AS a citizen William Nelson was ever ready to forward whatever appeared calculated to promote the public welfare; and his faith in the Divine maxim that righteousness exalts the nation knew no limits in its practical application. He judged his fellow-men, moreover, by his own high standard of rectitude; and, with his faith in humanity, he was prepared to favour the largest popular concessions. In politics accordingly he heartily sympathized with the Liberal party, and frankly gave expression to his opinions on all the great questions of the day. His numerous letters to his friends abound in discussions showing the keenest interest in all the events and movements that engaged public attention: the scientific discussions and religious controversies; the triumphs of engineering skill; the fascinating novelties of geographical exploration; or again, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the great American Civil War, the Franco-German War, the Eastern question in all its phases, and the no less momentous issues of party strife at home. In a letter, for example, of May 13th, 1886, addressed to his fellow-traveller, Major MacEnery, in which he gives him the latest information about their poor old dragoman, Abdallah, he thus writes: “I earnestly hope that there will soon be an end of the turmoil that there is at present in regard to Old Ireland, by letting her people have Home Rule to the fullest extent. There can be no harm in this; and we who are north of the Tweed will be a great deal the better too of having the management of our own affairs a great deal more in our own hands, as it is absurd that we should have to apply to Parliament for its sanction for many things that it knows little or nothing about; and a deal of money would be saved were applications to Parliament for them not to be necessary. The bill for the sewage of a district, for instance, in the south part of our city had to be got through Parliament lately; and what can that august body know about this odoriferous subject? We are much more familiar with it ourselves.” His appeal in such questions was apt to be to common sense; and when practical aid was needed, his purse was ever available. His sympathy with the working-classes found its most fitting expression in his dealings with those in his own employment. When the works at Hope Park were in flames, more than one onlooker reported overhearing the remark by some of his work-people, that they were sure he would feel it as much for their sakes as his own. A lady visiting a poor woman in the neighbourhood of the Hope Park works, whose husband was ill, was told by her: “He works for Mr. Nelson; and they dinna let their men suffer when they canna work.” Another told her that the aged and the crippled or maimed were found employment at the Parkside Works, “for Mr. Nelson can aye find a job to suit a’ sorts.” The evils of improvidence and the misery resulting from the drinking habits that prevailed among the lower classes were constant subjects of thought. He systematically exerted himself to devise innocent pastimes, and to stimulate the working-classes to more refined tastes and intellectual sources of enjoyment. His New-Year’s letters to friends always included some reference to the midnight gathering around the Tron Church in the High Street of Edinburgh for the “first-footing,” with its customary excesses, at the inauguration of the New Year; and every symptom of improvement was hailed with delight. The movement accordingly for displacing the taverns by “workmen’s homes” and coffee shops met with his heartiest encouragement. A Glasgow paper-maker mentioned to a friend that he had not seen Mr. Nelson for many years, when on the occasion of a visit to Edinburgh he went into one of the places then being established under the name of “British Workmen’s Houses” for the supply of non-intoxicating refreshments. To his surprise he found Mr. Nelson seated there in company with one of his daughters. On his expressing some surprise, Mr. Nelson said he had come to see how things were served; and that really he thought the coffee very good, and indeed, he said in his hearty way, he thought the milk quite as good as what they got at home from his own cows. He was not without a hope that one of the results of his reviving the popularity of St. Bernard’s Well, hereafter referred to, would be the promotion of the same good end. It is not therefore to be wondered that Mr. Nelson’s services were sought for in public life, and his fellow-citizens repeatedly manifested the high esteem they entertained for him by urging his acceptance both of civic and parliamentary honours. But few men ever shrank more sensitively from publicity, and only when the importance of the question under discussion overpowered his natural reserve could he be induced to take any part in a public meeting. Such, however, was the high sense of his services as a citizen that he was selected by her Majesty for the honourable distinction of Deputy-Lieutenant of the County of Edinburgh.

But his appreciation of the antique beauty and historical associations of his native city overcame all his retiring dread of publicity whenever they were endangered; and the same regard for the amenities of civic architecture, and the dread of the destruction of whatever is associated with the memorable events of bygone times, repeatedly find expression in his critical notes from abroad. In 1873 he writes to Mr. Campbell from Vienna, describing a two months’ Continental tour, in which he was accompanied by Mrs. Nelson and his daughters Eveline and Meta. He passed from Paris and Geneva to Italy; spent some time in Florence and Venice; travelled as far as Naples; and then returned to Rome. “I need not say,” he writes, “that Rome, which is really the capital of the world for art and archÆological interest, detained us much longer than any of the other places. I was there twenty-three years ago, and though great works are now in progress, I may say that there has been as yet no very great change since that time. The city, however, is now under Italian government, and in a few years Rome will be completely altered. There are large buildings in course of erection near the railway station, which are understood to be the commencement of an entire new city in that quarter; and in many of the streets throughout the city are marks on the houses, indicating that they are either to be wholly or partially demolished for improvements, or for the widening of the streets. But I must say that from what I have seen of the new buildings recently erected in Rome the architecture is of about as poverty-stricken a kind as can well be imagined. They are constructed of brick, which is plastered over, and the plaster gets a coating of size of a pink hue very much like that of blot-sheet; and the effect is anything but cheering. The windows have nothing round them but plain mouldings, and these are painted gray. There is not the slightest attempt at architectural ornament externally in any of the new buildings that I happened to see. If this sort of thing goes on to any great extent, the fine mediÆval feeling that there is about Rome as it now exists will be in a great measure done away with, and it will present in many parts a smooth-shaven and very unattractive appearance. The main things notable in the way of change, besides the new buildings to which I have referred, since I was in Rome formerly, are the excavations in the Forum and the Palace of the CÆsars, the Baths of Caracalla, and the changes caused by the occupation of the city by the Italian troops, and the disappearance from the streets of the religious processions, which are not now permitted. We hurried on to Rome in order to be there at Easter week, expecting to see something of the religious ceremonials for which that week has been famous for ages; but though we were in Rome the greater part of it, we found it nothing more than an ordinary week, as far as religious ceremonials are concerned. The Pope and his council are in the sulks, and as processions in the streets are not allowed, they have taken care that the curiosity of strangers shall not be gratified by any great ceremonial in the churches. It would interest you much to see the ruins of the Palace of the CÆsars, now that they have been cleared out, especially that part of them which is known to have been the court house. The wall all round still exists to some extent, as do also portions of the mosaic floor, and the place where the emperor or the judge sat is still to be seen. There is in front of it a portion of the marble balustrade that extended across this part of the court; and Dr. Philip, missionary to the Jews in Rome, who acted as guide to us in our wanderings through these immense ruins, said there can hardly be a doubt that Paul stood before that very balustrade and pleaded his cause before Nero as his judge. The guard-rooms of the soldiers of what is called the Palace of Tiberius are quite entire, and on the walls of them are several very interesting scratchings made by the occupants of those rooms in ancient days. One is of a Roman galley in full sail; another is an outline portrait said to be of Augustus CÆsar; another is a caricature likeness of Nero; and another a very clever comical figure of a fellow with a tremendously long nose. What a living reality they seem to give to those old times! In a room at a little distance there is a remarkably clever scratching of a donkey with a mill on its back, with the words below: ‘If you labour as I do, you shall not want bread.’ How little things of this kind carry us back to the far bygone past!”

In like manner, in a letter to Dr. Simpson, he thus records the impression which his visit to St. Petersburg in 1884 left on his mind: “We were very much disappointed with St. Petersburg, as it occupies a site that is very flat and very unhealthy; and it is a city of pure sham, so far as the architecture of it is concerned. The principal buildings, as a rule, are of plaster or cement, and are painted in a style that is perfectly barbaric. Even the celebrated Winter Palace is not an exception. It is of Roman architecture; and it is besmeared with paint of a yellowish-brown colour which is sufficient to make one shudder. The building, moreover, is of great extent, and it is all the more repulsive on this account.”

But if the disfigurement of the modern city of Peter the Great on the Neva, or the effacement of the historic antiquities of Rome, offended his taste, and gave rise to unavailing regrets, every movement of a like kind affecting his native city roused him not only to vehement protest, but to vigorous action to avert as far as possible the threatened mischief. Under such stimulus, all reserve disappeared, and he stood forth as the resolute defender of his city and its historical memorials. His letters to old schoolmates, whose lot had been cast far from those favourite haunts of early years, are frequently devoted to a notice of the rescue of some threatened antique building, or a wail over the irrevocable destruction of some historic pile in the alleys or closes of Old Edinburgh.

The old Bowhead land had an interest of its own, apart from its singular picturesqueness as an example of the civic architecture of older centuries. When its demolition could no longer be averted, he rescued from the wreck some of its substantial oak timbers, and had them fashioned into antique furniture as memorial gifts to absent friends. In 1883, another of the venerable survivals of older generations, immediately adjoining the former Castle Hill establishment, was demolished; and he thus records the event in a letter to myself:—“I sent you a Scotsman, with an account of the demolition of one of the old houses that you will remember on the Castle Hill. It stood in front of Milne’s Court, looking down the West Bow, and presented a very picturesque front, both to the street and to the court behind. Two stone-vaulted shops faced the street, standing some feet back from the pavement. It was thought that the main walls of the house went straight up all the way, and that the timber front, projecting story by story farther into the street, was an addition of later date; but this was a mistake, for the original beams extended right over the pavement. The likelihood is that there was an open veranda on each flat, though it had been closed in with lath and plaster in course of time. On the second flat, when the plaster was removed, it was interesting to see a neatly-carved oaken balustrade, that had been covered up probably for centuries, where one could fancy the good folks of the house sitting in their balcony enjoying the fresh air and having their gossip on the great events of the day. They could look down the Lawnmarket and the West Bow and up the Castle Hill; and it must have been a choice place on great occasions, when a royal cavalcade came up the Bow, or when some poor rogue went down it for the last time.” (In allusion to the old site of the gallows in the Grassmarket.) “I see, on turning to your ‘Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time,’ that it belonged to a worthy old citizen, Bartholomew Somerville, a liberal benefactor to our University in its early days.”

The sympathetic interest thus manifested in every ancient feature of the special haunts of his boyhood extended to whatever contributed to the picturesqueness and beauty of his native city. One who was very familiar with his indefatigable exertions for the conservation of whatever pertained to its historical antiquities—Mr. D. Scott Moncrieff—thus writes in reply to a request for information relative to the share borne by Mr. Nelson in recent efforts on that behalf:—“It is no easy matter to do this, for Mr. Nelson for many years took an active interest in every movement having for its object the enhancement of the beauties of his native city. As you are aware, he was long a member, and latterly one of the council, of the Cockburn Association, founded in 1875, for promoting the improvement of Edinburgh and its neighbourhood; and as convener of the council I had frequent opportunities of hearing his views upon such questions. His interest was much engaged, in particular, in the improvement of Edinburgh Castle, the Meadows, and other public parks, the encouragement of a higher style of architecture, and the frustration of mean and tasteless designs, vulgar advertisements, and the depraved habit of painting stone work. He strove to obviate the necessity for unsightly workshops and tall chimneys, for which in his own extensive works there was found no place.” But he soon discovered that mere criticising, remonstrating, and suggesting improvements were of little avail; and as Mr. Scott Moncrieff adds: “His interest in the work of the Association was not confined to attending meetings and expressing his views. Every citizen of Edinburgh may well feel proud and grateful that amongst them there was one gifted, not only with an exquisite taste for all that was beautiful, but with an enthusiasm in having his aspirations given expression to, and also with the means of carrying his ideas into effect.” One of those practical demonstrations of his public-spirited liberality has a history of its own.

The circular panel of the finely-carved mantle-piece in the council room of Heriot’s Hospital is filled with a painting which perpetuates the tradition that the medicinal spring of St. Bernard’s Well, on the Water of Leith—resembling in character the famed Harrogate springs—was discovered by a party of Heriot boys while sporting on the bank of the stream. A more dubious legendary tale assigns the origin of the name to the occupation of a cave on the neighbouring slope by the saint still associated with its healing waters; but its medicinal virtues are noted for the first time in the Scottish Magazine for 1760, at which date the water seems to have been in great repute. The old Scottish judge, Lord Gardenstone, an eccentric valetudinarian, having derived much benefit from the medicinal waters, in 1789 erected over the healing fountain a fine Doric temple, designed as a reproduction of the famous Sibyl’s Temple at Tivoli. A colossal plaster statue of Hygeia was placed within the columns, over the vaulted chamber of the well. Thus enshrined, it has ever since been a favourite morning resort; and William Nelson continued for many years to be one of its most faithful frequenters. But the picturesque and richly-wooded valley of the Leith, to which the Heriot boys resorted in the eighteenth century, has long been invaded by the extended new town. The temple had fallen into disrepair, and the boys of the neighbouring village of Stockbridge had defaced and mutilated the statue, till it presented some of the most familiar characteristics of a genuine antique. The amenities of the spot had suffered in all ways, and the proposed erection of a public laundry on the adjacent area threatened the final ruin of the well, when in 1885 Mr. Nelson interposed, purchased it and the grounds in its vicinity, restored and beautified the well, and commissioned Mr. Stephenson to execute a marble statue of Hygeia, to replace the mutilated goddess of earlier days. The surrounding grounds were tastefully laid out, under the directions of a skilled landscape gardener, and the whole finished at a cost of £5,000, and presented to the city. He did not live to see the fine statue placed on its pedestal; but his letters to his friends frequently refer to it, along with others of the various works of restoration which so largely occupied his thoughts and engaged his active sympathy in his later years. Writing to Captain Chester in January 1886 he says: “I send you the last report of the Cockburn Association, from which you will see that I have in hand the restoration of several ancient buildings in the Castle, and of the mineral well on the Water of Leith called St. Bernard’s Well, a chromo-lithograph of which I enclose. I am glad that it has fallen to my lot to do something ere I be ‘called hence to be no more,’ for the beauty and interest of mine own romantic town.”

The shrine of his favourite healing fountain had been restored to far more than its pristine beauty, and the generous benefactor to whom the work was due had himself been “called hence,” when the convener of the Cockburn Association wrote: “What Mr. William Nelson undertook he did well and thoroughly; and so long as Edinburgh citizens look down upon the valley of the Water of Leith, his work at St. Bernard’s Well will keep his memory green in their hearts.”

But, as his letters show, other and still more extensive and costly restorations engaged William Nelson’s practical liberality, and continued to be objects of deepest interest to him till the close of his life. So early as 1847, attention had been recalled, in the “Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time,” to the fact that the ancient hall of the palace in the Castle still existed, though so defaced and overlaid by later transmutations as to have passed out of knowledge of the living generation. But the matter was once more forgotten till near the close of 1883, when Lord Napier and Ettrick published in the Scotsman an account of his explorations above the modern ceiling of the hospital ward, where, “on creeping up a ladder, through a trap-door, he found himself in a maze of mighty beams, on which the dust of centuries lay thick and soft.” It was the fine old open timbered ceiling, of carved chestnut, of the great hall of the Castle. Public attention was now keenly awakened to the interest of this historic relic. Here was the aula Castri, or great hall of the Castle, where there is little doubt the Scottish Parliament assembled in 1437 to inaugurate the reign of the young king, James II. Here, too, if the legend is to be accepted as a verity, only two years later Chancellor Crichton had the fatal symbol of the bull’s head served up for the Earl of Douglas. It was here that Charles I. held his coronation banquet in 1633, and that Argyle entertained the Lord Protector Cromwell in 1650. Of the historic worth of the ancient hall there could be no question; and not only its degradation to the purposes of a garrison hospital, but the general neglect and disfigurement of the Castle, had long been a subject of public complaint.

The council of the Cockburn Association followed up the letter of Lord Napier with a memorial to the Marquis of Hartington, then Secretary of State for War, complaining of the misappropriation and defacement of the ancient hall, and urging its restoration. But the wonted formalities and circumlocution of official correspondence ensued, with little prospect of any satisfactory result, “when,” as Mr. Scott Moncrieff writes, “we were still hoping that the building might be rendered available for uses more in harmony with its history and associations; and while the matter was still under the consideration of the authorities, Mr. Nelson, knowing the well-nigh insurmountable obstacles in the way of Government dealing effectively, timeously, and reasonably, in affairs of the kind, in the most generous and patriotic way offered at his sole expense to undertake the restoration, not only of the old Parliament Hall, but also of two other most interesting and picturesque features of the Castle, the Argyle Tower and St. Margaret’s Chapel.”

The little oratory of St. Margaret had been a subject of interest to him from the time when it was anew brought under notice, in 1845, as a long-forgotten historical relic; and as for the Argyle Tower, it was associated in his mind with the reverence due to the martyrs of the Covenant. The fine old Edinburgh cemetery, the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, was only separated from the West Bow by the Grassmarket, where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the public gallows was erected, for the execution not only of degraded criminals, but of many of the victims of intolerance in Covenanting times, to whom a common grave was assigned in the neighbouring cemetery. There, accordingly, in happier days the Martyrs’ Monument was erected, with its tribute to the memory of “about a hundred noblemen and gentlemen, ministers, and others, noble martyrs for Jesus Christ,” all executed at Edinburgh, “from May 27th, 1661, that the most noble Marquis of Argyle was beheaded, to the 17th February 1688, that Mr. James Renwick suffered.” It was but a step from the early home in the West Bow to the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, where the Martyrs’ Monument had been an object of veneration to William Nelson from his youth. The same spirit of reverent piety which led to the erection of the Martyrs’ Monument on the spot selected, as a mark of ignominy, for the graves of the victims of Stuart persecution, associates the name of Argyle with the tower in the neighbouring fortress in which Archibald, Earl of Argyle, was imprisoned before his execution in 1685. He had gone up to London to pay his homage to Charles II., relying on the indemnity which had been granted, as far as England was concerned. But Scotland was still a separate kingdom; and as a prominent leader of the Scottish Covenanters, Argyle was regarded with special antipathy. He was accordingly arrested, cast into the Tower, and from thence transferred to the state prison in the Castle of Edinburgh. It was from that prison chamber that the earl addressed to his friends letters marked by a rare spirit of calm Christian resignation, including the simple farewell note to his own son, written immediately before his execution. Of the latter William Nelson had a facsimile made. Still more, according to current belief, it was in the same prison chamber that a member of the council, on coming to interview him, was startled at finding the victim of intolerance calmly asleep immediately before he walked with quiet composure to the scaffold. The scene associated with such memorable occurrences appealed to William Nelson’s religious no less than to his archÆological sympathies; so that the restoration of the Argyle Tower was for him, in a very special sense, a labour of love.

The work thus generously undertaken proceeded slowly, amid endless official routine and red-tape formalities. Plans were prepared and submitted to the critical revision of his colleagues in the council of the Cockburn Association before asking official approval. But hospital accommodation had to be found elsewhere; and the patience he manifested, and the calm perseverance with which he overcame the vis inertiÆ of the Circumlocution Office, were a source of admiration to his friends and of amusement to himself. His unostentatious liberality, along with the taste and judgment he displayed, naturally gave weight to his opinions; and, notwithstanding his instinctive reserve, he was induced on more than one occasion to remonstrate with the authorities on plans that had received official approval. In 1887 the sketch of a tasteless design for a new entrance gateway, to form the main approach to the Castle, had been exhibited without attracting public attention. The working plans had been withheld; and it was about to be proceeded with, on the plea, stated in an official letter, that “every reasonable facility had been afforded for criticism.” A respectful letter of remonstrance was forwarded by him to the Marquis of Lothian. Its style of formal courtesy would suggest that it had been drawn up more probably by some legal member of the council of the Cockburn Association, and sent to him for signature. But having done so, his own simple and plain-spoken style is unmistakably manifest in the postscript he has added: “The proposed designs, I can assure you, will give great dissatisfaction. They are not at all in keeping with the grand old Castle.”