The Edinburgh Review

“ The influence of the Edinburgh Review can scarcely be realised in these days of numberless periodicals, and it was from Edinburgh that its great rival, the Quarterly, drew much of its early support, and one of its great editors, John Gibson Lockhart. Edinburgh, moreover, was still a national metropolis, for the railway systems had not yet brought about the real union of England and Scotland, and it possessed a society not less distinctively Scots than the Established Church or the code of law. ”

“ After all, the matter is become very serious—eight or nine thousand copies of the Edinburgh Review are regularly distributed, merely because there is no other respectable and independent publication of the kind. In this city (Edinburgh) , where there is not one Whig out of twenty men who read the work, many hundreds are sold; and how long the generality of readers will continue to dislike politics, so artfully mingled with information and amusement, is worthy of deep consideration. ”

“ However small may be its merits, it is at all events ten times as good as ancient periodical literature used to be. A very much better authority than myself on such a subject has lately informed us that the majority of the old essays in the Edinburgh Review, at the very time when it was supposed to be most 'trenchant,' 'masterly,' 'exhaustive,' and a number of other splendid epithets, are so dull and weak and ignorant, that it is impossible that they or their congeners would now find acceptance in any periodical of repute. ”

“ The Edinburgh Reviewers are afraid to touch upon my poem. They do not know what to make of it; they do not like to condemn it, and they will not praise it for fear. They are as shy of it as I should be of wearing a Quaker’s hat. The fact is, they have no real taste. They dare not compromise their judgments on so puzzling a question. If on my [Pg 302] next publication they should praise me, and so lug in Endymion, I will address them in a manner they will not at all relish. The cowardliness of the Edinburgh is more than the abuse of the Quarterly. ”

“ After the peace, when Europe was immediately covered with travellers, it became known to some Edinburgh natives that there were better things in city architecture than the 'regular, elegant, and commodious' houses of New Edinburgh. ”

“ The old town, with its irregular houses, stage above stage, seen as we saw it, in the obscurity of a rainy day, hardly resembles the work of men, it is more like a piling up of rocks, and I cannot attempt to describe what we saw so imperfectly, but must say that, high as my expectations had been raised, the city of Edinburgh far surpassed all expectation. ”

“ Still, a little trimmed and tamed, an oasis of wooded bank shuts in the rushing stream, now purified and stocked with trout, where we were content to catch loaches and sticklebacks.
What a loss to this city was the classically-minded Gothicism or carelessness through which came to be rooted up so many noble trees that once dotted the parks of Drumsheugh and Bellevue! But Edinburgh has been well endowed afresh with open spaces and shrubberies, those that separate the blocks of the New Town mainly private joint-stock paradises, yet serving for public amenity. ”

“ It does not matter how many beautiful public buildings you possess, if they are not supported by, and in harmony with, the private houses of the town. Neither the mind nor the eye will accept a new college, or a new hospital, or a new institution, for a city. It is the Canongate, and the Princes Street, and the High Street that are Edinburgh. It is in your own private houses that the real majesty of Edinburgh must consist; and, what is more, it must be by your own personal interest that the style of the architecture which rises around you must be principally guided. ”

“ When writers of all sizes, like freemen of the city, are at liberty to throw out their filth and excrementitious productions, in every street as they please, what can the consequence be, but that the town must be poisoned, and become such another jakes, as by report of great travellers, Edinburgh is at night, a thing well to be considered in these pestilential times. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who knew better that grimy, witty, sordidly attractive, vanished Edinburgh underworld of tavern and oyster-cellar—and worse? The Gentle Shepherd is all very well, and the Tea-Table Miscellany, with its sentimental faking up of old Scots songs, is often very ill, though you cannot deny its service to Scots literature ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Amid all his graphic descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” ”

“ In the throng of Highland chieftains and border barons, in the full blaze of pride and beauty, he felt within him a humanity beyond the claim of titles; genius had given him a superscription more impressive than device of heraldry; the patent of nobility was written with fire in his heart, and the proud ones of earth became poor before the aristocrat of heaven. In that day of classic propriety, a poet from the plough, full of passionate earnestness, must have been in Edinburgh a startling phenomenon. But nature made herself heard in the very citadel of art ”

“ Everyone else says, "We are glad to think that you are by this time in splendid condition, richly enjoying your rest, and having a great success at Edinburgh"—this, where what one craves is mere pity for one's unmerited sufferings! ”

“ It has been very shrewdly remarked by a famous essayist and critic that a book is none the worse for having survived a generation or two. Robert Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh has survived many generations since its first appearance in 1825, and I have before me a copy of this edition in the original six parts, published at two shillings each, the first of which aroused in Sir Walter Scott so much interest. ”

“ With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. ”

“ It was rather that the one consisted of men independently resident in the place as lawyers, clergymen, and what not, and employing their leisure in literature, while the other consisted, to far greater extent, of authors by profession. This difference is pointed out by one of the old Edinburgh set itself, as serving to account for what he considered the greater geniality and cordiality of the habits of that set in their intercourse with each other in comparison with the contemporary habits of London literary society under the dogmatic presidency of Johnson. ”

“ Even at the first moment of their retreat they seem to have shaken off with the blossoms, which, in the human plant no less than in the vegetable one, alone contain the beauties and sweets of life—the stem being, alas, only at best the custodier of an acid—much of their interest in the busy, gossipping, scandalising, hating, and loving Edinburgh ”

“ The foundation was at length laid of that revolution which has ended in making Edinburgh a kind of double city—first, an ancient and picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes; and second, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect, and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of society. The New Town, keeping pace with the growing prosperity of the country, had, in 1790, been extended to Castle Street ”

“ To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere: "not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency of ideas and motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history; which has done its work, and does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own iron." ”

“ There is as good skating-ground, and as good curling-ground, at Lochend and Duddingston, as anywhere in all Scotland—nor is there anywhere else better beef and greens. There is no perfection anywhere, but Edinburgh society is excellent. We are certainly agreeable citizens; with just a sufficient spice of party spirit to season the feast of reason and the flow of soul, and to prevent society from becoming drowsily unanimous. Without the fillip of a little scandal, honest people would fall asleep ”

“ She played the fiddle, fought the stable boys, swore like a trooper, dressed in a jockey coat, walked like a man, sang in a voice that seemed a man’s, and was believed by half Edinburgh to be a man in disguise. She had strong affections and strong hates, she had great talent for mimicry, which made her many enemies, was inclined to be sceptical though not without misgivings and fears. She came to pay a visit to Balcarres, and stayed there for thirteen years. She had a choice collection of old Scots songs. One lingered in Sir Walter Scott’s memory ”

“ But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood, the tourist drives right through{66} the history of Old Edinburgh, through centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots go by, with music and the tramp of feet ”

“ Modern improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it is strange to see one still surviving—and to see it some hundreds of feet below your path. ”

“ Next day we all four got into a fly coach, and, without damage or detriment, reached this city in good time for dinner in Macgregor’s hotel, a remarkable decent inn, next door to one Mr. Blackwood, a civil and discreet man in the bookselling line.
Really the changes in Edinburgh since I was here, thirty years ago, are not to be told. I am confounded; for although I have both heard and read of the New Town in the Edinburgh Advertiser, and the Scots Magazine, I had no notion of what has come to pass. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two-score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen.”
Tourists are too much in the way of seeing no more of Edinburgh than its historic lions and rich museums, as indicated in the guide-books. I would invite them to pay more attention to the suburbs straggling on three sides into such fine hill scenery as is the environment of this city. Open cabs are easily to be had in the chief thoroughfares ”

“ On the left of the picture is a glimpse of the Firth of Forth, while to the right, behind the columns, rises Arthur’s Seat.
point and pier and headland is studded with coloured sea-lights; and far out in the measureless mid-Firth flashes the great Eye of the revolving light of Inchkeith.
Brave the “sharp sops of sleet and snipand snaw,” and come to Edinburgh in winter, and you will find all the residents at home and busy: the Law Courts sitting; the University at work ”

“ 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. ”