JEDBURGH ABBEY.JEDBURGH ABBEY.
The Abbey is, in its way, its individual way, most interesting of the chief four of "St. David's piles." It is beautifully lodged, beside the Jed, near the stream, and the stream more a part of its landscape; smooth-shaven English lawns lie all about, a veritable ecclesiastical close. It is simpler than Melrose, if the detail is not so marvelous, and there is substantially more of it. The Norman tower stands square; if witches still dance on it they choose their place for security. The long walls of the nave suggest almost a restoration—almost.
When the Abbey flourished, and when Alexander III was king, he was wedded here (1285)to Joleta, daughter of the French Count de Dreux. Always French and Scotch have felt a kinship, and often expressed it in royal marriage. The gray abbey walls, then a century and a half old, must have looked curiously down on this gay wedding throng which so possessed the place, so dispossessed the monks, Austin friars come from the abbey of St. Quentin at Beauvais.
Suddenly, in the midst of the dance, the King reached out his hand to the maiden queen—and Death, the specter, met him with skeleton fingers. It may have been a pageant trick, it may have been a too thoughtful monk; but the thirteenth century was rich with superstition. Six months later Alexander fell from his horse on a stormy night on the Fife coast—and the prophetic omen was remembered, or constructed.
The Abbey was newly in ruin when Mary Queen rode down this way, only twenty-one years after Hertford's hurtful raid. Court was to be held here, the assizes of October, 1566, at this Border town. For the Border had been over-lively and was disputing the authority of the Scottish queen as though it had no loyalty. Bothwell had been sent down as Warden of the Marches to quell the marauding free-booters.He had met with Little Jock Elliott, a Jethart callant, a Border bandit, to whom we can forgive much, because of the old ballad.
"My castle is aye my ain,An' herried it never shall be;For I maun fa' ere it's taen,An' wha daur meddle wi' me?Wi' my kuit in the rib o' my naig,My sword hangin' doun by my knee,For man I am never afraid,An' wha daur meddle wi' me?Wha daur meddle wi' me,Wha daur meddle wi' me?Oh, my name is little Jock Elliott,An' wha daur meddle wi' me?"I munt my gude naig wi' a willWhen the fray's in the wind, an' heCocks his lugs as he tugs for the hillThat enters the south countrie,Where pricking and spurring are rife,And the bluid boils up like the sea,But the Southrons gang doon i' the strife,An' wha daur meddle wi' me?"
And perhaps we can forgive the reiver, since he dealt a blow to Bothwell that those of us who love Mary have longed to strike through the long centuries. Bothwell took Elliott in custody, Elliott not suspecting that a Scot could prove treacherous like a Southron, and was carrying him to the Hermitage. Jock askedpleasantly what would be his fate at the assize.
HERMITAGE CASTLE.HERMITAGE CASTLE.
"Gif ane assyises wald mak him clene, he was hertlie contentit, but he behuvit to pas to the Quenis grace."
This was little promise to little Jock Elliott. He fled. Bothwell chased. Bothwell fired, wounded Jock, overtook him, and Jock managed to give Bothwell three vicious thrusts of his skene dhu—"Wha daur meddle wi' me!"—before Bothwell's whinger drove death into little Jock Elliott.
Bothwell, wounded, perhaps to death, so word went up to Edinburgh, was carried to the Hermitage.
Buchanan, the scandalous chronicler of the time—there were such in Scotland, then, and always for Mary—set down that "when news thereof was brought to Borthwick to the Queen, she flingeth away in haste like a madwoman by great journeys in post, in the sharp time of winter, first to Melrose, and then to Jedworth."
It happened to be the crisp, lovely, truly Scottish time, October, and Mary opened court at Jedburgh October 9, presiding at the meetings of the Privy Council, and then rode to the Hermitage October 16. She rode with an escort which included the Earl of Moray, the Earlof Huntley, Mr. Secretary Lethington, and more men of less note. For six days the girl queen (Mary was only twenty-four in this year of the birth of James, year before the death of Darnley, the marriage with Bothwell, the imprisonment at Loch Leven) had been mewed to state affairs, and a ride through the brown October woods, thirty miles there and thirty miles back again, must have lured the queen who was always keen for adventure, whether Bothwell was the goal, or just adventure.
The mist of the morning turned to thick rain by night, and the return ride was made in increasing wet and darkness. Once, riding ahead and alone and rapidly, the Queen strayed from the trail, was bogged in a mire, known to-day as the Queen's Mire, and rescued with difficulty.
Next day Mary lay sick at Jedburgh, a sickness of thirty days, nigh unto death. News was sent to Edinburgh, and bells were rung, and prayers offered in St. Giles. On the ninth day she lay unconscious, in this little town of Jedburgh, apparently dead, twenty years before Fotheringay. "Would God I had died at Jedburgh."
She did not die. Darnley visited her one day, coming from Glasgow. Bothwell came as soon as he could be moved, and the two madeconvalescence together in this old house of Jedburgh, perhaps the happiest house of all those where the legend of Mary persists. Even to-day it has its charm. The windowed turret looks out on the large fruit garden that stretches down to the Jed, very like that very little turret of "Queen Mary's Lookout" at Roscoff where the child queen had landed in France less than twenty years before.
Five years later, when Mary was in an English prison, a proclamation was read in her name at the town cross of Jedburgh, the herald was roughly handled by the Provost who received his orders from England, and Buccleuch and Ker of Fernihurst revenged themselves by hanging ten loyal (?) citizens who stood with the Provost.
Later, a century later, when at the town cross the magistrates were drinking a health to the new sovereign, a well-known Jacobite came by. They insisted on his joining in the toast. And he pledged—"confusion to King William, and the restitution of our sovereign and the heir!" Bravo, the Borderers!
The sentimental journeymen—with whom I count myself openly—may hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet—. One has read "Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were better not to "turn aside to Yarrow," to accept it as
"Enough if in our hearts we knowThere's such a place as Yarrow....For when we're there although 'tis fair,'Twill be another Yarrow."
There is peril at times in making a dream come true, in translating the dream into reality, in lifting the mists from the horizon of imagination. Should one hear an English skylark, an Italian nightingale? should one see Carcassonne, should one visit Yarrow?
Ah, welladay. I have heard, I have seen.Just at first, because no dream can ever quite come true, not the dream of man in stone, or of song in bird-throat, or even of nature in trees and sky and hills, there is a disappointment. But after the reality these all slip away into the misty half-remembered things, even Carcassonne, even Yarrow; the dream enriched by the vision, the vision softened again into dream.
And so, I will down into Yarrow.
Coaches run, or did before the war, and will after the war, through the pleasant dales of Yarrow and Moffat, dales which knew battles long ago and old unhappy far off things, but very silent now, too silent; almost one longs for a burst of Border warfare that the quiet may be filled with fitting clamour. The coaches meet at Tibbie Shiel's on St. Mary's and it is to Tibbie's that you are bound, as were so many gallant gentlemen, especially literary gentlemen, before you.
Selkirk is the starting point. And Selkirk is a very seemly, very prosperous town, looking not at all like an ecclesiastic city, as it started to be in the dear dead days of David the saint, looking very much as a hill city in Italy will look some day when Italy becomes entirely "redeemed" and modern, and exists for itself instead of for the tourist. Selkirk is indifferent to tourists, as indeed is every Scottish town; Scotland and Scotsmen are capable of existing for themselves. Selkirk hangs against the hillside above the Ettrick, and its show places are few; the spot where Montrose lodged the night before the defeat at Philipshaugh, the statue of Scott when he was sheriff, "shirra," the statue of Mungo Park near where he was given his medical training, and the home of Andrew Lang.
There is no trace of the "kirk o' the shielings," founded by the religious from Iona, from which by way of Scheleschyrche came Selkirk. Nor is there trace of Davis's pile, ruined or unruined, in this near, modern, whirring city. It is the sound of the looms one remembers in Selkirk, making that infinity of yards of Scotch tweed to clothe the world. Selkirk and Galashiels and Hawick form the Glasgow of the Border.
Always industrious, in the time of Flodden it was the "souters of Selkirk" who marched away to the Killing—
"Up wi' the Souters of SelkirkAnd down wi' the Earl o' Home."
These same souters—shoemakers—were busy in the time of Prince Charles Edward and contracted to furnish two thousand pair of shoes to his army; but one does not inquire too closely into whether they furnished any quota of the four thousand feet to go therein.
It was a warm sunny day when I made my pilgrimage up the Yarrow to St. Mary's. Although Yarrow has always sung in my ears, I think it was rather to see one sight that I came for the first time to Scotland, to see
"The swan on still St. Mary's LakeFloat double, swan and shadow."
I rather think it was for this I had journeyed across the Atlantic and up the East coast route. Such a sentimental lure would I follow. But then, if that seems wasteful and ridiculous excess of sentiment, let us be canny enough, Scotch enough, to admit that one sees so many other things, incidentally.
The "wan waters" of the Yarrow were shimmering, glimmering, in the morning light as I coached out of Selkirk, and by Carterhaugh.
"I forbid ye, maidens a',That wear gowd in your hair,To come or gae by Carterhaugh;For young Tamlane is there."
These round-shouldered hills, once covered with the Wood of Caledon, and the Forest ofEttrick, and the Forest of Yarrow, are very clear and clean in their green lawns to-day, scarce an ancient tree or a late descendant standing; here and there only gnarled and deformed, out of the centuries, out of perhaps that "derke forest" of James IV. His son, the Fifth James, thought to subdue the Border and increase his revenue by placing thousands of sheep in this forest; and these ruining the trees have decreased the tourists' rightful revenue. It is because of this absence of trees that one is perhaps more conscious of the shining ribbon of river; longer, clearer stretches may be seen in the green plain:
"And is this—Yarrow? This the streamOf which my fancy cherishedSo faithfully a waking dream?An image that has perished!O that some minstrel's harp were nearTo utter notes of gladness,And chase this silence from the airThat fills my heart with sadness!"
About Philipshaugh, two miles from Selkirk, the trees are in something of large estate, with oak and birch and fir and rowan, making dark shadows in the fair morning, as the historically minded traveler would fain have it. For it was there that Montrose met defeat, his small band against Leslie's many men. All about there lielegends of his fight and his flight across the Minchmoor and on to the North.
NEWARK CASTLE.NEWARK CASTLE.
And through here Scott loved to wander. Here he let the Minstrel begin his Last Lay—
"He paused where Newark's stately TowerLooks down from Yarrow's birchen bower."
And it was hither the Scotch poet came with Wordsworth, as the English poet describes it—
"Once more by Newark's Castle gateLong left without a warder,I stood, looked, listened, and with TheeGreat Minstrel of the Border."
Nearby, and near the highways, is the deserted farm cottage, the birthplace of Mungo Park, who traveled about the world even as you and I, and I fancy his thought must often have returned to the Yarrow.
The driver will point out the Trench of Wallace, a redout a thousand feet long, on the height to the North; and here will come into the Border memories of another defender of Scotland who seems rather to belong to the North and West.
Soon we reach the Kirk of Yarrow, a very austere "reformed" looking basilica, dating back to 1640, which was a reformed date, set among pleasant gardens and thick verdure. Scottand Wordsworth and Hogg have worshiped here, and from its ceiling the heraldic devices of many Borderers speak a varied history.
Crossing the bridge we are swiftly, unbelievingly, on the Dowie Dens of Yarrow.
"Yestreen I dream'd a dolefu' dream;I fear there will be sorrow!I dream'd I pu'd the heather green,Wi' my true love on Yarrow."But in the glen strive armed men;They've wrought me dole and sorrow;They've slain—the comeliest knight they've slain—He bleeding lies on Yarrow."She kiss'd his cheek, she kaim'd his hair,She search'd his wounds all thorough;She kiss'd them till her lips grew red,On the dowie houms of Yarrow."
Then we come into the country of Joseph Hogg. The farm where he was tenant and failed, for Hogg was a shepherd and a poet, which means a wanderer and a dreamer. And soon to the Gordon Arms, a plain rambling cement structure, where Hogg and Scott met by appointment and took their last walk together.
Hogg is the spirit of all the Ettrick place. Can you not hear his skylark—"Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless"—inthat far blue sky above Altrive, where he died—"Oh, to abide in the desert with thee!"
And now the driver tells us we are at the Douglass Glen, up there to the right lies the shattered keep of the good Lord James Douglass, the friend of Bruce. Here fell the "Douglass Tragedy," and the bridle path from Yarrow to Tweed is still to be traced.
"O they rade on and on they rade,And a' by the light of the moon,Until they came to yon wan water,And there they lighted down."
And soon we are at St. Mary's Loch—which we have come to see. To one who comes from a land of lakes, from the Land of the Sky Blue Water, there must be at first a sudden rush of disappointment. This is merely a lake, merely a stretch of water. The hills about are all barren, rising clear and round against the sky. They fold and infold as though they would shield the lake bereft of trees, as though they would shut out the world. Here and there, but very infrequent, is a cluster of trees; for the most part it is water and sky and green heatheryhills. The water is long and narrow, a small lake as our American lakes go, three miles by one mile; but large as it looms in romance, rich as it bulks in poetry.
INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN.INTERIOR VIEW, TIBBIE SHIEL'S INN.
Tibbie Shiel's is, of course, our goal. One says Tibbie Shiel's, as one says Ritz-Carlton, or the William the Conqueror at Dives. For this is the most celebrated inn in all Scotland, and it must be placed with the celebrated inns of the world. There is no countryside better sung than this which lies about St. Mary's, and no inn, certainly not anywhere a country inn, where more famous men have foregathered to be themselves. Perhaps the place has changed since the most famous, the little famed days, when Scott stopped here after a day's hunting, deer or Border song and story, up Meggatdale; and those famous nights of Christopher North and the Ettrick shepherd, nights deserving to be as famous as the Arabian or Parisian or London. The world has found it out, and times have changed, as a local poet complains—
"Sin a' the world maun gangAnd picnic at St. Mary's."
The inn, a rambling white house, stands on a strip between two waters, added to no doubt since Tibbie first opened its doors, but theclosed beds are still there—it was curious enough to see them the very summer that the Graham Moffatts played "Bunty" and "The Closed Bed"—and the brasses which Tibbie polished with such housewifely care.
For Tibbie was a maid in the household of the Ettrick shepherd's mother. She married, she had children, she came here to live. Then her husband died, and quite accidentally Tibbie became hostess to travelers, nearly a hundred years ago. For fifty-four years Tibbie herself ran this inn; she died in what is so short a time gone, as Scottish history goes, in 1878.
During that time hosts of travelers, particularly, wandered through the Border, came to this "wren's nest" as North called it. Hogg, of course, was most familiar, and here he wished to have a "bit monument to his memory in some quiet spot forninst Tibbie's dwelling." He sits there, in free stone, somewhat heavily, a shepherd's staff in his right hand, and in his left a scroll carrying the last line from the "Queen's Wake"—"Hath tayen the wandering winds to sing."
Edward Irving, walking from Kirkcaldy to Annan, was here the first year after Tibbie opened her doors so shyly. Carlyle, walking from Ecclefechan to Edinburgh, in his studentdays, caught his first glimpse of Yarrow from here—and slept, may it be, in one of these closed beds? Gladstone was here in the early '40's during a Midlothian campaign. Dr. John Brown—"Rab"—came later, and even R. L. S. knew the hospitality of Tibbie Shiel's when Tibbie was still hostess.
It is a long list and a brave one. In this very dining-room they ate simply and abundantly, after the day's work; in this "parlour" they continued their talk. And surely St. Mary's Lake was the same.
Down on the shore there stands a group of trees, not fir trees, though these are most native here. And here we loafed the afternoon away—for fortunately we were the only ones who "picnic at St. Mary's." There were the gentleman and his wife whom we took for journalistic folk, they were so worldly and so intelligent and discussed the world and the possibilities of world-war—that was several years ago—until at the Kirk of Yarrow the local minister, Dr. Borlund, uncovered this minister, James Thomson, from Paisley. If all the clergy of Scotland should become as these, austerity of reform would go and the glow of culture would come.
We all knew our history and our poetry ofthis region, but none so well as the minister. It was he who recited from Marmion that description which is still so accurate—
"By lone St. Mary's silent Lake;Thou know'st it well—nor fen nor sedgePollute the clear lake's crystal edge;Abrupt and sheer the mountains sinkAt once upon the level brink;And just a trace of silver strandMarks where the water meets the land.Far in the mirror, bright and blue,Each hill's huge outline you may view;Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,Nor tree nor bush nor brake is there,Save where of land, yon silver lineBears thwart the lake the scatter'd pine.Yet even this nakedness has power,And aids the feelings of the hour;Nor thicket, dell nor copse you spy,Where living thing conceal'd might lie;Not point, retiring, hides a dellWhere swain, or woodman lone might dwell;There's nothing left to fancy's guess,You see that all is loneliness;And silence aids—though the steep hillsSend to the lake a thousand rills;In summer time, so soft they weep.The sound but lulls the ear asleep;Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,So stilly is the solitude."
ST. MARY'S LAKE.ST. MARY'S LAKE.
Across the water is the old graveyard of vanished St. Mary's kirk. And it was thelow-voiced minister's wife—a Babbie a little removed—who knew
"What boon to lie, as now I lie,And see in silver at my feetSt. Mary's Lake, as if the skyHad fallen 'tween those hills so sweet,And this old churchyard on the hill,That keeps the green graves of the dead,So calm and sweet, so lone and wild still,And but the blue sky overhead."
We sat in the silences, the still silent afternoon, conscious of the folk verse that goes—
"St. Mary's Loch lies shimmering still,But St. Mary's kirkbell's lang dune ringing."
Suddenly, over the far rim of the water, my eye caught something white, and then another, and another. And I knew well that were I but nearer, as imagination knew was unnecessary, I might see the swan on still St. Mary's Lake, and their shadow breaking in the water.
I
suppose the Scotsman who has been born in Edinburgh may have a pardonable reluctance in praising the town, may hesitate in appraising it; Stevenson did; Scott did not. And I suppose if one cannot trace his ancestry back to Edinburgh, or nearly there, but must choose some of the other capitals of the world as his ancestral city, one might begrudge estate to Edinburgh.
I have none of these hesitations, am hampered by none of these half and half ways. Being an American, with half a dozen European capitals to choose from if I must, and having been born in an American capital which is among the loveliest—I think the loveliest—I dare choose Edinburgh as my dream city. I dare fling away my other capital claims, and all modification, ever Scotch moderation, to declare without an "I think" or "they say," Edinburgh is the most beautiful, the most romantic, the singular city of the world.
Those who come out of many generations of migration grow accustomed to choosing their quarter of the world; they have come from many countries and through nomadic ancestors for a century, or two, or three. And perhaps they, themselves, have migrated from one state to another, one city to another. Every American has had these phases, has suffered the sea change and the land. Surely then he may adopt his ancestral capital, as correctly as he adopts his present political capital.
It shall be Edinburgh. And while Constantinople and Rio and Yokohama may be splendid for situation, they have always something of foreign about them, they can never seem to touch our own proper romance, to have been the setting for our play. Edinburgh is as lovely, and then, the chalice of romance has been lifted for centuries on the high altar of her situation.
Edinburgh is a small city, as modern cities go; but I presume it has many thousands of population, hundreds of thousands. If it were Glasgow numbers would be important, fixative. But Edinburgh has had such a population through the centuries that to cast its total with only that of the souls now living within her precincts were to leave out of the picture thoseshadowy and yet brilliant, ever present generations, who seem all to jostle each other on her High street, without respect to generations, if there is very decided respect of simple toward gentle.
Edinburgh is, curiously, significantly, divided and scarce united, into Old Town and New Town. And yet, the Old Town with its ancientlandsso marvelously like modern tenements, and its poverty which is of no date and therefore no responsibility of ours, is neither dead nor deserted, and is still fully one-half the town. While New Town, looking ever up to the old, looking across the stretch to Leith, and to the sea whence came so much threatening in the old days, and with its memories of Hume and Scott who are ancient, and of Stevenson, who, in spite of his immortal youth, does begin to belong to another generation than ours—New Town also, to a new American, is something old. It has all become Edinburgh, two perfect halves of a whole which is not less perfect for the imperfect uniting.
There is no city which can be so "observed." I venture that when you have stood on Castle Hill—on the High Street with its narrow opening between thelandsframing near and far pictures—on Calton Hill—when you have beenable to "rest and be thankful" at Corstorphine Hill—when you have climbed the Salisbury crags—when you have mounted to Arthur's Seat and looked down as did King Arthur before there was an Edinburgh—you will believe that not any slightest corner but fills the eye and soul.
There is, of course, no single object in Edinburgh to compare with objects of traveler's interest farther south. The castle is not the Tower, Holyrood is a memory beside Windsor, St. Giles is no Canterbury, St. Mary's is not St. Paul's, the Royal Scottish art gallery is meager indeed, notwithstanding certain rare riches in comparison with the National. But still one may believe of any of these superior objects, as T. Sandys retorted to Shovel when they had played the game of matching the splendours of Thrums with those of London and Shovel had named Saint Paul's, and Tommy's list of native wonders was exhausted, but never Tommy—"it would like to be in Thrums!" All these lesser glories go to make up the singular glory which is Edinburgh.
Edinburgh CastleEdinburgh Castle
And there is the castle. Nowhere in all the world is castle more strategically set to guard the city and to guard the memories of the city and the beauty.
For the castle is Edinburgh. It stood there, stalwart in the plain, thousands and thousands of years ago, this castle hill which invited a castle as soon as man began to fortify himself. It has stood here a thousand years as the bulwark of man against man. Certain it will stand there a thousand years to come. And after—after man has destroyed and been destroyed, or when he determines that like night and the sea there shall be no more destruction. Castle Hill is immortal.
Always it has been the resort of kings and princes. First it was the keep of princesses, far back in Pictish days before Christian time, this "Castell of the Maydens." From 987B. C.down to 1566, when Mary was lodged here for safe keeping in order that James might be born safe and royal, the castle has had royalties in its keeping. It has kept them rather badly in truth. While many kings have been born here,few kings have died in its security; almost all Scottish kings have died tragically, almost all Scottish kings have died young, and left their kingdom to some small prince whose regents held him in this castle for personal security, while they governed the realm, always to its disaster.
There is not one of the Stewart kings, one of the Jameses, from First to Sixth, who did not come into the heritage of the kingdom as a baby, a youth; even the Fourth, who rebelled against his father and won the kingdom—and wore a chain around his body secretly for penance. And these baby kings and stripling princes have been lodged in the castle for safe keeping, prologues to the swelling act of the imperial theme.
History which attempts to be exact begins the castle in the seventh century, when Edwin of Deira fortified the place and called it Edwin's burgh. It was held by Malcolm Canmore, of whom and of his Saxon queen Margaret, Dunfermline tells a fuller story; held against rebels and against English, until Malcolm fell at Alnwick, and Margaret, dead at hearing the news, was carried secretly out of the castle by her devoted and kingly sons.
After Edward I took the castle, for half acentury it was variously held by the English as a Border fortress. Once Bruce retook it, a stealthy night assault, up the cliffs of the west, and The Bruce razed it. Rebuilt by the Third Edward, it was taken from this king by a clever ruse planned by the Douglass, Black Knight of Liddesdale. A shipload of wine and biscuits came into harbour, and the unsuspecting castellan, glad to get such precious food in the far north, purchased it all and granted delivery at dawn next morning. The first cart load upset under the portcullis, the gate could not be closed, the cry "A Douglass," was raised, and the castle entered into Scottish keeping, never to be "English" again until the Act of Union.
Henry IV and Richard II attempted it, but failed. Richard III entered it as friend. For three years it was held for Mary by Kirkcaldy, while the city was disloyal. Charles I held it longer than he held England, and Cromwell claimed it in person as part of the Protectorate. Prince Charles, the Third, could not take it, contented himself with the less castellated, more palatial joys, of Holyrood; a preference he shared with his greatest grandmother.
To-day perhaps its defense might be battered down, as some one has suggested, "fromthe Firth by a Japanese cruiser." But it looks like a Gibraltar, and it keeps impregnably the treasures of the past; as necessary a defense, I take it, as of any material treasure of the present.
If you are a king you must wait to enter; summons must be made to the Warder, and it must be certain you are the king; even Edward VII, most Stewart of recent kings had to prove himself not Edward I, not English, but "Union." If you are a commoner you know no such difficulties.
First you linger on the broad Esplanade where a regiment in kilts is drilling, perhaps the Black Watch, the Scots Greys. No doubt of late it has been tramped by regiments of the "First Hundred Thousand" and later, in training for the wars.
As an American you linger here in longer memory. For when Charles was king—the phrase sounds recent to one who is eternally Jacobite—this level space was a part of Nova Scotia, and the Scotsmen who were made nobles with estates in New Scotland were enfeoffed on this very ground. So close were the relations between old and new, so indifferent were the men of adventuring times toward space.
Or, you linger here to recall when Cromwellwas burned in effigy, along with "his friend the Devil."
MONS MEG.MONS MEG.
You pass through the gate, where no wine casks block the descent of the portcullis, and the castle is entered. There are three or four points of particular interest.
Queen Margaret's chapel, the oldest and smallest religious house in Scotland, a tiny place indeed, where Margaret was praying when word was brought of the death of Malcolm in battle, and she, loyal and royal soul, died the very night while the enemies from the Highlands, like an army of Macbeth's, surrounded the castle. The place is quite authentic, Saxon in character with Norman touches. I know no place where a thousand years can be so swept away, and Saxon Margaret herself seems to kneel in the perpetual dim twilight before the chancel.
There is Mons Meg, a monstrous gun indeed, pointing its mouth toward the Forth, as though it were the guardian of Scotland. A very pretentious gun, which was forged for James II, traveled to the sieges of Dumbarton and of Norham, lifted voice in salute to Mary in France on her marriage to the Dauphin, was captured by Cromwell and listed as "the great iron murderer, Muckle Meg," and "split its throat" insaluting the Duke of York in 1682, a most Jacobite act of loyalty. After the Rising of the Forty Five this gun was taken to London, as though to take it from Scotland were to take the defense from Jacobitism. But Sir Walter Scott, restoring Scotland, and being in much favour with George IV, secured the return of Mons Meg. It was as though a prince of the realm has returned. Now, the great gun, large enough to shoot men for ammunition, looks, silently but sinisterly, out over the North Sea.
History comes crowding its events in memory when one enters Old Parliament Hall. It is fitly ancestral, a noble hall with an open timbered roof of great dignity, with a collection of armour and equipment that particularly re-equips the past. And in this hall, under this roof, what splendour, what crime! Most criminal, the "black dinner" given to the Black Douglasses to their death. Unless one should resent the dinner given by Leslie to Cromwell, when there was no black bull's head served.
By a secret stair, which commoners and Jacobites may use to-day, communication was had with the Royal Lodgings, and often must Queen Mary have gone up and down those stairs, carrying the tumult of her heart, the perplexityof her kingdom; for Mary was both woman and sovereign.
The Royal Lodgings contain Queen Mary's Rooms, chiefly; the other rooms are negligible. It is a tiny bedchamber, too small to house the eager soul of Mary, but very well spaced for the niggard soul of James. One merely accepts historically the presence of Mary here; there is too much intertwining of "H" and "M." No Jacobite but divorces Darnley from Mary, even though he would not effect divorce with gunpowder. King James I, when he returned fourteen years after to the place where he was VI, made a pilgrimage to his own birth-room on June 19, 1617. I suppose he found the narrow space like unto the Majesty that doth hedge a king.
Mary must have beat her heart against these walls as an eagle beats wings against his cage. She never loved the place. Who could love it who must live in it? It was royally hung; she made it fit for living, with carpets from Turkey, chairs and tables from France, gold hangings that were truly gold for the bed, and many tapestries with which to shut out the cold—eight pictures of the Judgment of Paris; four pictures of the Triumph of Virtue!
Here she kept her library, one hundred andfifty-three precious volumes—where are they now? "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner," wrote Randolph, English envoy, to his queen, "instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie."
And I wondered if here she wrote that Prayer which but the other day I came upon in the bookshop of James Thin, copied into a book of a hundred years back, in a handwriting that has something of Queen Mary's quality in it—
"O Domine Deus!Speravi in te;O care mi Iesu!Nunc libera me:In dura catena,In misera poenaDesidero te;Languendo, gemendo,Et genuflectendoAdoro, imploro,Ut liberes me!"
Her windows looked down across the city toward Holyrood. Almost she must have heard John Knox thunder in the pulpit of St. Giles, and thunder against her. And, directly beneath far down she saw the Grassmarket. Sometimes it flashed with gay tournament folk; for before and during Mary's time all the world came to measure lances in Edinburgh. Sometimes it swarmed with folk come to watch an execution; in the next century it was filled in the "Killing Time," with Covenanter mob applauding the execution of Royalists, with Royalist mob applauding the execution of Covenanters; Mary's time was not the one "to glorify God in the Grassmarket."
At the top of the market, near where the West Bow leads up to the castle, was the house of Claverhouse, who watched the killings. At the bottom of the market was the West Port through which Bonnie Dundee rode away.
"To the Lords of Convention, 'twas Claverhouse spoke,Ere the king's crown go down there are crowns to be broke,So each cavalier who loves honour and me,Let him follow the bonnet of Bonnie Dundee.Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,Come saddle my horses and call up my men,Fling all your gates open, and let me gae free,For 'tis up with the bonnets of Bonnie Dundee."
And to-day, but especially on Saturday nights, if you care to take your life, or your peace in hand, you can join a strange and rather awful multitude as it swarms through the Grassmarket, more and more drunken as midnight comes on, and not less or more drunken than the mob which hanged Captain Porteous.
It is a decided relief to look down and findthe White Hart Inn, still an inn, where Dorothy and William Wordsworth lodged, on Thursday night, September 15, 1803—"It was not noisy, and tolerably cheap. Drank tea, and walked up to the Castle."
The Cowgate was a fashionable suburb in Mary's time. A canon of St. Andrews wrote in 1530, "nothing is humble or lowly, everything magnificent." On a certain golden gray afternoon I had climbed to Arthur's Seat to see the city through the veil of mist—
"I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawnOn Lammermuir. Harkening I heard againIn my precipitous city beaten bellsWinnow the keen sea wind."
It was late, gathering dusk and rain, when I reached the level and thinking to make a short cut—this was once the short cut to St. Cuthbert's from Holyrood—I ventured into the Cowgate, and wondered at my own temerity. Stevenson reports, "One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the policeman." Well, if Scott liked to "put a cocked hat on a story," Stevenson liked to put it on his own adventures. The Cowgate, in dusk rain, is adventure enough.
Across the height lies Greyfriar's. The church is negligible, the view from there superb,the place historic. One year after Jenny Geddes threw her stool in St. Giles and started the Reformation—doesn't it sound like Mrs. O'Leary's cow?—the Covenant was signed (Feb. 28, 1638) on top of a tomb still shown, hundreds pressing to the signing, some signing with their blood. The Reformation was on, not to be stopped until all Scotland was harried and remade.
GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD.GREYFRIARS' CHURCHYARD.
I like best to think that in this churchyard, on a rainy Sunday, Scott met a charming girl, fell in love with her, took her home under his umbrella, and, did not marry her—his own romance!
Because no king shall ever wear the crown again, nor wave the scepter, nor wield the sword of state, the Regalia, housed in the Crown Room, and guarded from commoner and king by massive iron grating, is more interesting than any other appanage of royalty in the world. The crown which was worn by Bruce, and which sat rather uneasily on the very unsteady head of Charles II at what time he was crowned at Scone and was scolded, is of pure gold and much bejeweled. The scepter, made in Paris for James V, carries a beryl, come from Egypt three thousand years ago, or, from a Druid priest in the mist of time. The swordwas a gift from Pope Julius to James IV; in those days the Scottish sovereign was surely the "Most Catholic Majesty."
England has no ancient regalia; hers were thrown into the melting pot by Cromwell. The Protector—and Destructor—would fain have grasped these "Honours," but they were spirited away, and later concealed in the castle. Here they remained a hundred and ten years, sealed in a great oak chest. The rumour increased that they had gone to England. And finally Sir Walter Scott secured an order from George IV to open the chest (Feb. 4, 1818).
It was a tremendous moment to Scott. Could he restore the Honours as well as the country? There they lay, crown of The Bruce, scepter of James V, sword of Pope and King. The castle guns thundered—how Mons Meg must have regretted her lost voice!
And still we can hear the voice of Scott, when a commissioner playfully lifted the crown as if to place it on the head of a young lady near—"No, by God, no!" Never again shall this crown rest on any head. That is assured in a codicil to the Act of Union. And—it may be that other crowns shall in like manner gain a significance when they no longer rest on uneasy heads.
The view from the King's bastion is royal. Where is there its superior? And only its rival from Calton Hill, from Arthur's Seat. The Gardens lie below, the New Town spreads out, the city runs down to Leith, the Firth shines and carries on its bosom the Inchkeith and the May; the hills of Fife rampart the North; the Highlands with Ben Lomond for sentinel form the purple West; and south are the Braid hills and the heathery Pentlands—the guide has pointed through a gap in the castle wall to the hills and to the cottage at Swanston.
"City of mists and rain and blown gray spaces,Dashed with the wild wet colour and gleam of tears,Dreaming in Holyrood halls of the passionate facesLifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years.Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?Cometh there not as a moon (where blood-rust searsFloors a-flutter of old with silks and laces)Gilding a ghostly Queen thro' the mist of tears?"Proudly here, with a loftier pinnacled splendourThroned in his northern Athens, what spells remainStill on the marble lips of the Wizard, and renderSilent the gazer on glory without a stain!Here and here, do we whisper with hearts more tender,Tusitala wandered thro' mist and rain;Rainbow-eyes and frail and gallant and slender,Dreaming of pirate isles in a jeweled main."Up the Canongate climbeth, cleft a-sunderRaggedly here, with a glimpse of the distant sea,Flashed through a crumbling alley, a glimpse of wonder,Nay, for the City is throned in Eternity!Hark! from the soaring castle a cannon's thunderCloseth an hour for the world and an æon for me,Gazing at last from the martial heights whereunderDeathless memories roll to an ageless sea."
If the Baedeker with a cautious reservation, declares Princes Street "Perhaps" the handsomest in Europe, there is no reservation in the guide-book report of Taylor, the "Water Poet," who wrote of the High Street in the early Sixteen Hundreds, "the fairest and goodliest streete that ever my eyes beheld." Surely it was then the most impressive street in the world. Who can escape a sharp impression to-day? It was then the most curious street in the world, and it has lost none of its power to evoke wonder.
A causeway between the castle and Holyrood, a steep ridge lying between the Nor' Loch (where now are the Princes' Gardens) and the Sou' Loch (where now are the Meadows, suburban dwelling) the old height offered the first refuge to those who would fain live under the shadow of the castle. As the castle becamemore and more the center of the kingdom, dwelling under its shadow became more and more important, if not secure. The mightiest lords of the kingdom built themselves town houses along the causeway. French influence was always strong, and particularly in architecture. So these talllandsrose on either side of the long street, their high, many-storied fronts on the High Street, their many more storied backs toward the Lochs. They were, in truth, part of the defense of the town; from their tall stories the enemy, especially the "auld enemy," could be espied almost as soon as from the castle. And the closes, the wynds, those dark tortuous alleys which lead between, and which to-day in their squalor are the most picturesque corners of all Europe, were in themselves means of defense in the old days when cannon were as often of leather as of iron, and guns were new and were little more reaching than arrows, and bludgeons and skene dhus and fists were the final effective weapon when assault was intended to the city.
The ridge divides itself into the Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the Canongate; St. Giles uniting the first two, and the Netherbow port, now removed, dividing the last two.
The Lawnmarket in the old days was near-royal, and within its houses the great nobles lodged, and royalty was often a guest, or a secret guest. The High Street was the business street, centering the life of the city, its trade, its feuds—"a la maniére d'Edimborg" ran the continental saying of fights—its religion, its executions, its burials. The Canongate, outside the city proper and outside the Flodden wall and within the precincts of Holyrood, therefore regarded as under the protection of Holy Church, became the aristocratic quarters of the later Stewarts, of the wealthy nobles of the later day.
I suppose one may spend a lifetime in Edinburgh, with frequent days in the Old Town, wandering the High Street, with the eye never wearying, always discovering the new. And I suppose it would take a lifetime, born in Old Town and of Old Town, to really know the quarter. I am not certain I should care to spend a lifetime here; but I have never and shall never spend sufficient of this life here. It is unsavoury of course; it is slattern, it is squalid, danger lurks in the wynds and drunkenness spreads itself in the closes. If the old warning cry of "Gardey loo!" is no longer heard at ten o' the night, one still has need of the answering "Haud yer hand!" or, your nose. Dr. SamuelJohnson, walking this street on his first night in Edinburgh, arm in arm with Boswell, declared, "I can smell you in the dark!" No sensitive visitor will fail to echo him to-day. There are drains and sewers, there is modern sanitation in old Edinburgh. But the habits of the centuries are not easily overcome; and the Old Town still smells as though with all the old aroma of the far years. Still, it is high, it is wind-swept—and what of Venice, what of the Latin Quarter, what of Mile End, what of the East Side?