CHAPTERXIXTHE HEART OF SCOTLAND

"The Heart of Scotland, Britain's other eye."—Ben Jonson

Edinburgh, August 24, 1890.—A bright blue sky, across which many masses of thin white cloud are borne swiftly on the cool western wind, bends over the stately city, and all her miles of gray mansions and spacious, cleanly streets sparkle beneath it in a flood of summer sunshine. It is the Lord's Day, and most of the highways are deserted and quiet. From the top of the Calton Hill you look down upon hundreds of blue smoke-wreaths curling upward from the chimneys of the resting and restful town, and in every direction the prospect is one of opulence and peace. A thousand years of history are here crystallised within the circuit of a single glance, and while you gaze upon one of the grandest emblems that the world contains of a storied and romantic past, you behold likewise a living and resplendent pageant of the beauty of to-day. Nowhere else are the Past and the Present so lovinglyblended. There, in the centre, towers the great crown of St. Giles. Hard by are the quaint slopes of the Canongate,—teeming with illustrious, or picturesque, or terrible figures of Long Ago. Yonder the glorious Castle Crag looks steadfastly westward,—its manifold, wonderful colours continuously changing in the changeful daylight. Down in the valley Holyrood, haunted by a myriad of memories and by one resplendent face and entrancing presence, nestles at the foot of the giant Salisbury Crag; while the dark, rivened peak of Arthur's Seat rears itself supremely over the whole stupendous scene. Southward and westward, in the distance, extends the bleak range of the Pentland Hills; eastward the cone of Berwick Law and the desolate Bass Rock seem to cleave the sea; and northward, beyond the glistening crystal of the Forth,—with the white lines of embattled Inchkeith like a diamond on its bosom,—the lovely Lomonds, the virginal mountain breasts of Fife, are bared to the kiss of heaven. It is such a picture aswords can but faintly suggest; but when you look upon it you readily comprehend the pride and the passion with which a Scotsman loves his native land.

The Crown of St. Giles's.

Dr. Johnson named Edinburgh as "a city too well known to admit description." That judgment was proclaimed more than a hundred years ago,—before yet Caledonia had bewitched the world's heart as the haunted land of Robert Burns and Walter Scott,—and if it were true then it is all the more true now. But while the reverent pilgrim along the ancient highways of history may not wisely attempt description, which would be superfluous, he perhaps may usefully indulge in brief chronicle and impression,—for these sometimes prove suggestive to minds that are kindred with his own. Hundreds of travellers visit Edinburgh, but it is one thing to visit and another thing to see; and every suggestion, surely, is of value that helps to clarify our vision. This capital is not learned by driving about in a cab; for Edinburgh to be truly seen and comprehended must be seen and comprehended as an exponent of the colossal individuality of the Scottish character; and therefore it must be observed with thought. Here is no echo and no imitation. Many another provincial city of Britain is a miniature copy of London; but the quality of Edinburgh is her own. Portions of her architecture do indeed denote a reverence for ancient Italian models, while certain other portions reveal the influence of the semi-classical taste that prevailed in the time of the Regent, afterwards George the Fourth. The democratic tendency of this period,—expressing itself here precisely as it does everywhere else, in button-making pettiness and vulgarcommonplace,—is likewise sufficiently obvious. Nevertheless, in every important detail of Edinburgh and of its life, the reticent, resolute, formidable, impetuous, passionate character of the Scottish race is conspicuous and predominant. Much has been said against the Scottish spirit,—the tide of cavil purling on from Dr. Johnson to Sydney Smith. Dignity has been denied to it, and so has magnanimity, and so has humour; but there is no audience more quick than the Scottish audience to respond either to pathos or to mirth; there is no literature in the world so musically, tenderly, and weirdly poetical as the Scottish literature; there is no place on earth where the imaginative instinct of the national mind has resisted, as it has resisted in Scotland, the encroachment of utility upon the domain of romance; there is no people whose history has excelled that of Scotland in the display of heroic, intellectual, and moral purpose, combined with passionate sensibility; and no city could surpass the physical fact of Edinburgh as a manifestation of broad ideas, unstinted opulence, and grim and rugged grandeur. Whichever way you turn, and whatever object you behold, that consciousness is always present to your thought,—the consciousness of a race of beings intensely original, individual, passionate, authoritative, and magnificent.

Scott's House in Edinburgh.

The capital of Scotland is not only beautiful but eloquent. The present writer does not assume to describe it, or to instruct the reader concerning it, but only to declare that at every step the sensitive mind is impressed with the splendid intellect, the individual force, and the romantic charm of the Scottish character, as it[252]is commemorated and displayed in this delightful place. What a wealth of significance it possesses may be indicated by even the most meagre record and the most superficial commentary upon the passing events of a traveller's ordinary day. The greatest name in the literature of Scotland is Walter Scott. He lived and laboured for twenty-four years in the modest three-story, gray stone house which is No. 39 Castle street. It has been my privilege to enter that house, and to stand in the room in which Scott began the novel ofWaverley. Many years roll backward under the spell of such an experience, and the gray-haired man is a boy again, with all the delights of the Waverley Novels before him, health shining in his eyes, and joy beating in his heart, as he looks onward through vistas of golden light into a paradise of fadeless flowers and of happy dreams. The room that was Scott's study is a small one, on the first floor, at the back, and is lighted by one large window, opening eastward, through which you look upon the rear walls of sombre, gray buildings, and upon a small slope of green lawn, in which is the unmarked grave of one of Sir Walter's dogs. "The misery of keeping a dog," he once wrote, "is his dying so soon; but, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?" My attention was called to a peculiar fastening on the window of the study,—invented and placed there by Scott himself,—so arranged that the sash can be safely kept locked when raised a few inches from the sill. On the south side of the room is the fireplace, facing which he would sit as he wrote, and into which, of an evening, he has often gazed, hearing meanwhilethe moan of the winter wind, and conjuring up, in the blazing brands, those figures of brave knights and gentle ladies that were to live forever in the amber of his magical art. Next to the study, on the same floor, is the larger apartment that was his dining-room, where his portrait of Claverhouse, now at Abbotsford, once hung above the mantel, and where so many of the famous people of the past enjoyed his hospitality and his talk. On the south wall of this room now hang two priceless autograph letters, one of them in the handwriting of Scott, the other in that of Burns. Both rooms are used for business offices now,—the house being tenanted by the agency of the New Zealand Mortgage Company,—and both are furnished with large presses, for the custody of deeds and family archives. Nevertheless these rooms remain much as they were when Scott lived in them, and his spirit seems to haunt the place. I was brought very near to him that day, for in the same hour was placed in my hands the original manuscript of hisJournal, and I saw, in his handwriting, the last words that ever fell from his pen. ThatJournalis in two quarto volumes. One of them is filled with writing; the other half filled; and the lines in both are of a fine, small character, crowded closely together. Toward the last the writing manifests only too well the growing infirmity of the broken Minstrel,—the forecast of the hallowed deathbed of Abbotsford and the venerable and glorious tomb of Dryburgh. These are his last words: "We slept reasonably, but on the next morning"—and so theJournalabruptly ends. I can in no way express the emotion with which I looked uponthose feebly scrawled syllables,—the last effort of the nerveless hand that once had been strong enough to thrill the heart of all the world. TheJournalhas been lovingly and carefully edited by David Douglas, whose fine taste and great gentleness of nature, together with his ample knowledge of Scottish literature and society, eminently qualify him for the performance of this sacred duty; and the world will possess this treasure and feel the charm of its beauty and pathos,—which is the charm of a great nature expressed in its perfect simplicity; but the spell that is cast upon the heart and the imagination by a prospect of the actual handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, in the last words that he wrote, cannot be conveyed in print.

The Maiden.

From the house in Castle street I went to the rooms of the Royal Society, where there is a portrait of Scott, by John Graham Gilbert, more lifelike,—being representative of his soul as well as his face and person,—than any other that is known. It hangs there, in company with other paintings of former presidents of this institution,—notably one of Sir David Brewster and one of James Watt,—in the hall in which Sir Walter often sat, presiding over the deliberations and literary exercises of his comrades in scholarship and art. In another hall I saw a pulpit in which John Knox used topreach, in the old days of what Dr. Johnson expressively called "The ruffians of Reformation," and hard by was "The Maiden," the terrible Scottish guillotine, with its great square knife, set in a thick weight of lead, by which the grim Regent Morton was slain, in 1581, the Marquis of Argyle, in 1661, and the gallant, magnanimous, devoted Earl of Argyle, in 1685,—one more sacrifice to the insatiate House of Stuart. This monster has drunk the blood of many a noble gentleman, and there is a weird, sinister suggestion of gratified ferocity and furtive malignity in its rude, grisly, uncanny fabric of blackened timbers. You may see, in the quaint little panelled chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, in the Cowgate, not distant from the present abode of the sanguinary Maiden,—brooding over her hideous consummation of slaughter and misery,—the place[257]where the mangled body of the heroic Argyle was laid, in secret sanctuary, for several nights after that scene of piteous sacrifice at the old Market Cross; and when you walk in the solemn enclosure of the Grayfriars church,—so fitly styled, by Sir Walter, The Westminster Abbey of Scotland,—your glance will fall upon a sunken pillar, low down upon the northern slope of that haunted, lamentable ground, which bears the letters "I. M.," and which marks the grave of the baleful Morton, whom the Maiden decapitated, for his share in the murder of Rizzio. In these old cities there is no keeping away from sepulchres. "The paths of glory," in every sense, "lead but to the grave." George Buchanan and Allan Ramsay, poets whom no literary pilgrim will neglect, rest in this churchyard, though the exact places of their interment are not positively denoted, and here, likewise, rest the elegant historian Robertson, and "the Addison of Scotland," Henry Mackenzie. The building in the High street in which Allan Ramsay once had his abode and his bookshop, and in which he wrote his pastoral ofThe Gentle Shepherd, is occupied now by a barber; but, since he is one that scorns not to proclaim over his door, in mighty letters, the poetic lineage of his dwelling, it seems not amiss that this haunt of the Muses should have fallen into such lowly hands. Of such a character, hallowed with associations that pique the fancy and touch the heart, are the places and the names that an itinerant continually encounters in his rambles in Edinburgh.

Grayfriars Church.

High Street—Allan Ramsay's Shop.

The pilgrim could muse for many an hour over the little Venetian mirror[50]that hangs in the bedroom ofMary Stuart, in Holyrood Palace. What faces and what scenes it must have reflected! How often her own beautiful countenance and person,—the dazzling eyes, the snowy brow, the red gold hair, the alabaster bosom,—may have blazed in its crystal depths, now tarnished and dim, like the record of her own calamitous and wretched days! Did those lovely eyes look into this mirror, and was their glance scared and tremulous, or fixed and terrible, on that dismal February night, so many years ago, when the fatal explosion in the Kirk o' Field resounded with an echo that has never died away? Who can tell? This glass saw the gaunt and livid face of Ruthven, when he led his comrades of murder into that royal chamber, and it beheld Rizzio, screaming in mortal terror, as he was torn from the skirts of his mistress and savagely slain before her eyes. Perhaps, also, when that hideous episode was over and done with, it saw Queen Mary and her despicable husband the next time they met, and were alone together, in that ghastly room. "It shall be dear blood to some of you," the queen had said, while the murder of Rizzio was doing. Surely, having so injured a woman, any man with eyes to see might have divined his fate, in the perfect calm of her heavenly face and the smooth tones of her gentle voice, at such a moment as that. "At the fireside tragedies are acted,"—and tragic enough must have been the scene of that meeting, apart from human gaze, in the chamber of crime and death. No other relic of Mary Stuart stirs the imagination as that mirror does,—unless, perhaps, it be the little ebony crucifix, once owned and reverenced by Sir Walter Scott and now piously treasured at[260]Abbotsford, which she held in her hands when she went to her death, in the hall of Fotheringay Castle.

The Canongate.

Holyrood Palace, in Mary Stuart's time, was not of its present shape. The tower containing her rooms was standing, and from that tower the building extended eastward to the abbey, and then it veered to the south. Much of the building was destroyed by fire in 1544, and again in Cromwell's time, but both church and palace were rebuilt. The entire south side, with its tower that looks directly towards the crag, was added in the later period of Charles the Second. The furniture in Mary Stuart's room is partly spurious, but the rooms are genuine. Musing thus, and much striving to reconstruct those strange scenes of the past, in which that beautiful, dangerous woman bore so great a part, the pilgrim strolls away into the Canongate,—once clean and elegant, now squalid and noisome,—and still the storied figures of history walk by his side or come to meet him at every close and wynd. John Knox, Robert Burns, Tobias Smollett, David Hume, Dugald Stuart, John Wilson, Hugh Miller, Gay, led onward by the blithe and gracious Duchess of Queensberry, and Dr. Johnson, escorted by the affectionate and faithful James Boswell, the best biographer that ever lived,—these and many more, the lettered worthies of long ago, throng into this haunted street and glorify it with the rekindled splendours of other days. You cannot be lonely here. This it is that makes the place so eloquent and so precious. For what did those men live and labour? To what were their shining talents and wonderful forces devoted? To the dissemination of learning; to the emancipation of thehuman mind from the bondage of error; to the ministry of the beautiful,—and thus to the advancement of the human race in material comfort, in gentleness of thought, in charity of conduct, in refinement of manners, and in that spiritual exaltation by which, and only by which, the true progress of mankind is at once accomplished and proclaimed.

HOLYROOD CASTLEANDARTHUR'S SEAT

But the dark has come, and this Edinburgh ramble shall end with the picture that closed its own magnificent day. You are standing on the rocky summit of Arthur's Seat. From that superb mountain peak your gaze takes in the whole capital, together with the country in every direction for many miles around. The evening is uncommonly clear. Only in the west dense masses of black cloud are thickly piled upon each other, through which the sun is sinking, red and sullen with menace of the storm. Elsewhere and overhead the sky is crystal, and of a pale, delicate blue. A cold wind blows briskly from the east and sweeps a million streamers of white smoke in turbulent panic over the darkening roofs of the city, far below. In the north the lovely Lomond Hills are distinctly visible across the dusky level of the Forth, which stretches away toward the ocean, one broad sheet of glimmering steel,—its margin indented with many a graceful bay, and the little islands that adorn it shining like stones of amethyst set in polished flint. A few brown sails are visible, dotting the waters, and far to the east appears the graceful outline of the Isle of May,—which was the shrine of the martyred St. Adrian,—and the lonely, wave-beaten Bass Rock, with its millions of seagulls and solan-geese. Busy Leith and picturesque Newhaven and every little village[263]on the coast is sharply defined in the frosty light. At your feet is St. Leonards, with the tiny cottage of Jeanie Deans. Yonder, in the south, are the gray ruins of Craigmillar Castle, once the favourite summer home of the Queen of Scots, now open to sun and rain, moss-grown and desolate, and swept by every wind that blows. More eastward the eye lingers upon Carberry Hill, where Mary surrendered herself to her nobles, just before the romantic episode of Loch Leven Castle; and far beyond that height the sombre fields, intersected by green hawthorn hedges and many-coloured with the various hues of pasture and harvest, stretch away to the hills of Lammermoor and the valleys of Tweed and Esk. Darker and darker grow the gathering shadows of the gloaming. The lights begin to twinkle in the city streets. The echoes of the rifles die away in the Hunter's Bog. A piper far off is playing the plaintive music ofThe Blue Bells of Scotland. And as your steps descend the crag, the rising moon, now nearly at the full, shines through the gauzy mist and hangs above the mountain like a shield of gold upon the towered citadel of night.

St. Giles's, from the Lawn Market.

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