CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR

TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,” however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea—a perfect El Dorado for the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood, with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock.

“Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “was on a homely and narrow scale. The College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes or dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the Poker Club in a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and

simple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest in each other. Acquaintances might not only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party walls, but from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip.... The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere.” And the overcrowding!

“A country gentleman and a lawyer, not long after raised to the Bench, lived with his wife and children and servants in three rooms and a kitchen. A wealthy goldsmith had a dwelling of two small rooms above his booth, the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.”[55] Edinburgh citizens came to consider the highest storeys in their tall “lands” the most desirable; and the tale is told of one old Edinburgh gentleman who, on a visit to London, expressed pleased surprise that the top flat where he had perched himself was the cheapest in the house. On being gently enlightened that this was in consequence of its being also the least thought of, he replied that he kent fine what gentility was, and after having lived sixteen storeys up all his life, was not going to come down in the world.

The first efforts at extension of the town were due to a private commercial speculation. The open country beyond the Nor’ Loch and the “Lang Dykes” was inaccessible till an Act of Parliament could be passed and drastic measures taken; and, where Acts of Parliament are necessary, progress is slow. Whilst time was passing, and others were talking and scheming for the public good, a builder named George Brown saw that the tide had come in his affairs, and took it at the flood and made his fortune. He built, with stones from Craigmillar Quarry, two squares of substantial dwelling-houses. The first built and bigger of these was George Square, whose site had formerly been part of the park of Ross House, the suburban residence of the Lords Ross, where later—after 1753—the famous George Lockhart of Carnwath had lived. The smaller square, Brown Square, was built after the first had proved a success, and several of the houses in it been taken by well-known citizens. George Square is still, though hemmed in by poor localities on three sides, a favourite place of residence, with a pleasant garden in the centre, and “the Meadows” near at hand. Here it was, at number 25, that Scott’s father lived, and part of Scott’s boyhood was spent. Brown Square has not survived socially, though it, too, has had its notable residents. It was from Brown Square that Lord Glenlee, the last person to use a sedan-chair in Edinburgh, used to sally forth in wig and cocked hat, in knee-breeches and silk stockings and buckled shoes; and in Brown Square there once lived the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” Miss Jeanie Elliott of Minto, one of the many gifted Jacobite ladies of Jacobite Edinburgh. These two squares formed a little southern colony by themselves, confined their hospitalities to themselves, and, in fact, as the Scottish phrase says, “kept themselves to themselves.”

At last, in 1767, the Act of Parliament for extending the city over the northern fields was passed, and the North Bridge was built from the High Street across the valley. And then, suddenly, as with the touch of a magician’s wand, the beginnings of the New Town of Edinburgh came into being: stately squares and noble buildings, wide, broad streets that put London thoroughfares to shame, graceful curved terraces and crescents; all the cold dignity of unlimited grey stone—stone pavements, stone roads, stone houses; and, nestling in every crevice of the stone, the green of the invaded country. New Edinburgh, like Jonah’s gourd, sprang up in a night, to shade many a prophet.

And who wielded the magician’s wand? The name of Lord Provost Drummond ought to be remembered in Edinburgh, of which, like a veritable Dick Whittington, he was six times Lord Provost. He was a man of public spirit and large enterprise, who brought dignity on himself and his office and his city. The New Town dates from his Provostship. At first, however, as all pioneers must do, he saw men look askance at the triumphs of his energy. He was probably called extravagant, and accused of squandering public money. “The scheme was at first far from popular,” Mr. Robert Chambers tells his readers. “The exposure to the north and east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered, that a lover told a New Town mistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that when he visited her he felt as performing an adventure not much short of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers should forget them, if they removed so far from the centre of things as Princes Street and St. Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable, and behoved to be made.”[56]

And then the bees swarmed.

Those of the Scottish nobles whom the Union had left in the capital took their persons and their households across the valley to the New Town, and left their family mansions and their family traditions behind them in the Old. 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. “The Lord Justice Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher, Lord President Craigie’s house by a rouping wife or saleswoman of old furniture, and Lord Drummore’s house left by a chairman for want of accommodation; ... the house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now possessed by a wheelwright!”[57]

David Hume was one of the bees who swarmed. He was buzzing busily on the third floor of a house in James’s Court with (what was particularly characteristic of Edinburgh houses of that period, but perhaps not so appealing to Hume as to some others) two little oratories, one off his dining-room and one out of his drawing-room. But neither the oratories nor the view to the north from his windows had the power to retain him. He spread his wings and alighted on the west corner house on the south side of St. Andrew Square. When his house at the corner was almost the only one in the street leading from Princes Street to St. Andrew Square, and before the names of the New Town streets had been inscribed on them, Dr. Webster, a humorous minister, wrote in chalk on the great sceptic’s dwelling “Saint David’s Street.” Hume’s old servant ran indignantly to her master to tell him; but Hume was a humorist too. “Weel, weel, Janet,” he said, “never mind. I am not the first man of sense that has been made a saint of.”

St. David Street it remains to this day.

Sir Laurence Dundas built himself a house in St. Andrew Square, but lost it in play to General Scott, a noted gambler, who staked £30,000 against it. Sir Laurence retained his house, however, by building General Scott another mansion-house, “Bellevue,” which for long stood in the centre of Drummond Place.

Along the line of the present Princes Street had formerly been the “Lang Gait,” or “Lang Dykes,” a rough road through rough country, where Claverhouse had clattered angrily towards the Highlands at the head of his troopers. This had been the scene of many a footpad robbery and murder, and many lovers’ evening strolls; but, when the New Town was built, it gradually was feued out, from east to west; and along it were built a single line of houses looking right across the valley and up towards the Old Town. It was proposed to call this—the principal street of New Edinburgh—“St. Giles Street,” after the patron saint of Edinburgh, which would have been a very appropriate name, and a slight offer of amends to the Saint for the insult offered to his effigy when the rude-minded rabble ducked it in the Nor’ Loch in the first days of the Reformation. However, George III. objected. “Hey, hey—what, what? St. Giles Street! never do! never do!” No doubt to Londoners the name might awaken associations with a neighbourhood unknown beyond London; but George III. showed some ignorance of Scottish history, for the district of St. Giles in London owes its name to the founder of a leper hospital—Maud, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Queen Margaret, who, when Queen of England, evidently sometimes felt a little homesick and very patriotic, and bestowed on her charity the name of the patron saint of Edinburgh.

And what became of the Nor’ Loch? The citizens had no longer to swim across it two at a time on a collier’s horse, as had the Hamiltons after the “Cleanse the Causeway” battle. The Nor’ Loch, formed in 1450 when first Edinburgh was walled, had done its duty and had its day, and was drained; and its place—now well-kept gardens—was for long a boggy morass. Across this morass some Lawnmarket shopkeepers were accustomed to make their way to investigate the progress of the new city; and, as the ground was marshy and muddy, they laid a few planks across to form a foot-bridge. George Boyd, a dealer in tartan, called “Five o’clock,” in jocular allusion to his bandy legs, seems to have been particularly impressed by the plank bridge; and, when some loose earth from a quarry fell on it and made the bridge more secure, his mind, which worked better than his legs, caught at the suggestion that the earth flung out by the builders from the foundations of the New Town might form a bridge across the valley. The suggestion was adopted, and the earth, to the amount, it has been calculated, of about two million cartloads, was deposited and a great mound formed in the valley of the Nor’ Loch, just below the centre of the High Street; and “Geordie Boyd’s brig” became “the Earthen Mound,” and so continued to be called until well on in the nineteenth century. So, indeed, one well-known and venerable Edinburgh citizen still speaks of it.

And this is how, within about forty years of its first conception, the New Town of Edinburgh spread itself over the plain and superseded the crumbling cluster of seven centuries. And this is how modern Edinburgh presents that curious spectacle, unknown in any other town, of two distinct divisions, divided topographically as well as historically and socially—Old Edinburgh and New Edinburgh.

CHAPTER VIII
THE EDINBURGH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS CIRCLE

IT is easy to trace Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh life from door to door. The house in the College Wynd, in which, on August 15, 1771, he was born, was pulled down in his lifetime. Sir Walter once pointed out its site to Mr. Robert Chambers during one of their walks together, and told him that his father had “received a fair price for his portion of it”; and, when Mr. Chambers naturally suggested that more money might have been made and the public much more gratified had Scott’s birthplace been retained to be shown,—“Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter, “that is very well; but I am afraid I should have required to be dead first, and that would not have been so comfortable, you know.”

The home of his boyhood and youth, 25 George Square, still stands, looking exactly the same to-day as it did then. Here the little lame boy lived, and regretted the country life at Sandyknowe among dogs and sheep and legends; and the troubles of life began for him as he limped backwards and forwards to the High School, or sensitively shrank from the rough tyranny of his elder brother; and the triumphs of life fired him as he took his share in the street “bickers” between the High School boys and the rough lads of Potterrow, or as he gained fame in the High School yard as a story-teller. It was under his parents’ roof in George Square that Scott lived all the years from those schoolboy days till he was a young man of many friendships, and slovenly dress and deep feelings and enthusiasms, studying law in deference to his father’s wishes, but thinking his own long thoughts during his rambles over Blackford Hill and the country round Edinburgh; and at home, in his father’s house, giving full play to his fancies in the safety of his own small den in the sunk basement, where he was surrounded by “more books than shelves,” where he hoarded collections of Scottish and Roman coins, and where he had proudly crossed a claymore and a Lochaber axe over a little print of Prince Charlie. But perhaps the fondest

treasure in that den was a certain china saucer which,—possibly unknown to the father upstairs,—the young Cavalier kept hung on the wall, and whose tale he no doubt often unfolded to his friends. Once upon a time Mrs. Scott’s curiosity had been roused by the visits, night after night, of a mysterious stranger, who came in a sedan-chair and a cloak, and remained closeted with her husband in his business-room till long after the household had retired. Mr. Scott preserved a stern reticence; but woman’s wit found out a way. One night, very late, when the house was silent in sleep, Mrs. Scott entered the business-room with a smile and two cups of tea, and the hospitable suggestion that, as they had sat so long, they might be glad of some refreshment. The stranger proved to be a richly dressed man, who bowed, took one of the cups, and drank it. But Mr. Scott, turning aside, neither drank his tea nor introduced his guest. Presently, returning from showing the stranger out, he took the empty cup, and, throwing up the window-sash, flung it out into the night, with the now famous words, “Neither lip of me nor mine comes after Murray of Broughton’s.”[58]

It was here, in this small den on the sunk floor of 25 George Square, that Jeffrey found Scott when he called on him the evening after he had asked to be introduced to him at the Speculative Society, where young Scott had read a paper on “Ballads”: and Jeffrey evidently did not extend his approval of Scott and of the paper on Ballads to this sunk den,—or was it that Scott had no command of hospitalities in his father’s house?—for they sallied forth together and supped at a tavern. No doubt, before they went, Jeffrey had looked round curiously at the treasures of his new acquaintance, and had been told how the “Broughton saucer” had come by its widowed condition.

It was decided that Scott should become an advocate, and he and his friend Clerk—a friendship made in the High School days, to last through life—read for the Bar together. Poor Scott, with his open-air nature and his dreamy enthusiasms, how he hated the drudgery! But he buckled to it; and every summer morning for two summers he used to walk from George Square to the house of his friend Clerk, “at the extremity of Princes Street, New Town,” arriving at seven o’clock, to rouse his sleepy fellow-student to an examination of Heineccius’s Analysis of the Institutes and Pandects and Erskine’s Institutes of the Law of Scotland. It speaks well for Clerk that their friendship did last.

They were called to the Bar together; and together, when the ceremony was over, they stood about in their wigs and gowns in the great hall, till at last Scott whispered to Clerk, imitating a farm servant-lass waiting at the Cross to be hired, “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and de’il an ane has speered our price.” Before the Court rose, however, Scott had earned his first guinea,—and he spent it on a silver taper-stand for his mother.

It was all in Edinburgh—all his “supreme moments.” Was it not in a shower of rain in Greyfriars’ Churchyard that he met his first love? Greyfriars’ Churchyard in a shower of rain, after a sermon; and Scott offered her his umbrella, and together they walked home under it. Probably it was a very shabby umbrella, for Scott was slovenly in his dress in those days. What did it matter? There were more walks—more talks. Presently Scott’s father thought it right to warn the other father, for Scott was but a dependent youth; and, moreover, his love had been given to the daughter and heiress of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches of Invermay, and in those days in Scotland every shade of rank was considered. Did Scott ever know what his father had done? Still the romance went on, till the day when Scott rode home from Invermay back to Edinburgh, and “the iron entered into his soul.” A long ride through the beloved Scottish Highlands—

She married Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Of course she did. Had it not been ordained since the beginning of time that she who had won the first love of Walter Scott was to marry another? Who knows her story? Who, for the matter of that, knows his? Who has measured the influence on his life?

It was in Edinburgh that Scott’s youth passed, and that most of the happenings took place that went to the making of him. In Edinburgh was clustered his group of friends: Clerk (afterwards the original of “Darsie Latimer”); Thomas Thomson, the legal antiquary; John Irving; Adam Ferguson; George Cranstoun (afterwards Lord Corehouse); George Abercromby (Lord Abercromby); Patrick Murray of Simprim; Patrick Murray of Auchtertyre; and, most congenial of all to Scott’s own nature, Erskine, the son of a Scottish Episcopalian clergyman of good family, and the only Tory, save Scott himself, among the set of young Whigs then predominant at Parliament House.

In those days Scott indulged in many rambles to the Borders or the Highlands, to interesting neighbourhoods and historic houses and worthy hosts; but it was from one of these excursions that he returned to Edinburgh to see the execution of Watt the republican; and it was in the Edinburgh theatre that he assisted to break the heads of a band of young Irish rowdies who howled and hooted during the National Anthem; and it was in Edinburgh that he haunted the vaults below Parliament House among hoards of MSS. and deeds, and came up again steeped in dust and lore to be made a curator of the Advocates’ Library, with Professor David Hume and Malcolm Laing the historian as his colleagues.

Scott’s first serious attempt at verse was a rhymed translation of BÜrger’s Lenore. It was written when he was four-and-twenty, and was done under the inspiration of hearing that Mrs. Barbauld, then on her first visit to Edinburgh, had read aloud Taylor’s then unpublished version of it at a party at Dugald Stewart’s. Scott, already deeply interested in German literature, was fired; and one morning before breakfast he brought his translation to show to his friend Miss Cranstoun.

Walter Scott was not without women friends. Miss Cranstoun, to whom he brought his poem before breakfast, had already been his confidante in his love-story. Of his young kinswoman, the wife of the head of his family, Hugh Scott of Harden,—who was a daughter of Count BrÜhl Martkirchen, Saxon Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, and Almeria, Dowager Countess of Egremont—he says that she “was the first woman of real fashion that took him up.”

It was about this time also that Scott’s martial ardour and patriotism found vent in helping to organise the Scottish Light-horse Volunteers, in preparation for the expected French Invasion. When, therefore, in his twenty-sixth year, he brought home to Edinburgh the little half-French bride to whose dark prettiness and novel vivacity he had fallen a victim whilst a fellow-visitor at a watering-place, she found a warm welcome awaiting her from a large and various circle of friends, all devoted to her young husband, and sharing with him one or other of his enthusiasms,—military or literary, antiquarian or sporting. Among these must not be forgotten Skene of Rubislaw, whose friendship with Scott began in a mutual love for German literature, and ended only with death.

Scott took his young wife first to lodgings in George Street, his house at 10 South Castle Street not being quite ready; and the following summer he hired that first and humblest of those three country homes near Edinburgh where his happiest days were spent, a pretty cottage, with a garden and a paddock, at Lasswade. It is still standing and unchanged. Here and at Castle Street the young people lived comfortably on their combined incomes for many years, and made themselves and their friends happy with much simple and inexpensive hospitality. At Lasswade it was that they formed friendships with the neighbouring great houses of Melville and Buccleuch; that they were near—as the country counts near—to Scott’s old friends the Clerks of Penicuik and Tytlers of Woodhouselee, and Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” who lived at Auchendinny. And it was at the Lasswade cottage that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived before breakfast on the morning of September 17, 1803. Scott was then writing the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and read the first four cantos to Wordsworth. He walked with his guests to Roslin, and afterwards met them for the famous days in the Border country, where he was Sheriff. Hogg’s first celebrated visit was paid at Castle Street. It was in the drawing-room there that the Ettrick Shepherd, feeling sure he “could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house,” lay down at full length on the sofa opposite hers. It was here that he “dined heartily and drank freely and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment.” It was here that, as the hour grew later, his enthusiasm showed itself in a descending warmth of appellations for his host, who, first “Mr. Scott,” became “Shirra,” and then “Scott,” “Walter,” and, finally, “Wattie”; and the “plentiful merriment” must have reached its culmination when Mrs. Scott was addressed as “Charlotte.”

When Thomas Campbell published his “Pleasures of Hope,” Walter Scott was an enthusiastic admirer of his fellow-poet. “I have repeated these lines so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head, which strong, pithy poetry excites.”

Oh days of enthusiasms and strong feelings! Nowadays, we are all jaded with travel, and washed over with the neutral tint of cosmopolitanism, and as insipid as bread and water. No Scott stamps and rolls his head to the rhythm of his thoughts on the North Bridge; no Scott protests out of his full heart against the innovations of Whiggery, and leans his brow against the wall of the Mound, unashamed if his tears be seen by a jesting Jeffrey, and tells him, “No, no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!”[59]

When Scott’s worldly prospects were very prosperous, when he was Sheriff of Selkirk, and the author of the successful Lay of the Last Minstrel, and a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, under the editorship first of Sydney Smith and then of Jeffrey, he was an established citizen of Edinburgh, in his second house in Castle Street—“poor 39”—as he lived to call it. Here were his most brilliant days spent,—here, and at Ashestiel, the picturesque farm on the banks of the Tweed which superseded the Lasswade cottage, and then at Abbotsford, the proudest home of all. But 39 Castle Street remained his town home through all the brilliant and wonderful years, till the financial crash came in 1826. It was here that Joanna Baillie paid a visit of a week or so,—here that Crabbe stayed,—here that every one of worth or want found a ready welcome. The dining-room in 39 Castle Street!—what scenes and what voices have its walls seen and heard! Here all Scott’s famous dinners took place, including those Sunday ones “without silver dishes” to his intimates—Mrs. Maclean of Torloisk and her daughters; his school friend Clerk; Kirkpatrick Sharpe of caustic humour and scandalous memory; Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, “Bozzie’s” son, and author of “Jenny dang the weaver”; Sir Alexander Don of Newton; William Allan, the artist; and many others. It was here he had his orderly “den” behind the dining-room, with its many books, its big writing-table, its two armchairs, the staghound on the floor, and the cat safely atop the book-ladder, and one picture—the beautiful, sad face of Graham of Claverhouse, who, as Scott said, “foully traduced” by Covenanting historians, “still passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian desperado.”

It must have been in the window of this study that Scott sat writing night after night, when the son of William Menzies, living at his father’s house in George Street, looked across from the back windows of their house to the back of Scott’s, when, at a gathering of “gay and thoughtless” young men, mostly advocates, he asked one to change places with him that he might not see a hand that fascinated his eye. “It never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied—and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”

It was in this self-same study that an attempt was made on Scott’s life by a man named Webber, whose literary efforts Scott had befriended. Webber had taken to drinking, and a sudden mad resentment against Scott filled his unhinged mind. In this study Scott suddenly found himself confronted by a madman with firearms, insisting on a duel then and there; and it was only because of Scott’s absolute self-control and courage that the great man’s life did not end in the year 1818. He suggested that a duel in the house might disturb the ladies of the family and had better be postponed till after dinner; and then, locking up the pistols, he calmly brought Webber into the dining-room, and, whilst they dined with an unconscious hostess, Scott sent for the young man’s friends.

It was to Castle Street that Scott walked home across the Mound leaning on his daughter’s arm, his own trembling, speaking not a word all the way, on the day after the Scottish Regalia had been discovered. It was owing to Scott’s representations to his friend the Prince Regent that the Commission had been appointed to examine the Crown Room in the Castle, and the long-lost Regalia had been brought to light. The next day he and his fellow-commissioners had brought the ladies of their families to view it, and Sophia Scott had been so wrought upon by the sight that she had turned faint, and was drawing back from the group when she heard her father’s voice, “something between anger and despair,” exclaim, “By God, no!” and turned to see that one of the Commissioners had been, in play, about to put the Scottish crown on the head of a young girl present. The father and daughter walked home together in silence, with a new sympathy between them.

It was of this very year, 1818, that Lockhart said: “At this moment, his position, take it for all in all, was, I am inclined to believe, what no other man had ever won for himself by the pen alone. His works were the daily food, not only of his countrymen, but of all educated Europe. His society was courted by whatever England could show of eminence. Station, power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every demonstration of respect and worship, and—a few political fanatics and envious poetasters apart—wherever he appeared, in town or country, whoever had Scotch blood in him, ‘gentle or simple,’ felt it move more rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.”[60]

Lockhart goes on to say that, “descending to what many looked on as higher things,” the annual profits of Scott’s novels alone had been for several years not less than £10,000, and his Castle of Abbotsford was being built, and “few doubted that ere long he might receive from the just favour of his Prince some distinction in the way of external rank, such as had seldom before been dreamt of as the possible consequences of mere literary celebrity.”

On February 2, 1820, Scott took Prince Gustavus Vasa, and his attendant, Baron Polier, who were spending some months in Edinburgh, to the window over Constable’s shop in the High Street, to hear George IV. proclaimed King at the site of the Cross. Here Scott lamented to the Prince the “barbarity of the Auld Reekie Bailies,” who had removed the historic Cross; and when the exiled Prince broke down on hearing the National Anthem sung by the crowd, Scott drew Lockhart away into another window, whispering: “Poor lad! poor lad! God help him!”

Scott’s friend and admirer the Prince Regent once King, the distinctions came. In 1820 Scott went to London to receive the baronetcy which, as Lord Sidmouth had told him, it had been the Prince Regent’s desire to confer on him. Whilst in London he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his portrait for the King, and to Chantrey for his bust, and the degree of D.C.L. was offered him by both the English Universities. Three Edinburgh distinctions were conferred on him. He was elected President of the Royal Scottish Society; he was first President of the Bannatyne Club, which he had founded; and he was appointed Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Scottish Academy. Those years were his most active time as a citizen as well as an author, for he was chairman of nearly every public meeting, or charity, or educational scheme in the town. 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. This fortnight was perhaps the proudest and most brilliant of Scott’s life,—“his supreme moment”—and again it was in Edinburgh. The Tories, their dream of Jacobitism dead with the Cardinal of York, were more personally loyal than the Whigs; and Scott, most tory of Tories, was loyalest of the loyal. It was his influence that had brought about the royal visit, and on him devolved all the arrangements; and for weeks Castle Street was like a green-room, filled by all the actors in the great play. When the day came and in the rain the King’s yacht cast anchor in Leith Roads—where Mary Stuart’s galleys had in the mist cast anchor on a bygone August day—Scott rowed alongside and boarded the Royal George. The King toasted him in native whisky; and Scott, in his enthusiasm, asked leave to keep the glass. He put it, carefully wrapped up, in his deep coat-tail pocket, and went home holding the skirt of his coat carefully in front of him. Alas for the vanity of human wishes! At Castle Street he found that Crabbe the poet had chosen this inopportune season to arrive unexpectedly on a visit. Scott, ever hospitable, welcomed him warmly, and promptly sat down beside him; and crash!—the glass was smashed to atoms.

At six next morning, Queen Street—that sober terrace!—saw Sir Walter Scott clad in Campbell tartans at a muster of the Celtic Club; and a little later an inimitable scene took place in the dining-room of 39 Castle Street. Scott had hospitably brought some half-dozen Celts home to breakfast; and, on entering the room himself from his study, he discovered Crabbe, the dapper English clergyman, punctiliously neat and decorous in his black clothes and buckled shoes, standing surrounded by huge kilted and plaided Highlanders, like a sleek spaniel surrounded by collies. To Scott’s amazement, the tongue in which all were endeavouring to exchange ideas proved to be French; for Crabbe, as ignorant as an Englishman can be about Scotland, had heard the Gaelic; and, judging the strangely garbed men to be foreigners, and addressing them amiably in French, had been promptly taken by them for a French abbÉ.

Throughout all the busy fortnight Scott was the centre of everything. Daily he dined at Dalkeith Palace,[61] and attended the King at the levÉes and drawing-rooms at Holyrood, at St. Giles’s Church on Sunday, at the performance by Murray’s company of Rob Roy, and at the banquet given by the Magistrates to the King at the Parliament House. It was Scott who organised the great procession from Holyrood to the Castle in copy of the “Riding of the Parliament.” And, as Lockhart points out in his Life of Scott, it was due to Scott’s Celtic ardour that in all the arrangements the kilts and pipes were made so prominent that King George became impressed with the false idea that Scotland’s glory rested on them alone, and that he showed this by giving as his one toast at the banquet: “The Chieftains and Clans of Scotland, and Prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” Perhaps it dates from this that the English to this day think the kilt the national—if not the usual—dress of the Scot, and that Punch makes Highlanders talk lowland Scotch, and Scotsmen speak Gaelic. But some results of the King’s visit—also due to Sir Walter Scott’s influence—were better. The King knighted Adam Ferguson, Deputy-Keeper of the Regalia, and Raeburn, the Scottish portrait-painter; and Mons Meg was returned from the Tower, after much correspondence; and the Scottish peerages forfeited in 1715 and 1745 were restored.

Four years later, Scott sent for his old friend Skene of Rubislaw. It was a cold January morning—seven o’clock—when Skene arrived, and Scott’s greeting to him was: “My friend, give me a shake of your hand: mine is that of a beggar.” The crash had come. Offers of assistance poured in—from his children, from the principal banks of Edinburgh, from friends high and low. Scott, hearing that Sir William Forbes the banker, his old rival in love, was foremost in wishing to help, wrote in his diary: “It is fated our planets should cross, though, and that at periods most interesting for me. Down—down—a hundred thoughts.”

No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That eident hand!...

Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... Ha til mi tulidh.”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at Abbotsford. And so—first there, and then next winter alone with his youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at No. 6 Shandwick Place,—Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in the days of his prosperity.

Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished, not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels.

CHAPTER IX
SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY

SOCIAL Edinburgh of yesterday,—that is to say, the social life of Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen Victoria,—what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds of names rise in the memory—names of all sorts and conditions of men, “thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery in the background of all those lives—a piling up of noble architecture against the cloudy Scottish sky; a running up of numberless “long unlovely streets”; a constant pulling down of dear, dirty, historic dwellings; an occasional restoration of some ancient building; a widening out of all the suburbs. It means many statues in the streets of those who once were alive in them. It means the intersection of the heart of the beautiful city by gleaming lines of rail, and overhead by gleaming telegraph and telephone wires; it means the light of electricity flashing suddenly through the town, and the old gas-lamps burning dimly, and then put out for the last time; it means railway whistles and cable tramway bells; it means smoke rising from miles and miles of cold grey streets. But it is still the smoke of domestic fires, as in the days when Gavin Douglas, waking on a winter morning in 1512, “bade beit the fire and the candel allicht,” and not the smoke of belching chimneys of commerce. Edinburgh, as befits her intellect, prints and publishes; and, as befits her climate, she brews and distils; and the streams that flow down her valleys towards the Firth of Forth pass on their way many mills that provide paper for printers and authors; but farther than this she declines to go.

During Scott’s lifetime there were living in Edinburgh a remarkable cluster of men; and some of those who, as young men, had been his fellow-citizens, survived him right on until past the middle of the century, and wrote their names large in the annals not only of Edinburgh but of the world, before they too in their turn passed away. In literature, during Scott’s lifetime, there was the immortal Baroness Nairne, of the “weel-kent” Jacobite and Episcopalian family, the Oliphants of Gask. Baroness Nairne, while she lived and when she died,—during the meetings she must have had with Scott at the house of her sister, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston,—was all the time the unavowed author of some of the best-loved and best-known of our national songs. There were Jeffrey the critic, Lord Cockburn, Henry Mackenzie, the “Man of Feeling,” Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, Campbell the poet, M‘Crie, the historian and biographer of Knox, Dugald Stewart, and his antagonist, Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Allan, the artist, Sir Henry Raeburn, the great Scottish portrait-painter, Miss Ferrier, the novelist, Dr. Alexander Murray, the philologist, Kirkpatrick Sharpe of the bitter tongue, and David Laing, the kindly antiquary. In 1817 Blackwood’s Magazine had been started in Tory rivalry to the Whiggism of Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review; and in 1832, the very year of Scott’s death, William and Robert Chambers began the publication of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Robert Chambers—who may be regarded, in virtue of his long-unacknowledged Vestiges of Creation, as the forerunner of Darwin—had, as a boy of twenty, written his inimitable Traditions of Edinburgh. The compiling of the Traditions had brought him at once under the astonished and delighted notice of Scott, and begun a friendship between them, resulting in many walks all about Edinburgh, and many talks—also all about Edinburgh. After Scott’s death there were in Edinburgh many notabilities. There was a brilliant literary coterie scintillating in the Blackwood Saloon: Professor Wilson, “Christopher North”; Scott’s son-in-law, Lockhart; Professor Wilson’s son-in-law, Professor Aytoun, the writer of those stirring national ballads that have thrilled so many Scottish hearts; Hogg, enticed from his Ettrick pastures into the turmoil of Noctes AmbrosianÆ; Dr. Moir, known as “Delta.” These names are associated with the early days of Blackwood, as are those of Lord Jeffrey, Lord Brougham, and Lord Cockburn with the early days of the Edinburgh Review. Sir William Hamilton was living at 16 Great King Street; and somewhere in Edinburgh, invisible as a microbe, but as far-reaching in achievement, there was the quaint little figure of De Quincey. In one of a row of small houses in Comely Bank, on the north-west outskirts of the city, lived Thomas Carlyle. Among the judges were Lord Jeffrey and Lord Cockburn, survivors of the Whig party of Scott’s days, and Lord Neaves, a staunch Conservative. Chiefest among the Presbyterian Scottish clergy was the great Dr. Chalmers, and grouped with him were Dr. Cunningham, Dr. Guthrie, and Dr. Candlish. Chiefest among the Episcopalian Scottish clergy was the much-loved Scotsman, Dean Ramsay, author of Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character.

In 1842 Queen Victoria paid her first royal visit to her Scottish capital. She came, like George IV., by sea, and arrived at Granton on September 1—most opportunely, for it was St. Giles’s Day. In the following year, 1843, a great event occurred in the history of the Church of Scotland, and the scene of its enactment was St. Andrew’s Church in George Street, Edinburgh. No nation, it is said, knows anything of what lies north of it. France knows nothing about England: England’s ignorance in all regarding Scotland is supreme. Ask the average Englishman what is meant by “the Disruption,” and he will stare at you. And yet the Disruption was the outcome of a controversy that agitated Scotland for years, a controversy strong enough to split the Church of Scotland into two. Three years after the Disruption, the “Philosophical Institution” was founded, and this was an event in the history of intellectual and social Edinburgh that can best be valued when it is remembered that among the first presidents were such men as Lord Macaulay, Lord Brougham, Thomas Carlyle, and Adam Black, and that among the first lecturers who came to Edinburgh by invitation of the Philosophical were Dickens and Thackeray, Anthony Trollope and Charles Kingsley, and Ruskin, who so roundly abused our New Town architecture.

Through the second half of the century, social Edinburgh was proud of such men as Sir James Y. Simpson, the discoverer of the anÆsthetic properties of chloroform; Dr. John Brown, the author of Rab and his Friends; Hugh Miller, the geologist, author of Old Red Sandstone; Alexander Smith, the poet; John Skelton, the essayist and historian; Alexander Russel, the witty editor of the Scotsman; Dr. John Hill Burton, the Historiographer-Royal; and Skene, his successor in that office, who was the son of Sir Walter Scott’s old friend. George Combe lived in Edinburgh until 1858; and in the University, besides those already named, were Sir David Brewster, Sir Robert Christison, Professor Syme, John Goodsir, Lyon Playfair, and Professor Tait. And does not the whole of Listerian surgery date from Edinburgh? And is not Lister’s own great original “spray,” though long since superannuated, still the glory of an Edinburgh Infirmary ward? Through the last hours of yesterday, Edinburgh was familiar with the picturesque figure of Professor Blackie in his plaid, with his beautiful old face framed in its silver hair, and his joyous Celtic exuberance and enthusiasms that so often startled the sober Scot. He, too, is gone.

When, in 1884, Edinburgh University, “the Town College,” celebrated her Tercentenary, and invited all the greatest celebrities of Europe to attend it, the streets of the sober grey city were for one wondrous week illuminated by flashes of academic colours and faces of foreign poets and soldiers, foreign men of science and statesmen, foreign historians and philosophers, foreign theologians and artists; Englishmen, Canadians, and Americans; Frenchmen, Germans, and Austrians; Russians, Italians, and Greeks. It was a week of compliments and fireworks, of lions and lionising, when every one who wished saw his own special Shelley plain, and he stopped and spoke to him; and then all the great European savants went away again, the richer by another honorary degree, and left Edinburgh to calm down again, the richer by another memory.

The town itself has changed greatly since the days when Cockburn, Jeffrey, and Horner stood in Queen Street and listened to the corncrake in the fields stretching between them and the sea. It has changed since they lamented the cutting down of the trees round “Bellevue,” the beautiful house of General Scott, in the centre of Drummond Place. It has changed since the “Highland Lady” spent the winters of her girlhood there, attended the routs and balls, and walked in Princes Street attired in a white gown, a pink spencer, yellow tan boots with dangling tassels, and a deep-poked bonnet with three tall white ostrich feathers held aloft by the wind. 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. Merchiston Castle, for instance, the home of the Napiers, a hoary and battlemented old keep, now stands within a walled garden among modern villas; and the fine old turreted dwelling of Chiesley of Dalry is now imbedded in mean streets, and saved from ignominy, and kept clean and orderly, by being an Episcopalian Training College. The various new buildings that have sprung up during the Victorian era to decorate or to deface the city are of course too numerous to mention; but a few of them are closely connected with the social life of Edinburgh yesterday. “It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott,” writes the author of Edinburgh Sketches and Memories; “the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters.”[63] It stands on the green velvet of the grass of Princes Street Gardens, noblest in the long line of statues of Edinburgh’s notable citizens, facing the gayest and most crowded thoroughfare of the modern city; but through its fine Gothic arches one sees the old town Scott loved so well.

The University New Buildings have considerably enlarged the University itself; and the M‘Ewan Hall has been further added to it by the generosity of Mr. William M‘Ewan, and the Students’ Union by the efforts of the ladies of the University and the town; and Mr. Andrew Carnegie has given Edinburgh its splendid Public Library.

In 1879 there was consecrated the great Cathedral Church of St. Mary, then the largest ecclesiastical building that had been built in Britain since the Reformation.[64] The Cathedral was built by endowment of the Misses Walker, and the architect was Sir Gilbert Scott. It stands at the west end of Edinburgh, and its grounds include Old Coates House, one of the two or three houses that stood beyond the Nor’ Loch in the days before the New Town was thought of.

In 1887 the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street was presented to Edinburgh by the late Mr. J. R. Findlay; and though many of the portraits of our

great dead, like the faces of our great living, have gone to London, yet there is now a goodly collection of national portraits in the capital of Scotland. 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; there is another form of patriotism which seeks to restore the old, and two such inestimable benefits have been conferred not only on Edinburgh, but on all who visit her, and who venerate the past. In 1883 the late Mr. William Chambers restored with reverence and taste the Church of St. Giles, which had been half ruined by ruthless vandalism in 1829, and in 1892 the late Mr. Thomas Nelson restored magnificently the splendid old hall of the Castle, the scene of so many banquets and so many Parliaments, and of not a few tragedies.[65]

CHAPTER X
THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering his Edinburgh days, must have remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence, nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands.

During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row was his home proper. Heriot Row, one of the pleasantest resident streets in Edinburgh, is, like all Edinburgh resident streets, a row of grey stone houses built in absolute uniformity. It is built on the northern slope of the New City, parallel with the three large main streets,—Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street,—but below them, and is a single row of houses with an open outlook, facing the green trees and turf of the gardens that stretch between Heriot Row and Queen Street above. It was in the nursery facing the gardens and looking up to the dignified dwellings of Queen Street through the trees that the little fretful invalid child was soothed by his faithful Calvinistic nurse, Alison Cunningham, and that on summer evenings, after he had gone to bed, he lay listening to “grown-up people’s feet” on the street below, and watching the birds in the trees.

Till yesterday, when electricity turned night into day, the lamplighter used to go quickly at evening along the Edinburgh streets with his ladder, fix the hook at the end of it into the cross-bar of each lamp-post in turn, run up, lift off the glass top, and light the lamp. Every small street urchin in Scotland knows the cry of “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!”—and the little town child, in his cosy Edinburgh nursery, counted himself very lucky to have a lamp-post just before the front door of his home, and used to sit until his tea was ready and watch for “Leerie” posting down the street with his ladder and his light.

The grandfather Balfour’s manse at Colinton was associated with holidays when all the young cousins played in the dark, shabby, homelike rooms, or, “sin without pardon,” broke the branches and got through a breach in the garden wall, and so to the joys of the river.

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; and, close to the village end of the Dell, where the tall, wonderful cedars stand high against the sky above the manse and the church, there is a little fragment of ruin half-hidden among the trees on the steep bank, and tradition speaks vaguely, but suggestively, of a forgotten hermit and his cell.

The village itself is changed since Stevenson knew it. There is now a little double line of railway passing through, and an occasional train puffs out of a rocky tunnel into a little station, and presently proceeds on its leisurely way up the valley. The old parts of Colinton remain in picturesque patches, but round them has blossomed forth a community of red-roofed, gabled houses, with quaint latticed windows, and every shade of “harled” walls. They face every way; but whichever way they face they command lovely views, seen through the clear, brisk Midlothian air, across fields under the rule of the famed Midlothian farming, and to the grand range of the Pentlands, with the beautiful, richly-coloured valley between, and overhead a Scottish sky of great fleecy clouds and deep blue vistas.

Of Stevenson it may be submitted that he was a wandering sheep who did not love the fold; and his Picturesque Notes, for all their literary value, are tinged with the Calvinism he learnt at his nurse’s knee, and inhaled unconsciously in his native air, and that glooms his outlook even whilst he is most jeeringly observant of its effects on others. He was not happy in Edinburgh. But, underlying all the sarcasm, all the sneers, all the bitterness and fretfulness—whether directed at convention, custom, clothes, creeds, or climate—one seems to hear the cry of despairing indignation of youth lacking its birthright of strength and health.

It is pleasanter to think of Stevenson playing the truant from the University, in his country haunts amid whins and whimsies, than of his facing a “downright meteorological purgatory” in the “draughty parallelograms” of the city. Every inch of the Pentlands, of Blackford Hill, of the Braids, of “classic Hawthornden” and all the valley of the Esk, of the windings of the Water of Leith and of the shores of the Firth of Forth—all of it was known to the youthful Stevenson, known so well and so faithfully that he could describe it afterwards from the Tropics. But especially dear and homelike must the Pentlands have been to him—the Pentlands, where the old manse of his boyish holidays lies, and where “Little Swanston” of his later years still nestles in the trees beside one of the most picturesque villages in Scotland, within half-an-hour’s walk from Edinburgh. All the ground between Colinton and Swanston is historic. Had the countryside kept a diary, the first leaves would have been inscribed in Roman characters; for here was once a Roman town, though all that now remains of the conquering race of the old world is a little Roman bridge, and the great unhewn Battlestone standing huge and awesome alone in a field, and telling of the battle fought here, centuries ago, between the Picts and the Romans. A few hundreds of pages farther on in the diary would come the stern words of the persecuted Covenanters, who were encamped near here before the battle of Rullion Green.

All this romance and lore was known to Stevenson and loved by him, as well as he knew and loved the cry of the sea-gulls as they circled overhead, or followed the plough with loud cries of hunger. Often must the young Stevenson, with his strange face and long hair and his eccentric garb, have climbed the steep hill road, past “Hunter’s Tryst,” five hundred feet above sea-level, where, it is told, Allan Ramsay laid the scenery of the Gentle Shepherd,[66] and where the members of the Six Feet Club used to meet in the little roadside inn which Sir Walter Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd both knew well. The quiet cart-road to Swanston leads out of this road, a little beyond the sharp turn at “Hunter’s Tryst,” and before the

cross-roads at Fairmilehead. It leads yet another hundred feet higher, a gentle ascent between fields and pastures, and across a tiny trickling burn fringed with willows, to the green slopes at the foot of Caerketton, one of the Pentland range. 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. Swanston itself, now a farm, was originally a grange belonging to some neighbouring religious house, probably Currie, and is a fine old stone building, its tall gabled side having the characteristically Scottish “crow steps.” The road continues, a mere cart track, in front of the garden wall, and curls round at the back to some modern cottages, “stane sclated”; and here it ends, as if unwilling to betray that a few steps farther on is one of the prettiest villages in Scotland—a rustic group of thatched and harled homesteads, with here and there fenced-in gardens of old-fashioned flowers, and all set round about an irregular patch of village green and Swanston Burn, beside which play the little healthy, bonny Scottish bairns, “like tumbled fruit in grass.”

The inhabitants of this village remember Stevenson well. They thought he was “daft.” His fame has not yet impressed them. “Ay, he was much aboot the place,” an old dame will say, indifferently. “But, whenever the wind was in the east, he would be off to his grandfather’s at Colinton,” a hale and sturdy old man will add.

“He was much aboot the place.” To the Stevenson lover this is its charm to-day—above the bleating of the lambs, above the delight of the wholesome air, above the tones and tints of thatch against the hill or of wood reek against the sky. And yet, to Stevenson, it was all these things that charmed, and that he recollected so tenderly when he lay slowly dying in far-away Samoa: the barking of the sheep-dog and the voice of the shepherd in the grey early morning, and the pure air that was “rustically scented”—all the sights and sounds so dear to the country-lover. And yet, climb up a little among the whins and the pastures behind his home, and turn—and there lies Edinburgh below you, painted like a picture in the haze of smoke and sunshine.

We are looking west up stream, towards the sun setting behind Corstorphine Hill. Above the waterfall is a distillery with its chimney pointing to the Dean U.F. Church. On the right of the picture are the two towers of the Orphan Hospital.