PART IITHE NEW TOWN

Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair;Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air;Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld;Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld.Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been;Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen!Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun,And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run.Scottish Ballad.[52]

WHENJames VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his—as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied requestapplied not only to the street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle, and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.

Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and thatMacbethis his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them. The year after King James and his courtiers hadreturned south, Taylor the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the freedom of the city.

Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh of that day,—the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]

Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing theEdinburgh Courant. This must have been after his release from the State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, thepillory, and temporary ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street (so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere, and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere else,—especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it. Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in hisWalks in Edinburgh. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance ofone vast castle.”

Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.”

Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came in the cortège of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr. Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr. Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of “Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburghliterati. Here,during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of—

How happy could I be with either,Were t’other dear charmer away!

who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of ideas with the author of—

Wae’s me! For baith I canna get,To ane by law we’re stented;Then I’ll draw cuts, and take my fate,And be with ane contented.

And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century Goldsmith was a medical student in Edinburgh, living, it is said, in College Wynd, and writing amusing accounts of the dulness and formality and drollery of the Assemblies. An Edinburgh tailor’s account for the year 1753, found by the late Mr. David Laing in the pages of an old ledger, allows one to imagine Goldie gracing Edinburgh in a suit of sky-blue satin and black velvet, and a “superfine small hatt” which bore “8s. worth of silver hatt lace.” Mr. Filby the tailor charged the modest sum of £3:6:6 for a “superfine high claret-coloured” cloth suit; but possibly he might have charged double thatamount or half that amount with equal profit to himself, for the account was “carried over,” and no ledger remains to tell the tale.[54]

Tobias Smollett paid two visits to Edinburgh, the last in 1766, when he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Telfer of Scotstoun, in St. John Street. This street, then inhabited by some of the aristocracy of Edinburgh, still retains a distinguished look; and much of the fine old architecture remains, including Mrs. Telfer’s home, which was in the first floor of the house over the great archway through which the street is entered. This house, which was previously the residence of the Earl of Hopetoun, attracts the eye immediately by its turnpike stair, occupying the corner of the street, beside the arched entrance. Smollett was introduced by Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk to Edinburgh literary celebrities, among them Home, who had so scandalised his brother clergy by writing a play,—“The Douglas”; and, like Gay thirty years before, he haunted Allan Ramsay’s library,—in Smollett’s day the property of Alexander Kincaid the publisher.Humphrey Clinkercontains all Smollett’s comments on Edinburgh society, men, and manners.

Three years later, in 1769, Benjamin Franklin visited Edinburgh. He was given the freedom of the city, and was accorded the usual hospitable welcome from all the chief people of the town.

On a Saturday evening in August 1773, Dr. Johnson’s huge figure filled the doorway of the old Whitehorse Innin Boyd’s Close, and presently Boswell, in his house in James’s Court, received the following note:—

Saturday night.Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being newly arrived at Boyd’s.

Saturday night.

Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being newly arrived at Boyd’s.

Boswell hurried off to welcome the traveller, and found him roaring passionately at the waiter, who had put sugar into the lemonade with his fingers. Out into the hot August evening the two friends went, and walked up the High Street arm-in-arm to James’s Court, where Mrs. Boswell waited to administer tea to her ponderous rival. “Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms,” Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other, four stories high.” Here Mr. and Mrs. Boswell invited all the people of brilliant achievement in the city to meet him,—Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Mrs. Murray of Henderland, Allan Ramsay the artist, Beattie the poet, Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, and many others; but among them was the Duchess of Douglas, “talking broad Scotch with a paralytic voice,” and Dr. Johnson showed open preference for her society. What all these people thought of Dr. Johnson is suggested by the wit of Henry Erskine, the well-known Edinburgh advocate, brother of the Earl of Buchan. After much inimitable politeness and good-humour during his presentation to Johnson, he slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand for the sight of “your English bear.” Mrs. Boswell (néeMontgomery, one of the Eglintoun family) was equally

OLD HOUSES IN CANONGATE In the foreground of the picture are the piers and entrance gates of the Canongate Parish Church. Past the shaft of the cross on the other side of the Canongate is the opening into Bakehouse Close. The timber-fronted houses with their gables present as picturesque an appearance as any in Edinburgh.OLD HOUSES IN CANONGATEIn the foreground of the picture are the piers and entrance gates of the Canongate Parish Church. Past the shaft of the cross on the other side of the Canongate is the opening into Bakehouse Close. The timber-fronted houses with their gables present as picturesque an appearance as any in Edinburgh.

In the foreground of the picture are the piers and entrance gates of the Canongate Parish Church. Past the shaft of the cross on the other side of the Canongate is the opening into Bakehouse Close. The timber-fronted houses with their gables present as picturesque an appearance as any in Edinburgh.

witty and even more frank. She had certainly some provocation, because, as Boswell himself tells, Dr. Johnson had, among other habits, one of turning the candles upside down when they did not burn brightly enough. “I have often seen a bear led by a man,” the much-tried hostess told her infatuated lord, “but I never before saw a man led by a bear.”

Boswell not only invited all Edinburgh to meet Dr. Johnson, but took Dr. Johnson to all the sights of the city. On Sunday, after they had attended service in the Episcopal chapel in Blackfriars Wynd, Johnson saw Holyrood; and, under the guidance of Principal Robertson, he and Boswell went over the University. Boswell also took his guest to the island of Inchkeith, and to stay with Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield for a few days, and they dined and drank tea at the old inn at Roslin, and

Went to Hawthornden’s fair scene by night,Lest e’er a Scottish tree should wound his sight.

Many of Dr. Johnson’s comments on things Scottish were quite genial; but two terse ones expressed decided disapproval. “No, Sir!” he bellowed, when some one proposed to introduce him to David Hume. And again, “I can smell you in the dark!” he grumbled to Boswell, no doubt most truthfully, as they walked through the city.

A year after Dr. Johnson’s visit there came to Edinburgh and its hospitalities another Englishman. Captain Topham cannot be called a famous visitor, buthe deserves mention, both because of his charming little book,Letters from Edinburgh, written in the Years 1774 and 1775, and because of the artistic contrast he forms to Dr. Johnson. Captain Topham must have re-established his country’s character for good manners in the opinion of Edinburgh citizens. He had not compiled a dictionary; neither had he “kept a school and ca’d it an academy,” as old Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, said of Johnson; but he was a wide-minded man of good breeding, had been educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, had travelled, and held a commission in the Guards, and seems to have been equipped for enjoying social existence, and adding to its enjoyment by others. He was by no means sparing in his comments; his humour would make that impossible. Amid all his graphic descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” He tells of the bad inns, and here again his good-humour saves him. No swearing at the waiter without sugar-tongs, but—“Well, said I to my friend (for you must know that I have more patience on these occasions than wit on any other) there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffeehouse.” He describes the amusements,—the theatre,the assemblies and dances, the oyster cellars, the funerals, and the executions. The Kirk and devotion, the University and education, trade and the booksellers, all are spoken of. He gives a warm picture of a very friendly and hospitable town, simple in its ways and hours and incomes and requirements, but brimful of intellect and cultured love of letters and music, and peopled by a kindly, couthy race, with very strongly marked characters, dwelling together in unity at very close quarters.

The only social error Captain Topham seems to have made was when a lady invited him to an oyster supper in a cellar. He “agreed immediately,” but complains pathetically to his correspondent, “You will not think it very odd that I should expect, from the place where the appointment was made, to have had apartie tête-à-tête. I thought I was bound in honour to keep it a secret, and waited with great impatience till the hour arrived. When the clock struck the hour fixed on, away I went, and inquired if the lady were there. ‘Oh yes,’ cried the woman, ‘she has been here an hour or more.’ I had just time to curse my want of punctuality when the door opened, and I had the pleasure of being ushered in, not to one lady as I had expected, but to a large and brilliant company of both sexes, most of whom I had the honour of being acquainted with.”

But even Captain Topham’s amiable temper has its limits. Of two things he speaks evil,—of his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, and of a haggis.

In November 1786 Burns paid his first and famousvisit to Edinburgh. He came, dejected, unknown, his mind hovering on the thoughts of intended exile; and in a moment, as it were, Edinburgh recognised him, and flashed on all her lights to welcome him and do his genius honour. There followed the most brilliant and triumphant period of all his short life. He was fêted and lionised by all ranks of society; the magnates and the celebrities, the literary and the learned, the high-born and the low-born, the fashionable and the gay, beautiful women and great men, vied with each other in entertaining this wonderful poet with the rustic garb and the dark eyes. Burns was the honoured and petted guest of every man and woman of note in Edinburgh—of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, of Sir John Whiteford, of the Ferriers at 15 George Street, of the eccentric Lord Monboddo and his “angel” daughter at 13 St. John Street, and of a hundred more. He rollicked in Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd, or, among the “Crochallan Fencibles,” listened to Dawney Douglas quavering the minor pathos of his Gaelic song, “Cro Chalien.” He stood bareheaded beside the unmarked grave of Fergusson in the Canongate Churchyard, and knelt and kissed the spot, and sent to ask if the “Ayrshire ploughman” might erect a stone to the memory of the poet to whom he owed so much. He read aloud his “Cottar’s Saturday Night” before the young Duchess of Gordon and the lovely Miss Burnet, and bewildered them with his fascination and his genius. He published his Edinburgh edition of his poems, and dedicated them tothe Caledonian Hunt; and the names of all his admirers and hosts are still there—a long list of good, well-known Scottish names.

In 1786 there occurred the memorable meeting, at the house of Professor Adam Fergusson, between Burns and Scott. There was a gathering of “several gentlemen of literary reputation,” and Scott, a boy of fifteen, was present. Scott “had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him,” but, with the better manners of that period, “of course we youngsters sat silent and listened.” Burns was affected by one of the pictures on the wall, and the lines printed beneath it. He “actually shed tears,” and asked whose the lines were. None of the “gentlemen of literary reputation” volunteering the information, Scott whispered to a friend that they were Langhorne’s, and the friend told Burns, who turned to the boy with a “look and a word.” “You’ll be a man yet!” is what Burns said: and those words and that look are all the link between these two great Scottish poets, who “spoke each other in passing.”

It was not until December 1787 that Burns met “Clarinda,” the very lovely Mrs. M‘Lehose, a cousin-german of Lord Craig’s. She, forsaken by her husband, lived in a house of three rooms in General’s Entry, between Bristo Street and Potterrow. Burns had met her only once, at a tea-party gathering, before—he having met with a carriage accident and being unable to leave his lodgings—their famous “Clarinda andSylvander” correspondence began. Clarinda possessed more than beauty, as her letters and verses show. There were many beautiful faces in Edinburgh, and Burns has immortalised them in his eulogies—Miss Burnet, Miss Ferrier, Miss Whiteford; but poor Clarinda’s verses he has mingled with his own. It is said that it was these two marvellous lines of hers that first struck him:—

Talk not to me of Love! for Love hath been my foe.He bound me with an iron chain, and flung me deep in woe.

Clarinda continued to live on in Edinburgh, and died there when nearly eighty, with a picture of the long-dead Sylvander beside her.

Of all comments on Edinburgh the best-known is Burns’s passionate salutation to the venerable city:—

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers,Where once beneath a monarch’s feetSat Legislation’s sovereign powers.From marking wildly scattered flowers,As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,And singing, lone, the lingering hours,I shelter in thy honoured shade.Here wealth still swells the golden tide,As busy trade his labour plies;There Architecture’s noble prideBids elegance and splendour rise;Here Justice, from her native skies,High wields her balance and her rod;There Learning, with his eagle eyes,Seeks science in her coy abode.There, watching high the least alarms,Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar,Like some bold veteran grey in arms,And marked with many a seamy scar:The ponderous wall and massy bar,Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,Have oft withstood assailing war,And oft repelled the invader’s shock.With awe-struck thought, and pitying tearsI view that noble, stately dome,Where Scotia’s kings of other years,Famed heroes! had their royal home.Alas, how changed the times to come!Their royal name low in the dust!Their hapless race wild-wandering roam,Though rigid law cries out, ’Twas just!Wild beats my heart to trace your steps,Whose ancestors, in days of yore,Through hostile ranks and ruined gapsOld Scotia’s bloody lion bore:Even I who sing in rustic lore,Haply,mysires have left their shed,And faced grim danger’s loudest roar,Bold following where your fathers led!Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers!Where once beneath a monarch’s feetSat Legislation’s sovereign powers!From marking wildly scattered flowers,As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,And singing, lone, the lingering hours,I shelter in thy honoured shade.

Here wealth still swells the golden tide,As busy trade his labour plies;There Architecture’s noble prideBids elegance and splendour rise;Here Justice, from her native skies,High wields her balance and her rod;There Learning, with his eagle eyes,Seeks science in her coy abode.

There, watching high the least alarms,Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar,Like some bold veteran grey in arms,And marked with many a seamy scar:The ponderous wall and massy bar,Grim rising o’er the rugged rock,Have oft withstood assailing war,And oft repelled the invader’s shock.

With awe-struck thought, and pitying tearsI view that noble, stately dome,Where Scotia’s kings of other years,Famed heroes! had their royal home.Alas, how changed the times to come!Their royal name low in the dust!Their hapless race wild-wandering roam,Though rigid law cries out, ’Twas just!

Wild beats my heart to trace your steps,Whose ancestors, in days of yore,Through hostile ranks and ruined gapsOld Scotia’s bloody lion bore:Even I who sing in rustic lore,Haply,mysires have left their shed,And faced grim danger’s loudest roar,Bold following where your fathers led!

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers!Where once beneath a monarch’s feetSat Legislation’s sovereign powers!From marking wildly scattered flowers,As on the banks of Ayr I strayed,And singing, lone, the lingering hours,I shelter in thy honoured shade.

Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,Yea, an imperial city that might holdFive times a hundred noble towns in fee,And either with their might of Babel old,Or the rich Roman pomp of empery,Might stand compare, highest in arts enrolled,Highest in arms, brave tenement for the freeWho never crouch to thrones, nor sin for gold.Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinageOf clear bold hills that curve her very streets,As if to vindicate, ’mid choicest seatsOf Art, abiding Nature’s majesty;And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rageChainless alike, and teaching liberty.Arthur Hallam,Sonnet to Edinburgh.

TOWARDSthe end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined area. The quaint and impressive site ofthis “city set on a hill,” however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea—a perfectEl Doradofor the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood, with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock.

“Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “was on a homely and narrow scale. The College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes or dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as thePoker Clubin a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and

PRINCES STREET FROM THE STEPS OF THE NEW CLUB The spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.PRINCES STREET FROM THE STEPS OF THE NEW CLUBThe spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.

The spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.

simple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest in each other. Acquaintances might not only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party walls, but from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip.... The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere.” And the overcrowding!

“A country gentleman and a lawyer, not long after raised to the Bench, lived with his wife and children and servants in three rooms and a kitchen. A wealthy goldsmith had a dwelling of two small rooms above his booth, the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.”[55]Edinburgh citizens came to consider the highest storeys in their tall “lands” the most desirable; and the tale is told of one old Edinburgh gentleman who, on a visit to London, expressed pleased surprise that the top flat where he had perched himself was the cheapest in the house. On being gently enlightened that this was in consequence of its being also the least thought of, he replied that he kent fine what gentility was, and after having lived sixteen storeys up all his life, was not going to come down in the world.

The first efforts at extension of the town were due to a private commercial speculation. The open country beyond the Nor’ Loch and the “Lang Dykes” was inaccessible till an Act of Parliament could be passed anddrastic measures taken; and, where Acts of Parliament are necessary, progress is slow. Whilst time was passing, and others were talking and scheming for the public good, a builder named George Brown saw that the tide had come in his affairs, and took it at the flood and made his fortune. He built, with stones from Craigmillar Quarry, two squares of substantial dwelling-houses. The first built and bigger of these was George Square, whose site had formerly been part of the park of Ross House, the suburban residence of the Lords Ross, where later—after 1753—the famous George Lockhart of Carnwath had lived. The smaller square, Brown Square, was built after the first had proved a success, and several of the houses in it been taken by well-known citizens. George Square is still, though hemmed in by poor localities on three sides, a favourite place of residence, with a pleasant garden in the centre, and “the Meadows” near at hand. Here it was, at number 25, that Scott’s father lived, and part of Scott’s boyhood was spent. Brown Square has not survived socially, though it, too, has had its notable residents. It was from Brown Square that Lord Glenlee, the last person to use a sedan-chair in Edinburgh, used to sally forth in wig and cocked hat, in knee-breeches and silk stockings and buckled shoes; and in Brown Square there once lived the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” Miss Jeanie Elliott of Minto, one of the many gifted Jacobite ladies of Jacobite Edinburgh. These two squares formed a little southern colony by themselves, confined their hospitalities to themselves, and, in fact,as the Scottish phrase says, “kept themselves to themselves.”

At last, in 1767, the Act of Parliament for extending the city over the northern fields was passed, and the North Bridge was built from the High Street across the valley. And then, suddenly, as with the touch of a magician’s wand, the beginnings of the New Town of Edinburgh came into being: stately squares and noble buildings, wide, broad streets that put London thoroughfares to shame, graceful curved terraces and crescents; all the cold dignity of unlimited grey stone—stone pavements, stone roads, stone houses; and, nestling in every crevice of the stone, the green of the invaded country. New Edinburgh, like Jonah’s gourd, sprang up in a night, to shade many a prophet.

And who wielded the magician’s wand? The name of Lord Provost Drummond ought to be remembered in Edinburgh, of which, like a veritable Dick Whittington, he was six times Lord Provost. He was a man of public spirit and large enterprise, who brought dignity on himself and his office and his city. The New Town dates from his Provostship. At first, however, as all pioneers must do, he saw men look askance at the triumphs of his energy. He was probably called extravagant, and accused of squandering public money. “The scheme was at first far from popular,” Mr. Robert Chambers tells his readers. “The exposure to the north and east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered, that a lover told a New Townmistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that when he visited her he felt as performing an adventure not much short of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers should forget them, if they removed so far from the centre of things as Princes Street and St. Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable, and behoved to be made.”[56]

And then the bees swarmed.

Those of the Scottish nobles whom the Union had left in the capital took their persons and their households across the valley to the New Town, and left their family mansions and their family traditions behind them in the Old. All the legal dignitaries—Lord President, Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Advocate, Dean of Faculty, Solicitor-General, Lords of Council and Session—all those “carls” whom James VI. had made “lairds,” accompanied by the “carlins” whom he had declined to make “leddies”; the advocates, the “writers”; all the old Scottish “gentry,” the wealthy burghers: all hurried out of their closes and took up their residences in the big new houses across the Nor’ Loch.

Nature, however, abhors a vacuum, and so do landlords; and the deserted High Street and Canongate filled up rapidly with humbler citizens. “The Lord Justice Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher, Lord President Craigie’s house by a rouping wife or saleswoman of old furniture, and Lord Drummore’shouse left by a chairman for want of accommodation; ... the house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now possessed by a wheelwright!”[57]

David Hume was one of the bees who swarmed. He was buzzing busily on the third floor of a house in James’s Court with (what was particularly characteristic of Edinburgh houses of that period, but perhaps not so appealing to Hume as to some others) two little oratories, one off his dining-room and one out of his drawing-room. But neither the oratories nor the view to the north from his windows had the power to retain him. He spread his wings and alighted on the west corner house on the south side of St. Andrew Square. When his house at the corner was almost the only one in the street leading from Princes Street to St. Andrew Square, and before the names of the New Town streets had been inscribed on them, Dr. Webster, a humorous minister, wrote in chalk on the great sceptic’s dwelling “Saint David’s Street.” Hume’s old servant ran indignantly to her master to tell him; but Hume was a humorist too. “Weel, weel, Janet,” he said, “never mind. I am not the first man of sense that has been made a saint of.”

St. David Street it remains to this day.

Sir Laurence Dundas built himself a house in St. Andrew Square, but lost it in play to General Scott, a noted gambler, who staked £30,000 against it. Sir Laurence retained his house, however, by building General Scott another mansion-house, “Bellevue,”which for long stood in the centre of Drummond Place.

Along the line of the present Princes Street had formerly been the “Lang Gait,” or “Lang Dykes,” a rough road through rough country, where Claverhouse had clattered angrily towards the Highlands at the head of his troopers. This had been the scene of many a footpad robbery and murder, and many lovers’ evening strolls; but, when the New Town was built, it gradually was feued out, from east to west; and along it were built a single line of houses looking right across the valley and up towards the Old Town. It was proposed to call this—the principal street of New Edinburgh—“St. Giles Street,” after the patron saint of Edinburgh, which would have been a very appropriate name, and a slight offer of amends to the Saint for the insult offered to his effigy when the rude-minded rabble ducked it in the Nor’ Loch in the first days of the Reformation. However, George III. objected. “Hey, hey—what, what? St. Giles Street! never do! never do!” No doubt to Londoners the name might awaken associations with a neighbourhood unknown beyond London; but George III. showed some ignorance of Scottish history, for the district of St. Giles in London owes its name to the founder of a leper hospital—Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who, when Queen of England, evidently sometimes felt a little homesick and very patriotic, and bestowed on her charity the name of the patron saint of Edinburgh.

And what became of the Nor’ Loch? The citizenshad no longer to swim across it two at a time on a collier’s horse, as had the Hamiltons after the “Cleanse the Causeway” battle. The Nor’ Loch, formed in 1450 when first Edinburgh was walled, had done its duty and had its day, and was drained; and its place—now well-kept gardens—was for long a boggy morass. Across this morass some Lawnmarket shopkeepers were accustomed to make their way to investigate the progress of the new city; and, as the ground was marshy and muddy, they laid a few planks across to form a foot-bridge. George Boyd, a dealer in tartan, called “Five o’clock,” in jocular allusion to his bandy legs, seems to have been particularly impressed by the plank bridge; and, when some loose earth from a quarry fell on it and made the bridge more secure, his mind, which worked better than his legs, caught at the suggestion that the earth flung out by the builders from the foundations of the New Town might form a bridge across the valley. The suggestion was adopted, and the earth, to the amount, it has been calculated, of about two million cartloads, was deposited and a great mound formed in the valley of the Nor’ Loch, just below the centre of the High Street; and “Geordie Boyd’s brig” became “the Earthen Mound,” and so continued to be called until well on in the nineteenth century. So, indeed, one well-known and venerable Edinburgh citizen still speaks of it.

And this is how, within about forty years of its first conception, the New Town of Edinburgh spread itself over the plain and superseded the crumbling cluster ofseven centuries. And this is how modern Edinburgh presents that curious spectacle, unknown in any other town, of two distinct divisions, divided topographically as well as historically and socially—Old Edinburgh and New Edinburgh.

Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings.... Positively, when I contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of excellence ... positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.Professor Masson’sEdinburgh Sketches and Memories.

Professor Masson’sEdinburgh Sketches and Memories.

ITis easy to trace Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh life from door to door. The house in the College Wynd, in which, on August 15, 1771, he was born, was pulled down in his lifetime. Sir Walter once pointed out its site to Mr. Robert Chambers during one of their walks together, and told him that his father had “received a fair price for his portion of it”; and, when Mr. Chambers naturally suggested that more money mighthave been made and the public much more gratified had Scott’s birthplace been retained to be shown,—“Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well; but I am afraid I should have required to be dead first, and that would not have been so comfortable, you know.”

The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands, looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins, and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest

THE HIGH SCHOOL AND BURNS’S MONUMENT FROM JEFFREY STREET To the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.THE HIGH SCHOOL AND BURNS’S MONUMENT FROM JEFFREY STREETTo the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.

To the left of the picture, over a roof in the foreground, appears part of the tunnel of the North British Railway, above which rises that fine classic building, the (modern) High School. It stands on the southern slope of the Calton Hill, a portion of which is seen to the extreme left. On the extreme right is the monument to Robert Burns.

treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,—possibly unknown to the father upstairs,—the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night, of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]

It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square, that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not extend his approval of Scottand of the paper on Ballads to this sunk den,—or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his father’s house?—for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern. No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton saucer” had come by its widowed condition.

It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his friend Clerk—a friendship made in the High School days, to last through life—read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’sAnalysis of the Institutes and Pandectsand Erskine’sInstitutes of the Law of Scotland. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.

They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall, till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose, however, Scott had earned his first guinea,—and he spent it on a silver taper-stand for his mother.

It was all in Edinburgh—all his “supreme moments.”Was it not in a shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love? Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it. Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks—more talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the beloved Scottish Highlands—

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