissimilar songs as the heart-melting “Land o’ the Leal” and the cheery “Caller Herrin’.” There’s the king of all marketing songs. It really compels one to think with despair of what a dreary mockery life would be were this, of all harvests, to fail. For love of that song I could defend the Forth herring against all competitors whatsoever. Loch Fyne herring? Fair fish, yes; but really, now, you would hardly say they have that racy flavor we get in the Forth article. Caller salmon? Oh, pshaw, you are from Glasgow; you have been swearing by caller salmon for five hundred years; have it on your coat of arms; used to draw it on legal papers as other people do seals;—but, honestly, have you ever seen a salmon in the Clyde, anywhere near Glasgow, in all your life? And if you did, would you eat it? Certainly not! So “give over,” as they say in England. Certainly there never was such pathos and unction devoted to just such a subject. And the music, too! How it compels you with its appealing monotones and rebukes you with the brave huckster cries on high F! So when you are passing near Waverley Market and encounter one of the picturesque Scandinavian fishwives, who has trudged in with her “woven willow” from her little stone house at Newhaven with the patched roof and quaint fore-stairs, unless you are willing to buy a herring then and there and carry it around in your pocket, run for your life before she starts singing:—
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,Darkling as they face the billows,A’ to fill our woven willows!“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;Buy my caller herrin’,New drawn frae the Forth.”
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,Darkling as they face the billows,A’ to fill our woven willows!“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;Buy my caller herrin’,New drawn frae the Forth.”
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,Darkling as they face the billows,A’ to fill our woven willows!
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows,
Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows,
Darkling as they face the billows,
A’ to fill our woven willows!
“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;Buy my caller herrin’,New drawn frae the Forth.”
“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?
They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;
Buy my caller herrin’,
New drawn frae the Forth.”
To stroll down High Street is to unscroll Scottish history and survey Edinburgh of to-day at one and the same time. “Hie-gait,” as the old fellows still occasionally call it, is the “historic mile”par excellenceof Scotland. In its independent fashion it assumes new names as it meanders along, first Castle Hill, then Lawnmarket, then High Street, and finally Canongate. Even the afternoon sun ventures guardedly among the nest of tall, gauntlandsthat scowl at each other across its war-worn way. Bleak and glum to the peaked and gabled roofs, eight and ten stories above the sidewalk, they have resisted dry rot by a miracle of mortar and still hang together, doubtless to their own amazement, huddling a perfect enmeshment of tiny homes like some ingenious nest of boxes. It would be hard to imagine more drear and rickety domiciles or any more nervously overshadowed with an impending doom of dissolution. One looks anxiously about to see some venerable veteran give it up with a dismal, weary groan and collapse in a vast huddle of domestic wreckage. Fancy livingwhere you have to scale breakneck stairs to a dizzy height and then reach your remote eyrie by a trembling gangway over an air well! Theclosesorwyndsthat are engulfed among these flat-chested ancients are equally surprising. One passes in from the street through a dirty entrance with a worn stone sill and a rudely carven doorhead inscribed with Scriptural and moral injunctions, and finds himself in an inner court fronted by dirty doors and palsied windows full of frowzy women, a cobbled pavement littered with refuse and a patch of sky half-hidden by fragments of laundry. And, mind you, these retreats are not without pride of tradition; many of them have entertained riches and royalty—but that was not last week. Lady Jane Grey was once hidden in famous White Horse Close, which must have fallen further than Lucifer to reach its present condition. Douglas Tavern was in one of them, where Burns and his brethren of the “Crochallan Club” were wont to revel with “Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie, and amang guid companie.” Legends, of course, abound. There was the case of the two stubborn sisters who quarreled one night and never spoke to each other again, though they lived the remainder of their lives together in the selfsame room. There’s Scotch persistence! Deacon Brodie was another instance, the “Raffles” of his time. He it was who used to ply his nefarious trade by night on the friends who knew him by day as a highly respectable cabinet-worker; and if you look furtively aloft at some dusty,closed shutter you can fancy the dark lantern glowing and the file rasping and the black mask drawn to his chin. Happily, they hanged him eventually; and, singularly enough, on the very gallows for which he had himself invented a very superior drop.
Aclose, therefore, is so cheerless a spot that you could not well be worse off if you were to dive down the steep, wet steps of a neighboring slit of an alley and come out on the old Grassmarket of sinister renown where they hanged the Covenanters of the Moss Hags. As you gaze about on this ill-omened slum, once the home of many a prosperous and respected “free burgess,” but now given over to drovers and visiting farmers, and peer suspiciously up the adjoining West Port where Burke and Hare conducted their murders to get bodies for the surgeons, you are very apt to beat a hurried retreat and cry out with Claverhouse, “Come, open the West Port and let me gang free!”
After one or two such explorations a stranger is content to pursue his investigation in the broad light of High Street. It seems delightful then to watch the barefooted boys in the street and the little girls in aprons and “pigtails.” And happily he may come across a shaggy steely-eyed old Highlander growling to a comrade in the guttural Gaelic, or perhaps a soldier in kilts and sporan. At this hour he will certainly see around Parliament Square groups of advocates and solicitors and “writers to the Signet,” and, it may be, some judge ofthe “Inner House” or “Outer House,” and possibly the Lord President himself. Otherwise he can take note of the uninviting shop-windows and the piles of merchandise on the sidewalks, and find entertainment in such unfamiliar signs as “provisioners,” “spirit merchants,” “bootmakers,” “hairdressers,” etc., with prices set forth in shillings and pence, or rejoice in a hostelry with so unusual a name as “The Black Bull Lodgings for Travellers and Working Men.”
There are pleasant surprises. For instance, you find in the cobbled pavement the outline of a heart—and you do not have to be told that you are standing on the site of the terrible old Tolbooth prison, at the Heart of Midlothian. And what rushes to mind and displaces all other associations if not the fine story Sir Walter gave us under that name! Here, then, the Porteous mob swarmed and raged in its struggle to burn this savage Bastile, and here they tried and condemned poor Effie Deans and locked her up while the faithful Jeanie turned heaven and earth to save her, and the heart of old David broke. “The Heart of Midlothian!” Why, it is like being a boy all over again!
Encouraged by this discovery, like a man who has just found a gold-piece, you keep a sharp lookout on the pavements, and presently comes a second reward in the shape of a brass tablet in the ground marking the last resting-place of stern John Knox. “There!” say you; “Dr. Johnson said he ought to be buried in the publicroad, and sure enough, he is!” What a man! He dared all things and feared nothing. How many a long discourse did Queen Mary herself supply him a topic for, and how often did he assail even her with personal rebukes and virulent public tirades! Thanks to the Free Church, his dwelling stands intact, farther down the street at the site of the Netherbow; and a fine specimen it is of sixteenth-century domestic Scotch architecture, with low ceilings and stairways scarce two feet wide—but, like its former austere tenant, narrow, cornery, and unpleasant. Implacable, unbending old John Knox! There is nothing in Browning more shuddering in imaginative flight than the quatrain:—
“As if you had carried sour John KnoxTo the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,Fastened him into a front-row box,And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
“As if you had carried sour John KnoxTo the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,Fastened him into a front-row box,And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
“As if you had carried sour John KnoxTo the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,Fastened him into a front-row box,And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
“As if you had carried sour John Knox
To the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
One makes a long stop before the far-famed church of St. Giles, half a thousand years old and the battle-ground of warring creeds. Its crown-shaped tower top is one of the familiar landmarks of Edinburgh. Within you may study to heart’s content the grim barrel vaulting and massive Norman piers and the tattered Scottish flags in the nave, but there is scope for many an agreeable thought outside if one conjures up the little luckenbooth shops that once clustered between its buttresses, and imagines Allan Ramsay in his funny nightcap selling wigs, or “Jingling Geordie” Heriot, of“The Fortunes of Nigel,” gossiping with his friend King JamesVIover his jewelry counter. Nor would you forget Jenny Geddes and how she seized her stool in disgust when the Dean undertook to introduce the ritual, and let it fly at the good man’s head with the sizzling invective, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye! Would ye say mass i’ my lug!”
Old Tron Kirk, farther on, is still an active feature of Edinburgh life, and particularly on New Year’s Eve when the crowds rally here as the old year dies. Beyond it the Canongate extends itself in a rambling, happy-go-lucky fashion, lined with curious timber-fronted houses with “turnpike” stairs. It is like sitting down to “Humphrey Clinker” once more; or better still, perhaps, to the poems of Fergusson; and we smile at thoughts of the scowling, early-risen housewives of other days who would
“Wi’ glowering eyeTheir neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
“Wi’ glowering eyeTheir neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
“Wi’ glowering eyeTheir neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
“Wi’ glowering eye
Their neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
and fancy how the convivial revelers would foregather by night and
“sit fu’ snug,Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,Or haddock lug.”
“sit fu’ snug,Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,Or haddock lug.”
“sit fu’ snug,Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,Or haddock lug.”
“sit fu’ snug,
Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,
Or haddock lug.”
But lingering along the Canongate is a negligible pleasure. There is nothing in the whole architectural world more jailish and pitiless than the gaunt Tolbooth and all its grim neighbors. It is as if the conceptionof anything suggestive of beauty or ornamentation had been harshly repressed, and ugliness and the most naked utility sternly insisted upon. One may, however, if he is interested in slums, pause a moment to look down through the railings of the South Bridge on the screaming peddlers and flaunting shame of bedraggled Cowgate, and behold a district which stands to Edinburgh in the relative position of Rivington Street to New York, or Petticoat Lane to London, or Montmartre to Paris.
The end of the Canongate, a few steps farther on, debouches unexpectedly, and with a sudden unpreparedness for the stranger, on the great open square before Holyrood. There it stands, black and dismal; more like a prison than a palace! The Abbey ruins, in the rear, supply all the atmosphere of romance that the eye will get here. But the eye is better left as a secondary aid in comprehending Holyrood; history and imagination do the work. Cowering sorrowfully in its gloomy hollow, it has the look of a moody, forsaken thing brooding over a neglectful world. Its memories are of the dead. Its sole companionship is in the mosses and grassy aisles of the crumbling Abbey chapel, where lie the bones of Scottish royalty that ruled and reveled here its allotted time and left scarce a memory behind. It was here they slew Rizzio as he dined with Queen Mary; and perhaps that is romance enough.
The fumes and cobwebs of murky tradition dissipatein the keen, vigorous air of Calton Hill. Breezes from over the level shore-sands of Leith taste sharp of salt and excite bracing thoughts of the sea. Like a map, the whole environ of Edinburgh lies exposed from the Pentlands to the Firth. There is the steepled city, rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean, and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen’s cottages, and farther still the Meadows and their archery grounds, “the furzy hills of Braid” and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence “Marmion” and his bard looked down on “mine own romantic town,” and, on the southern horizon, the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too. To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying courses for the Baltic. In the distance, over Leith, looms the tall lighthouse of the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad. Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling little Water of Leith, where “David Balfour” kept tryst with “Alan Breck,” and many a sturdy little “brig” leaps across it as it hurries along, “brimmed,” wrote Stevenson, “like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds.” Still farther to the westward, where the old Queens Ferry Coach Roadappears as a faint white tracing, within many “a mile of Edinborough Town,” thin vapors of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brooksides; and one knows that the rowans there are white with bloom and the meadows flecked with daisies, and that bees are droning in the foxglove and blackbirds singing in the hawthorn.
Calton Hill itself scarcely improves on acquaintance, but loses rather. Its meagre scattering of monuments would barely excite a passing interest were it not for their conspicuous location and that suggestion of the Athenian Acropolis. A paltry array—a tall, ugly column to Nelson, a choragic monument like the one to Burns on a hillside near Holyrood, an old observatory with a brown tower and a new one with a colonnaded portico and a dome, and, most mentioned of all, the so-called “ruin” of the proposed national monument to the Scotch dead of Waterloo and the Peninsula, which got no farther than a row of columns and an entablature when funds failed and work stopped. Many a bitter shaft of scorn and mockery has this ill-starred undertaking pointed for the disparagers of Scotland. However, in its present condition it has done more than any other agency to stimulate the pleasant illusion of the “Modern Athens.” The hill itself is a favorite resort, lofty, and with a broad, rounded top. The eastern slopes are terraced and set with gardens, and the western and northern sides are steep verdant braes. One yieldsthe palm for reckless daring to Bothwell; not every one would care to speed a horse down such a course even to win attention from eyes so bright and important as Queen Mary’s.
It was on Calton Hill I had my first experience of the old school of Scotchmen, in the person of a dry and withered chip of Auld Reekie, combative, peppery, brusque and sententious, and abounding in that peculiar admixture of braggadocio and repression so characteristic of the class. He had evidently been nurtured from infancy on Allan Ramsay’s collection of Scotch proverbs, for he quoted them continually, giving the poet credit for their origin. He was sitting in the shade of Nelson’s column in shirt sleeves and cap, absorbed to all appearances in a copy of “The Scotsman,” though I suspect he had been regarding me for some while with quite as much curiosity as I now did him. He was a grim, self-contained old party, as dignified as the Lord Provost himself, with gray, shaggy eyebrows and a thin, wry mouth that gripped a cutty pipe; and he looked so much a part of the surroundings, so settled and weather-beaten, that one might almost have passed him over for some memorial carving or, at least, an “animated bust.” Him I beheld with vast inner delight and gingerly approached, giving “Good day” with all the cordiality in the world. The reward was a curt nod and a keen scrutiny from a pair of hard and twinkling blue eyes that had an appearance under the grizzled browsof stars in a frosty sky. I observed upon the fineness of the day; he opined “There had been waur, no doot.” I noted what a capital spot it was for a quiet smoke; he allowed I might “gang far an’ find nane better.” Here I made proffer of a cigar and, presumably, with acceptable humility, for he took it with an “Ah, weel, I dinna mind,” of gloomy resignation—and so we got things going.
The conversation that followed I venture to give in some detail as illustrating, possibly, the peculiarities of a type to be encountered on every Edinburgh street corner—whimsical, conservative, witty, cautious in opinion, and surcharged with local pride.
“A man can take life pleasantly here,” said I, when we had lighted up.
“Aye, aye,” said he; “even a hard-workin’ one like mysel’, as Gude kens. But a bit smoke frae ane an’ twa o’ the day hurts naebody, I’m thinkin’; an’ auld Allan Ramsay was richt eneuch, ‘Light burdens break nae banes.’”
“You will never be leaving Edinburgh, I’ll warrant.”
“Na, na. Ye’ll have heard tell the sayin’, ‘Remove an auld tree an’ it will wither.’”
“There’s more money to be made elsewhere, perhaps.”
“I’m no so sure o’ that. Forbye, ‘Little gear the less care.’”
“One wouldn’t find a handsomer city than this, at all events.”
“Aweel, aweel, a’body kens that. Ye’ll no so vera frequently see the bate o’ it, I’m thinkin’. Them that should ken the best say sae.”
“How many people are there here, sir?”
“Mare than three hunner an’ fifty thoosan’, I’m telt.”
“No more? It is small for its fame. Why, Glasgow must be three times as large,” I ventured, resolved to stir him up a little.
“Glesgie, is it! Think shame o’ yersel’, mon, to say the same! A grippie carlin, Glesgie! Waur than the auld wife o’ the sayin’, ‘She’ll keep her ain side o’ the hoose, and gang up an’ doon in yours.’ Ye canna nay-say me there. Gae wa’ wi’ ye!”
“But you must admit it is a great port. The receipts are enormous, I’m told.”
“Aye, an’ it’s muckle ye’ll be telt ye’ll never read in the Guid Buik! Port, are ye sayin’? Hae ye na thought o’ Leith? Or the bonny sands an’ gardens o’ Portobello? Or Granton, forbye, wi’ the three braw piers o’ the Duke o’ Buccleuch? Ye’ll no be kennin’ they’re a’ a part o’ Ed’nboro, maybe.”
“But how about the ship-building on the Clyde?”
“An’ what wad ye make o’ that? How ony mon in his senses could gang to think sic jowkery-packery wi’ the gran’ brewin’ ayont the Coogait is mair than ever I could win to understan’. It’s by-ordinar, fair! An’ dinna loup to deecesions frae the claver an’ lees aboot muckle things. ’Twas Allan Ramsay himsel’ said,‘Mony ane opens their pack an’ sells nae wares.’ It’s unco strange that a body should tak nae notice o’ the learnin,’ an’ the gran’ courts, an’ the three hunner congregeetions, an’ a’ the bonny kirks we hae in Ed’nboro, but must ever be spairin’ o’ the siller. Do ye think, noo, it’s sae vera wonderful to ‘Put twa pennies in a purse, an’ see them creep thegither’? Glesgie may ken a’ sic-like gear, I’m nae sayin’; but there’s no sae muckle worth in that, as ye’ll be findin’ oot, though ye read in the books til the morn’s mornin’. It’s a fair disgrace to hae sic thochts. Mon can sae nae mair.”
“At any rate, there’s a fine university there.”
“It’s easy sayin’ sae. Muckle service is it! Gude kens a’ they learn there! Gin it’s cooleges ye’ll be admirin’, maybe ye’ll no be so vera well acquaint wi’ our ain toun? There’s nane in a’ Glesgie like the ane ye see the day. Mon, it’s fair dementit ye’ll be.”
It took time and diplomacy and many a round compliment on Edinburgh to bring him out of his sulk; but eventually he yielded.
“Aye,” said he, “I believe ye’ll be in the richt the noo. It’s gran’ up here, dinna misdoot it. Mony’s the braw sicht to be had, that’s a fac’, an’ I ken them a’ like the back o’ my hand. Sin lang afore yon trees were plantit, mare than ane fine dander hae I taen mysel’, bonny simmer days, lang miles o’er the heather. Ye’ll believe me, I’d gang hame and sleep soun’. It’s na sae pleesant, maybe, in winter, wi’ the dour haars an’ the fog an’ theeast winds. But I aye like it fine in simmer, wi’ a bit nip o’ wind betimes an’ then fair again. At the gloaming it’s quaiet an’ cauller, and then aiblins I bide a blink an’ hae a bit puff o’ my cutty, an’ syne I’ll gang to my bed wi’ an easy hairt. But, wheesht, mon! It’ll be twa o’ the day by the noo, I’m thinkin’? Is it so! Be gude to us! Weel, weel, I’ll gang my gait. I maunna be late to the wark; it’s a fearsome example to the laddies. ‘A scabbed sheep,’ says auld Allan, ‘smites the hale hirsel’.’ Guid day to ye; an’ keep awa’ frae Glesgie.” And with many a sigh and rheumatic hitch he shuffled off to the steps.
The old man was right. “Frae ane an’ twa o’ the day” a blither or more inspiring spot than Calton Hill would be hard to find. What more could possibly be desired, with a city so fair and famous at one’s feet and the air tonic with the sweetness of the heather and the brine of the sea! Fancy plays an amiable rôle and adds to one’s contentment with shadowy illusions of the Canongate of bygone days acclaiming Scotland’s kings and queens as they ride forth in pomp and pageantry, with trains of fierce clansmen from the furtherest Highlands, with pibrochs screaming, bonnets dancing, and axes and claymores rattling. And Montrose may pass with his Graham Cavaliers, or Argyle leading the Campbells of the Covenant. With our eyes on Holyrood, pathetic visions float before us of fair Mary of many sorrows, over whose gilded gloom the poets have lovedto linger. One moment she looms in the heroic martyrdom conceived by Schiller, and the next we see her as Swinburne did in “Chastelard,” with
“lipsCurled over, red and sweet; and the soft spaceOf carven brows, and splendor of great throatSwayed lily-wise.”
“lipsCurled over, red and sweet; and the soft spaceOf carven brows, and splendor of great throatSwayed lily-wise.”
“lipsCurled over, red and sweet; and the soft spaceOf carven brows, and splendor of great throatSwayed lily-wise.”
“lips
Curled over, red and sweet; and the soft space
Of carven brows, and splendor of great throat
Swayed lily-wise.”
Welcome apparitions of later days throng about us on the hill: Ramsay and his “Gentle Shepherd,” young Fergusson and his wild companions, Burns with his jovial cronies, the scholarly Jeffrey, the learned Hume, the inspired Sir Walter, the delightful revelers of the “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” the gentle Lady Nairne, the eager, brilliant Stevenson, and Dr. Brown with the faithful “Rab” and Ollivant with “Bob, Son of Battle.” The crisp sunshine lies golden on Princes Street and all her flowered terraces; it glints the grim redoubts of the Castle and lingers on the crooked gables of High Street. From the brown heather of the Pentlands to the distant sparkle of the Firth stretches a vigorous and comely land. What man so callous as to feel no joy in “Scotia’s Darling Seat”!