Francis Watt

“ The Border country is a pleasant pastoral land, with soft, rounded hills, and streams innumerable, and secluded valleys, where the ruins of old peels or feudal castles intimate a troubled past. That past, however, has left a precious legacy to letters, for the Border ballads are of the finest of the wheat. They preserve, as only literature can, the joys and sorrows, the aspirations, hopes and fears, and beliefs of other days and vanished lives. ”

“ When O'Connor induced the chartists to repudiate the corn law repeal agitation, he withdrew from the chartist movement, for his hatred of the 'bread tax' was all through the deepest principle in his life. He believed it had caused his father's ruin, his own losses and disappointments, both as workman and capitalist; it was ruining the country, and would cause a terrible revolution. Thus all his efforts came to be directed to the repeal agitation. 'Our labour, our skill, our profits, our hopes, our lives, our children's souls are bread taxed,' he exclaims. ”

“ One constantly recurring street scene in old Edinburgh was the execution of criminals. Not a mere case of decorous hanging, but a man, as like as not, dismembered in sight of the gaping crowd, and that man was often one who had been within the memory of all a great personage in the State, to whom every knee had been bowed, and every cap doffed. ”

“ Money is not the result but the cause of wealth, he thought. To increase it then must be beneficial, and the best way is by a properly secured paper currency. This is the motive force; but it is to be applied in a particular way. Law had a profound belief in the omnipotence of government. He saw the evils of minor monopolies, and of private farming of taxes. He proposed to centre foreign trade and internal finance in one huge monopoly managed by the state for the people, and carrying on business through a plentiful supply of paper money. ”

“ Robin Hood and his merry band are but the glorified types of a very multitude who chased the deer night and day, for the forest stretched mile after mile over hill and dale, and the tall deer were fair to look on, and the taste of their flesh was as sweet to the wanderer and the outlaw as to the noble or the monarch ”

“ A distinction has been drawn between tavern, inn and hotel, the tavern supplying food and drink, the hotel lodging, the inn both; but this is fanciful. “Hotel” now means “inn,” and “inn” is often applied to a mere public-house, whilst “tavern” is less used. “Inn,” still the legal and best, as it is the oldest, is a form of the word “in” or “within.” This sense is retained in the case of the English legal societies still known as Inns of Court (q.v.) . In the Bible “inn” means “lodging-place for the night.” Hospitality has always been a sacred duty in the East. ”

“ And there was the usual monastic legend, to which, as far as it concerns Edinburgh, I make elsewhere sufficient reference. Between the Reformation and the end of the eighteenth century, or even later, the supernatural had a stronger grip on the Scots than on any other race in Europe. The unseen world beckoned and made its presence known by continual signs; portents and omens were of daily occurrence; men like Peden, the prophet, read the book of the future, every Covenanter lived a spiritual life whose interest far exceeded that of the material life present to his senses. ”

“ You think with regret of Howell's thirty-three huge volumes, that vast magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug comfort of our time! ”

“ It is soon quit of houses; yet the crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways. If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. ”

“ It is the beautiful that I thus actively recall, the august airs of the castle on its rock, nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendours of the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was received into a sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and upwards by fresh grades and rises, city beyond city, a New Jerusalem bodily scaling heaven. ”

“ The Scots Borderers were dreaded by their own more peaceful countrymen; and to think of that narrow strip of country, hemmed in by the Highlands to the north and the Border clans on the south, is to shudder at the burden it had to endure. For a race, whatever its good qualities, that lives by rapine, is like to be dangerous to friends as well as foes. Some Border clans, as the Armstrongs and the Elliots, were girded at as “always riding” ”

“ To catalogue the evils of the sanctuary system were to show lack of historical sympathy, nay, even of humour. The former days were not as these; it had its place with the shrine and the pilgrimage, the knight errant, and the trial by ordeal in the strange economy of a vanished world. As the times grew modern its practical inconvenience was felt for the first time. Yet the occasion of the first assault on the privilege of sanctuary was one where the benefits were conspicuous, and the assailant had the worst of motives. It was the case just noted of Edward IV.'s widow ”

“ Of much the same class were the caddies, whose name still lingers as the attendants on golf-players; the caddie was the man-of-all-work of old Edinburgh, for various indeed were his functions. Even to-day, if you look at some of the high houses, you remember how much time inhabitants must have spent in going up and down stairs; load the climber with burdens and life were scarce worth living. The chief burden was water, and the caddies were the class who bore the stoups containing it up and down. ”

“ But there was a North as well as a South Britain; and—what was more to the purpose—the Scots marriage law was all that heart could wish. Marriage (it held) is a contract into which two parties not too young and not too “sib” might enter at any time, all that was necessary being that each party clearly and in good faith expressed consent. Neither writing nor witnesses, however important for proof, were essential to a valid union. Not that the Scots law, civil or ecclesiastical, favoured this happy despatch; but the very punishment it imposed only tied the knot tighter. ”

“ Of old time man's dress was rich and varied, but how to catch its vanished effect? In Courts of Justice there is still the splendid, if occasional, bravery of the judge. See the same man in private, gaze on divinity disrobed, and the disenchantment measures for you what is lost in the splendid garb of other days. ”

“ No, for after all she was a Queen and a Stuart, and it is mere commonplace to say that she never failed to confront her fate.
It were easy and useless to dwell on the glaring contrasts in character between Mary and her son James, between the most tragically unfortunate and the most prosaically fortunate of the Stuarts. Such contrasts between the character and fate of parent and child are not uncommon in daily life. The first day of James on earth was memorable for the dramatic meeting of his father and mother. ”

“ Between the reign of James I. and that of Victoria all the subjects here discussed have suffered change, with one exception. The "Press-Gang" is still a legal possibility, but how hard to fancy it ever again in actual use!
I fear that these glimpses of other days may seem harsh and sombre; there is blood everywhere; the cruel consequences of law or custom are pushed to their logical conclusions with ruthless determination. The contrast to the almost morbid sentimentalism of to-day is striking. So difficult it seems to hit the just mean! But the improvement is enormous. ”

“ One of those, “an unwieldy old woman,” had fallen down one of those steep outside stairs abundant in old Edinburgh, but she crashed on a passing baker and escaped unhurt by what seemed to Mrs. Stevenson a special interposition of Providence. “I would like to know what kind of Providence the baker thought it,” exclaimed her husband.
R.L.S. had certain flirtations with the Edinburgh underworld of his time, for the dreary respectability and precise formalism which has settled like a cloud on the once jovial Auld Reekie was abhorrent to the soul of the bright youth. ”