Rosaline Masson

“ It was in this great hall that Charles I. sat, surrounded by Scottish and English nobles, on a June evening in 1633, at a great banquet given by the Earl of Mar in his honour, the day before he was crowned at Holyrood. It was here that, a few years later, Alexander Leslie, the Covenanting General, gave a banquet to Cromwell and the Covenanting lords, whilst a blue banner waved above them bearing the angry legend, “For an Oppressed Kirk and a Broken Covenant.” ”

“ When Edinburgh was only a castle rising out of woods and morasses, with a cluster of wooden, thatched huts below it, all the land lying between the Castle and Arthur’s Seat was part of the unhewn forest of Drumsheugh; and there, where the red elk and the Caledonian boar roamed under primeval oaks, the pious Celtic kings of Scotland were wont to take their pleasure in the chase. ”

“ The men and women who felt Edinburgh their own during the first half of last century would scarcely find their way about it to-day; they would wander through vast tracts of busy streets where for them were green fields and yellow whins, and discover further indentations of the country in new suburbs embracing fragments of old villages, or enclosing in a new street some ancient castle or homestead. ”

“ Frank undertook to lead a small body of men up the perilous path he had so often traversed alone. Randolph consented; and, one dark and stormy night in March 1314,—March has ever been a fateful month in Scottish history,—when the howling wind and lashing rain would help to cover the sounds of stealthy climbing, thirty men crept after Frank up the precipitous cliffs, the walls were silently scaled, the English garrison was overpowered, and Edinburgh Castle was once more in the hands of Scots. ”

“ Passing a big open cart-shed, many empty carts, a cottage or two, cackling poultry, and a barking dog, you come to Swanston, the garden gate open, giving a most alarming view of a very modern and grotesque effigy of Tam o’ Shanter—usually taken for a statue of Stevenson—which is set on a rockery half-way up the little drive. All this is visible and prominent; but the village lies hidden behind the house; and Swanston Cottage, Stevenson’s home, is a little to one side, on the slope of the hill, and remains unseen, especially in spring or summer when the trees are full of leaf. ”

“ Edinburgh has had her architects, her philanthropists, her great soldiers, and her explorers; and she has always been especially noted for her printers and her publishers. Nor is Edinburgh, with her love for romance, likely to forget her illustrious criminals. To enumerate merely the names of the notable citizens of all sorts would form a small volume in itself: it must suffice to hurry through the centuries, picking out a name at random here and there, and especially those connected with houses still standing in the Old Town of Edinburgh. ”

“ IN Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing the Castle. ”

“ The better class in Edinburgh were very Jacobite in their leanings and sympathies,—Jacobite almost to a man, certainly to a woman. In George I.’s reign many a loyal Scot suffered torture, imprisonment, and death in the Castle; and women of gentle birth were among the Jacobites who endured barbarous treatment for their loyalty to the fallen race.
With every century the outward aspect of the Castle has changed, so that its jagged outline to-day, blotted against the sunset sky, is utterly different from what dwellers in Edinburgh of any other century would have known. ”

“ And there must not be forgotten the greatest building of all—if building it can be called—that has been achieved near Edinburgh during yesterday: the Forth Bridge, the highest bridge in the world, finished in 1890, with its monster claws planted firmly on either side of the Firth of Forth, just where Queen Margaret and Malcolm Canmore used to be ferried to and fro on their journeyings between Edinburgh Castle and Dunfermline Palace.
It is not only by the building of new edifices that wealthy citizens have generously endowed Edinburgh ”

“ To Edinburgh, as in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, there journeyed, in James IV.’s days, knights from all over Europe, to take part in the famous tournaments held below the Castle Rock or on the open spaces beside Holyrood, and to try and win the lance tipped with pure Scottish gold with which the King rewarded the best tilter. There gathered in Edinburgh, in the days of James IV., not only the flower of chivalry, but men of science, and men of art, and men of learning. ”

“ It is all there to-day: the damp old harled manse beside the parish church; the graveyard with its ancient tombs and the great iron coffin,—memento of the days of “resurrectionist” terror; the great swirling brown river under the magnificent trees of Colinton Dell; even the “weir with its wonder of foam,” and the old mill with the “wheel in the river.” It is one of the prettiest spots round Edinburgh, cool and quiet, with the reflections of the branches on the brown, foam-flecked surface of the deeper pools ”

“ Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets, with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite incomprehensible to the modern citizen. ”

“ Tweeddale Close, a door or two farther on, once the stately town residence of the Marquises of Tweeddale, is now indissolubly connected with the story of a mysterious crime,—the Begbie murder; for it was just within this close that a bank porter was stabbed to death on a dark November afternoon in 1806. The murderer, in spite of all the hue and cry and horror that followed on his crime, died undiscovered. ”

“ If he enter and have a glimpse of the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take several volumes to tell all there is to be told. ”

“ It is in the Canongate that the most stately buildings remain, a fact not wonderful when one learns that in the eighteenth century, before the Scottish nobles “left their hame,” the Canongate included among its residents no less than two Dukes, sixteen Earls, two Countesses, seven Barons of the Realm, thirteen Baronets, four Commanders-in-Chief, seven Lords of Session, and five “eminent men”; not to mention a bank, a ladies’ school, and two inns. What material for romance! ”

“ Many volumes and countless articles have been written about Scottish life and character, while the grand and beautiful in the scenery of Scotland have been reproduced in numerous ways, from the rough wood-cut to the latest colour process, but in the present book the hard-beaten path is departed from, and some of the less familiar pictures of Scottish life are represented. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas! are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it recalling a hundred memories,—but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to modern buildings. ”

“ Every day must have seen him limping along Princes Street, recognised by all, coming from Parliament House, or his meetings, or his printer’s; perhaps one of a group talking eagerly, pausing to disperse at the door of some bookshop or on the steps of a club, or at the corner of Castle Street. Many a head must have turned to gaze after the rugged familiar figure; many a whisper to child or stranger must have followed him, “There, look! That is Sir Walter Scott!”
In August 1822 George IV. paid his state visit to Edinburgh, and stayed a fortnight in the capital of the ancient kingdom. ”