Edinburgh

“ Year by year for seven centuries the alleys had become higher and narrower, till Edinburgh looked like a vast city crowded in close column on the steep faces of a hill, until the building of a bridge to the north, when it burst from the embattled girdle that for ages had pent it up, and more like another Babylon than a "modern Athens" spread picturesquely over every steep rock and deep defile in its vicinity. ”

“ I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford; for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle, and its environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthur's Seat, St. Bernard's Well, and the Pentland Hills, compensated him for the change, and filled him with cheerfulness and admiration. But I was impatient to arrive at the termination of my journey. ”

“ It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous, mediæval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers, the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing by the old. ”

“ Let us linger a few moments before we part, and, turning round, let us climb the steep path that leads over the shoulder of the hill to the village of Corstorphine. As breathless and exhausted we reach the top, we sink gratefully on the seat, which long has been known as "Rest and be thankful," and let our eyes and thoughts stray over the beautiful scene. Before us lies Edinburgh, with its castle and its spires,—beyond is the sea and distant Lammermuirs. Over all the golden light of evening is shining, and the fir-trees throw long shadows at our feet. ”

“ Edinburgh is empty as a desert when the courts are up and the schools closed. The emptiness of London after the season, which is such perfect fiction and such absolute truth, is nothing to the desolation of Edinburgh in the time of its holiday. To live, as he said, in a garret in the old town, or even in the top story of one of the newer, more convenient houses in the modern quarter, while every-body was away, instead of here on the edge of the glorious heather, among the summer delights of the moor, was folly itself to think of. ”

“ A clear day in Edinburgh is possible. I have spent a month of such days, and have longed for the mists, a touch of them, that the castle might turn to a purple wonder, and the deep [Pg 140] blue shadows sink over it, and the gray precipice of the High Street look higher than ever. Gray is in truth the colour of Edinburgh, "the gray metropolis of the North." But it is never a dreary gray, never a heavy gray like London. There the gray is thick, charged with soot; one can rub it from his face. ”

“ Even on a moderately gusty night the noise of the wind amidst the tall lands and narrow closes of the Old Town, as heard from Princes Street, is a sound never to be forgotten; it has a tragic mournful dignity in its infinite wail, the voice of old Edinburgh touched with pity and terror! Some one has said what a charming place Edinburgh would be if you could only put up a screen against the east wind. As that is impossible it may be held to excuse everything from flight to dissipation! ”

“ So that every reading person who visits Edinburgh is brought face to face, day after day, with all this squalor and misery; and it is so different from what one naturally expects to find in Scotland, and especially in this ancient and wealthy seat of learning, that it makes a very strong impression upon the imagination—an impression so strong that it is scarcely counterbalanced, even by long sojourn in the scrupulously clean residential sections, on either side of this filthy and festering centre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Edinburgh has made its mark upon the world and its place among the great centres of the world’s civilization. On the whole, no city in Great Britain, or in Christendom, has ever attained to such well-developed, I will not say angular, but salient individuality. This is deep-featured and ineffaceable. It is, not was. Edinburgh has reared great men prolifically and supplied the world with them, and kept always a good number back for itself to give a shaping to others the world needed. Its prestige is great in the production of such intellects. ”

“ Old Edinburgh comes to light in the glow of this arrival, not indeed with any distinctness of vision, but with something of the aspect of a capital filled to overflowing with a many-coloured and picturesque crowd. The country folk in their homespun, and all the smaller rank of gentlemen, with their wives in the French hoods which fashion already dictated, thronged the ways and filled every window to see the King come in. ”

“ Another Edinburgh rose at the feet of the first, a sober, respectable, modern, and square-toed town, with wide streets and buildings solid and strong, not without pretensions to a certain stateliness of size and design, but in strong contrast with the architecture and fashion native to the soil—the high gables and turreted stairs of the past. ”

“ Edinburgh is the only town in Great Britain, which I have visited, whose streets are not shunned by respectable people at night.
A fine road about two miles long leads to Leith, which stands for Piræus to the Scotch Athens. There, in the mud and smoke, dwells a population of sixty thousand toil-stained folk, who contrast strongly with their elegant neighbours of Edinburgh. ”

“ Inconceivable, too, in Edinburgh, the place beside it, where behind plate glass walls, curtained with flimsy brise-bises that were as a ground mist, men and women ate and drank under strong lights with a divine shamelessness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. ”

“ All in all, then, need we wonder at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk umbrella? ”

“ 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. ”

“ No man in Edinburgh can for a moment forget that he is in Scotland.” It is almost startling to look up from the grime of the Canongate to the solitary nooks of Arthur’s Seat, though the sea of houses spreads miles around. Whatever scenic effects remain, the historical effects of the landscape are vanished. With what various emotions the crowd from every point of vantage must have watched Dundee’s progress along the Lang Gate to his interview with the Duke of Gordon on the Castle rock! ”

“ Long before I knew what geography was I had a fairly intimate knowledge of Edinburgh. Calton Hill, Arthur's Seat, Samson's Ribs, Holyrood Palace, High Street and Princes Street, I had the right location and a true picture of them all. When boy-like I would be building forts with blocks or in the sand, they would always be called Edinburgh Castle.
I knew all his stories except one, and that one was his own life. I heard that too, at last, and it came about in this wise. An important registered letter used to come to father quarterly, containing his soldier's pension. ”

“ Many of the younger Edinburgh generation, however, that knew nothing of him personally in his prime, must have a vivid recollection of casual glimpses of him in those still recent years, when his stooping, eccentric figure, very untidily dressed, and with the most battered and back-hanging of hats, would be seen pushing rapidly along Princes Street, or some other thoroughfare, with a look that seemed to convey the decided intimation: “Don’t stop me; I care for none of you.” ”

“ The city shall be joined to Leith on the north, and a procession of wise masons shall there lay the foundations of a spacious harbour. Pequin or Nanquin shall not be able to compare with Edinburgh for magnificence. Our city shall be the greatest wonder of the world, and the fame of its glory shall reach the distant ends of the earth. [257] But lament, O thou descendant of the royal Dane, and chief of the tribe of Wilson; for thy shop, contiguous to the porch, shall be dashed to pieces, and its place will know thee no more! ”

“ Now here is the advantage of Edinburgh. In the country, if a sense of inability once seizes me, it haunts me from morning to night; but in Edinburgh the time is so occupied and frittered away by official duties and chance occupation, that you have not time to play Master Stephen and be gentlemanlike and melancholy. [136] On the other hand, you never feel in town those spirit-stirring influences—those glances of sunshine that make amends for clouds and mist. The country is said to be quieter life ”

“ Such a thing exists nowhere in the world except at Edinburgh. And the city is situated on hills; you are hurrying along somewhere or other, and all at once beneath your feet have a deep green chasm with a fine you river below ”

“ Rome is a city of candles and incense mingled with the dry mustiness of crumbling skeletons.
In Edinburgh you encounter here and there the smell of old Scotland. Thatch enters into its make-up, why I cannot tell you. But the cold grey metropolis still preserves the soul of the thatch, a cosy sensation that is prone to bring tears to the eyes of the returning exile. ”

“ They do us and our country [xxv] justice now, and we have sometimes thought even more than justice; for they are lost in admiration of our cities—above all, of Edinburgh—and speak with such raptures of our scenery, that they would appear to prefer it even to their own. They are charmed with our bare green hills, with our shaggy brown mountains they are astonished, our lochs are their delight, our woods their wonder, and they hold up their hands and clap them at our cliffs. ”

“ If we may believe, notwithstanding the protest of that much-deceived antiquary the Laird of Monkbarns, that these fair and forlorn ladies were the first royal inhabitants of the Castle of Edinburgh, we may imagine that they watched from their battlements more wistfully than fearfully, over all the wide plain, what dust might rise or spears might gleam, or whether any galley might be visible of reiver or rescuer from the north. ”

“ Edinburgh has never been a rich town. In the old days, it was as poor as poor might be, and so was its college; they had nothing in the way of plate to show visitors, or to parade on great occasions. Their only exhibits were the college mace and George Buchanan’s skull! There was a legend about the mace. In 1683 the tomb of Bishop Kennedy at St. Andrews was opened: it contained five silver maces—quite a providential arrangement, one for each of the Scots Universities, and one to spare! But there was a mace in Edinburgh before this. ”

“ One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh always imagine as necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting. Whether from the influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old Scottish baronage and baronetage, acting conjointly as a counterpoise to the influence of the clergy, or from other less obvious causes, there has always been in Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of speculative opinion, a tougher traditional scepticism, a greater latitude of jest at things clerical and Presbyterian, than in other Scottish towns. ”

“ By thousands are the strangers that it brings in and takes out of Edinburgh every day, and328 indeed, as regards its effect on our town, it is something like that of the pipes which convey the water of some hushed and inland loch away to the boisterous strife of cities, and again away from the cities to the eternal ocean. The students of that Edinburgh which was once so difficult to reach and to leave are now whirled away into a thousand whirlpools of civilization; they can no longer huddle around and try to blow up the embers of that ancient Edinburgh which we can only revive in imagination. ”