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SUMMER has leaped suddenly on Edinburgh like a tiger.
The air is still and hot above the houses; but every now and then a
breath of east wind startles you through the warm sunshine—like a
sudden sarcasm felt through a strain of flattery—and passes on
detested of every organism. But, with this exception, the atmosphere is
so close, so laden with a body of heat, that a thunderstorm would be
almost welcomed as a relief. Edinburgh, on her crags, held high towards
the sun—too distant the sea to send cool breezes to street and square—is
at this moment an uncomfortable dwelling-place. Beautiful as ever, of
course—for nothing can be finer than the ridge of the Old Town etched
on hot summer azure— but close, breathless, suffocating. Great volumes
of white smoke surge out of the railway station; great choking puffs of
dust issue from the houses and shops that are being gutted in Princes
Street. The Castle rock is gray; the trees are of a dingy olive; languid
"swells," arm-in-arm, promenade uneasily the heated pavement;
water-carts everywhere dispense their treasures; and the only human
being really to be envied in the city is the small boy who, with
trousers tucked up, and unheeding of maternal vengeance, marches coolly
in the fringe of the ambulating shower-bath. Oh for one hour of heavy
rain! Thereafter would the heavens wear a clear and tender, instead of a
dim and sultry hue. Then would the Castle rock brighten in colour, and
the trees and grassy slopes doff their dingy olives for the emeralds of
April. Then would the streets be cooled, and the dust be allayed. Then
would the belts of city verdure, refreshed, pour forth gratitude in
balmy smells; and Fife—low-lying across the Forth—break from its hot
neutral tint into the greens, purples, and yellows that of right belong
to it. But rain won’t come; and for weeks, perhaps, there will be
nothing but hot sun above, and hot street beneath; and for the
respiration of poor human lungs an atmosphere of heated dust, tempered
with east wind.
Moreover, one is tired and jaded. The whole man, body
and soul, like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, is fagged
with work, eaten up of impatience, and haunted with visions of vacation.
One "babbles o’ green fields," like a very Falstaff; and the
poor tired ears hum with sea-music like a couple of sea-shells. At last
it comes, the 1st of August, and then—like an arrow from a Tartar’s
bow, like a bird from its cage, like a lover to his mistress—one is
off; and before the wild scarlets of sunset die on the northern sea, one
is in the silence of the hills, those eternal sun-dials that tell the
hours to the shepherd, and in one’s nostrils is the smell of
peat-reek, and in one’s throat the flavour of usquebaugh. Then come
long floating summer days, so silent the wilderness, that one can hear
one’s heart beat; then come long silent nights, the waves heard upon
the shore, although that is a mile away, in which one snatches
the "fearful joy" of a ghost story, told by shepherd or
fisher, who believes in it as in his own existence. Then one beholds
sunset, not through the smoked glass of towns, but gloriously through
the clearness of enkindled air. Then one makes acquaintance with
sunrise, which to the dweller in a city, who conforms to the usual
proprieties, is about the rarest of this world’s sights.
 Mr
De Quincey maintains, in one of his essays, that dinner—dinner about
seven in the evening, for which one dresses, which creeps on with
multitudinous courses and entrées, which, so far from being a gross
satisfaction of appetite, is a feast noble, graceful, adorned with the
presence and smile of beauty, and which, from the very stateliness of
its progress, gives opportunities for conversation and the encounter of
polished minds—saves over-wrought London from insanity. This is no
mere humorous exaggeration, but a very truth; and what dinner is to the
day the Highlands are to the year. Away in the north, amid its green or
stony silences, jaded hand and brain find repose—repose, the depth and
intensity of which the idler can never know. In that blessed idleness
you become in a strange way acquainted with yourself; for in the world
you are too constantly occupied to spend much time in your own company.
You live abroad all day, as it were, and only come home to sleep. Away
in the north you have nothing else to do, and cannot quite help
yourself; and conscience, who has kept open a watchful eye, although her
lips have been sealed these many months, gets disagreeably
communicative, and tells her mind pretty freely about certain little
shabby selfishnesses and unmanly violences of temper, which you had
quietly consigned — like a document which you were for ever done with
— to the waste-basket of forgetfulness. And the quiet, the silence,
the rest, is not only good for the soul, it is good for the body too.
You flourish like a flower in the open air; the hurried pulse beats a
wholesome measure; evil dreams roll off your slumbers; indigestion dies.
During your two months’ vacation, you amass a fund of superfluous
health, and can draw on it during the ten months that succeed. And in
going to the north, and wandering about the north, it is best to take
everything quietly and in moderation. It is better to read one good book
leisurely, lingering over the finer passages, returning frequently on an
exquisite sentence, closing the volume, now and then, to run down in
your own mind a new thought started by its perusal, than to rush in a
swift perfunctory manner through half a library. It is better to sit
down to dinner in a moderate frame of mind, to please the palate as well
as satisfy the appetite, to educe the sweet juices of meats by
sufficient mastication, to make your glass of port "a linked
sweetness long drawn out," than to bolt everything like a
leathern-faced Yankee for whom the cars are waiting, and who fears that
before he has had his money’s worth, he will be summoned by the
railway bell.. And shall one, who wishes to extract from the world as
much enjoyment as his nature will allow him, treat the Highlands less
respectfully than he will his dinner? So at least will not I. My bourne
is the island of which Douglas dreamed on the morning of Otterburn; but
even to it I will not unnecessarily hurry, but will look on many
places on my way. You have to go to London; but unless your business is
urgent, you are a fool to go thither like a parcel in the night train
and miss York and Peterborough. It is very fine to arrive at majority,
and the management of your fortune which has been all the while
accumulating for years; but you do not wish to do so at a sudden leap—to
miss the April eyes and April heart of seventeen!
The Highlands can be
enjoyed in the utmost simplicity; and the best preparations are—money
to a moderate extent in one’s pocket, a knapsack containing a spare
shirt and a toothbrush, and a courage that does not fear to breast the
steep of the hill, and to encounter the pelting of a Highland shower. No
man knows a country till he has walked through it; he then tastes the
sweets and the bitters of it. He beholds its grand and important points,
and all the subtler and concealed beauties that lie out of the beaten
track. Then, O reader, in the most glorious of the months, the very
crown and summit of the fruitful year, hanging in equal poise between
summer and autumn, leave London or Edinburgh, or whatever city your lot
may happen to be cast in, and accompany me on my wanderings. Our course
will lead us by ancient battle-fields, by castles standing in hearing of
the surge; by the bases of mighty mountains, along the wanderings of
hollow glens; and if the weather holds, we may see the keen ridges of
Blaavin and the Cuchullin hills; listen to a legend old as Ossian, while
sitting on the broken stair of the castle of Duntulm, beaten for
centuries by the salt flake and the wind; and in the pauses of ghostly
talk in the long autumn nights, when the rain is on the hills, we may
hear—more wonderful than any legend, carrying you away to misty
regions and half-forgotten times—the music which haunted the
Berserkers of old, the thunder of the northern sea!
A perfect library of
books has been written about Edinburgh. Defoe, in his own
matter-of-fact, garrulous way, has described the city. Its towering
streets, and the follies of its society, are reflected in the inimitable
pages of "Humphrey Clinker." Certain aspects of city
life, city amusements, city dissipations, are mirrored in the clear,
although somewhat shallow, stream of Fergusson’s humour. The old life
of the place, the traffic in the streets, the old-fashioned shops, the
citizens with cocked hats and powdered hair, with hospitable paunches
and double chins, with no end of wrinkles, and hints of latent humour in
their worldly - wise faces, with gold-headed sticks, and shapely limbs
encased in close-fitting small-clothes, are found in "Kay’s
Portraits." Passing Scott’s other services to the city—the
magnificent description in "Marmion," the "high
jinks" in "Guy Mannering," the broils of the nobles and
wild chieftains who attended the Court of the Jameses in "The
Abbot"—he has, in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," made
immortal many of the city localities; and the central character of
Jeanie Deans is so unassumingly and sweetly Scotch, that she
seems as much a portion of the place as Holyrood, the Castle, or the
Crags. In Lockhart’s "Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk," we
have sketches of society nearer our own time, when the Edinburgh
Review flourished, when the city was really the Modern Athens, and a
seat of criticism giving laws to the empire. In these pages, we are
introduced to Jeffrey, to John Wilson, the Ettrick Shepherd, and Dr
Chalmers. Then came Blackwood’s Magazine, the "Chaldee
Manuscript," the "Noctes," and "Margaret
Lindsay." Then the "Traditions of Edinburgh," by Mr
Robert Chambers; thereafter the well-known Edinburgh Journal. Since
then we have had Lord Cockburn’s chatty "Memorials of his
Time." Almost the other day we had Dean Ramsay’s Lectures, filled
with pleasant antiquarianism, and information relative to the men and
women who flourished half a century ago. And the list may be closed with
"Edinburgh Dissected," written after the fashion of Lockhart’s
"Letters,"—a book containing pleasant reading enough,
although it wants the brilliancy, the acuteness, the eloquence, and
possesses all the ill-nature, of its famous prototype.
Scott has done more for Edinburgh than all her great
men put together. Burns has hardly left a trace of himself in the
northern capital. During his residence there his spirit was soured, and
he was taught to drink whisky-punch—obligations which he repaid by
addressing "Edina, Scotia’s darling seat," in a copy of his
tamest verses. Scott discovered that the city was beautiful—he sang
its praises over the world—and he has put more coin into the pockets
of its inhabitants than if he had established
a branch of manufacture of which they had the monopoly. Scott’s novels
were to Edinburgh what the tobacco trade was to Glasgow about the close
of the last century. Although several labourers were before him in the
field of the Border Ballads, he made fashionable those wonderful stories
of humour and pathos. As soon as "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel" appeared, everybody was raving about Melrose and
moonlight. He wrote "The Lady of the Lake," and next year a
thousand tourists descended on the Trosachs, watched the sun setting on
Loch Katrine, and began to take lessons on the bagpipe. He improved the
Highlands as much as General Wade did when he struck through them his
military roads. Where his muse was one year, a mail-coach and a hotel
were the next. His poems are grated down into guidebooks. Never was an
author so popular as Scott, and never was popularity worn so lightly and
gracefully. In his own heart he did not value it highly; and he cared
more for his plantations at Abbotsford than for his poems and novels. He
would rather have been praised by Tom Purdie than by any critic. He was
a great, simple, sincere, warm-hearted man. He never turned aside from
his fellows in gloomy scorn; his lip never curled with a fine disdain.
He never ground his teeth save when in the agonies of toothache. He
liked society, his friends, his dogs, his domestics, his trees, his
historical nick-nacks. At Abbotsford, he would write a chapter of a
novel before his guests were out of bed, spend the day with them, and
then, at dinner, with his store of shrewd Scottish anecdote, brighten
the table more than did the champagne. When in Edinburgh, any one might
see him in the streets or in the Parliament House. He was loved by
everybody. No one so popular among the souters of Selkirk as the Shirra.
George IV., on his visit to the northern kingdom, declared that
Scott was the man he most wished to see. He was the deepest, simplest,
man of his time. The mass of his greatness takes away from our sense of
its height. He sinks like Ben Cruachan, shoulder after shoulder, slowly,
till its base is twenty miles in girth. Scotland is Scott-land. He is
the light in which it is seen. He has proclaimed over all the world
Scottish story, Scottish humour, Scottish feeling, Scottish virtue; and
he has put money into the pockets of Scottish hotel-keepers, Scottish
tailors, Scottish boatmen, and the drivers of the Highland mails.
 Every
true Scotsman believes Edinburgh to be the most picturesque city in the
world; and truly, standing on the Calton Hill at early morning, when the
smoke of fires newly-kindled hangs in azure swathes and veils about the
Old Town—which from that point resembles a huge lizard, the Castle its
head, church-spires spikes upon its scaly back, creeping up from its
lair beneath the Crags to look out on the morning world—one is quite
inclined to pardon the enthusiasm of the North Briton. The finest view
from the interior is obtained from the corner of St Andrew Street,
looking west. Straight before you the Mound crosses the valley, bearing
the white Academy buildings; beyond, the Castle lifts, from grassy
slopes and billows of summer foliage, its weather-stained towers and
fortifications, the Half-Moon battery giving the folds of its standard
to the wind. Living in Edinburgh there abides, above all things, a sense
of its beauty. Hill, crag, castle, rock, blue stretch of sea, the
picturesque ridge of the Old Town, the squares and terraces of the New—
these things seen once are not to be forgotten. The quick life of to-day
sounding around the relics of antiquity, and overshadowed by the august
traditions of a kingdom, makes residence in Edinburgh more impressive
than residence in any other British city. I have just come in—surely
it never looked so fair before? What a poem is that Princes Street! The
puppets of the busy, many-coloured hour move about on its pavement,
while across the ravine Time has piled up the Old Town, ridge on ridge,
gray as a rocky coast washed and worn by the foam of centuries; peaked
and jagged by gable and roof; windowed from basement to cope; the whole
surmounted by St Giles’s airy crown. The New is there looking at the
Old. Two Times are brought face to face, and are yet separated by a
thousand years. Wonderful on winter nights, when the gully is filled
with darkness, and out of it rises, against the sombre blue and the
frosty stars, that mass and bulwark of gloom, pierced and quivering with
innumerable lights. There is nothing in Europe to match that, I think.
Could you but roll a river down the valley it would be sublime. Finer
still, to place one’s-self near the Burns Monument and look toward the
Castle. It is more astonishing than an Eastern dream. A city rises up
before you painted by fire on night. High in air a bridge of lights
leaps the chasm; a few emerald lamps, like glow-worms, are moving
silently about in the railway station below; a solitary crimson one is
at rest. That ridged and chimneyed bulk of blackness, with splendour
bursting out at every pore, is the wonderful Old Town,
where Scottish history mainly transacted itself; while, opposite, the
modern Princes Street is blazing throughout its length. During the day
the Castle looks down upon the city as if out of another world; stern
with all its peacefulness, its garniture of trees, its slopes of grass.
The rock is dingy enough in colour, but after a shower, its lichens
laugh out greenly in the returning sun, while the rainbow is brightening
on the lowering sky beyond. How deep the shadow which the Castle throws
at noon over the gardens at its feet where the children play! How grand
when giant bulk and towery crown blacken against sunset! Fair, too, the
New Town sloping to the sea. From George Street which crowns the ridge,
the eye is led down sweeping streets of stately architecture to the
villas and woods that fill the lower ground, and fringe the shore; to
the bright azure belt of the Forth with its smoking steamer or its
creeping sail; beyond, to the shores of Fife, soft blue, and flecked
with fleeting shadows in the keen clear light of spring, dark purple in
the summer heat, tarnished gold in the autumn haze; and farther away
still, just distinguishable on the paler sky, the crest of some distant
peak, carrying the imagination into the illimitable world. Residence
in Edinburgh is an education in itself. Its beauty refines one like
being in love. It is perennial, like a play of Shakespeare’s. Nothing
can stale its infinite variety.
 From
a historical and picturesque point of view, the Old Town is the most
interesting part of Edinburgh; and the great street running from
Holyrood to the Castle—in various portions of its length called the
Lawnmarket, the High Street, and the Canongate—is the most interesting
part of the Old Town. In that street the houses preserve their ancient
appearance; they climb up heavenward, story upon story, with outside
stairs and wooden panellings, all strangely peaked and gabled. With the
exception of the inhabitants, who exist amidst squalor, and filth, and
evil smells undeniably modern, everything in this long street breathes
of the antique world. If you penetrate the narrow wynds that run at
right angles from it, you see traces of ancient gardens. Occasionally
the original names are retained, and they touch the visitor
pathetically, like the scent of long-withered flowers. Old armorial
bearings may yet be traced above the doorways. Two centuries ago fair
eyes looked down from yonder window, now in possession of a drunken
Irishwoman. If we but knew it, every crazy tenement has its tragic
story; every crumbling wall could its tale unfold. The Canongate is
Scottish history fossilised. What ghosts of kings and queens walk there!
What strifes of steel-clad nobles! What wretches borne along, in the
sight of peopled windows, to the grim embrace of the "maiden
!" What hurrying of burgesses to man the city walls at the approach
of the Southron! What lamentations over disastrous battle days! James
rode up this street on his way to Flodden. Montrose was dragged up
hither on a hurdle, and smote, with disdainful glance, his foes gathered
together on the balcony. Jenny Geddes flung her stool at the priest in
the church yonder. John Knox came up here to his house after his
interview with Mary at Holyrood—grim and stern, and unmelted by the
tears of a queen. In later days the Pretender rode down the Canongate,
his eyes dazzled by the glitter of his father’s crown, while bagpipes
skirled around, and Jacobite ladies, with white knots in their bosoms,
looked down from lofty windows, admiring the beauty of the "Young
Ascanius," and his long yellow hair. Down here of an evening rode
Dr Johnson and Boswell, and turned in to the White Horse. David Hume had
his dwelling in this street, and trod its pavements, much meditating the
wars of the Roses and the Parliament, and the fates of English
sovereigns. One day a burly ploughman from black eyes, came down here
and turned into yonder churchyard to stand, with cloudy lids and
forehead reverently bared, beside the grave of poor Ayrshire, with
swarthy features and wonderful Fergusson. Down the street, too, often
limped a little boy, Walter Scott by name, destined in after years to
write its "Chronicles." The Canongate once seen is never to be
forgotten. The visitor starts a ghost at every step. Nobles, grave
senators, jovial lawyers, had once their abodes here. In the old,
low-roofed rooms, half-way to the stars, philosophers talked, wits
coruscated, and gallant young fellows, sowing wild oats in the middle of
last century, wore rapiers and lace ruffles, and drank claret jovially
out of silver stoups. In every room a minuet has been walked, while
chairmen and linkmen clustered on the pavement beneath. But the
Canongate has fallen from its high estate. Quite another race of people
are its present inhabitants. The vices to be seen are not genteel.
Whisky has supplanted claret. Nobility has fled, and squalor taken
possession. Wild, half-naked children swarm around every door-step.
Ruffians lounge about the mouths of the wynds. Female faces, worthy of
the "Inferno," look down from broken windows. Riots are
frequent; and drunken mothers reel past scolding white atomies of
children that nestle wailing in their bosoms—little wretches to whom
Death were the greatest benefactor. The Canongate is avoided by
respectable people, and yet it has many visitors. The tourist is anxious
to make acquaintance with it. Gentlemen of obtuse olfactory nerve, and
of an antiquarian turn of mind, go down its closes and climb its spiral
stairs. Deep down these wynds the artist pitches his stool, and spends
the day sketching some picturesque gable or doorway. The fever-van comes
frequently here to convey some poor sufferer to the hospital. Hither
comes the detective in plain clothes on the scent of a burglar. And when
evening falls, and the lamps are lit, there is a sudden hubbub and crowd
of people, and presently from its midst emerge a couple of policemen and
a barrow with a poor, half-clad, tipsy woman from the sister island
crouching upon it, her hair hanging loose about her face, her hands
quivering with impotent rage, and her tongue wild with curses. Attended
by small boys, who bait her with taunts and nicknames, and who
appreciate the comic element which so strangely underlies the horrible
sight, she is conveyed to the police cell, and will be brought before
the magistrate to-morrow—for the twentieth time perhaps—as a
"drunk and disorderly," and dealt with accordingly. This is
the kind of life the Canongate presents to-day—a contrast with the
time when the tall buildings enclosed the high birth and beauty of a
kingdom, and when the street beneath rang to the horse-hoofs of a king.
The New Town is divided
from the Old by a gorge or valley, now occupied by a railway station;
and the means of communication are the Mound, Waverley Bridge, and the
North Bridge. With the exception of the Canongate, the more filthy and
tumble-down portions of the city are well kept out of sight. You stand
on the South Bridge, and looking down, instead of a stream, you see the
Cowgate, the dirtiest, narrowest, most densely peopled of Edinburgh
streets. Admired once by a French ambassador at the court of one of the
Jameses, and yet with certain traces of departed splendour, the Cowgate
has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf of furniture brokers,
second-hand jewellers, and vendors of deleterious alcohol. These
second-hand jewellers’ shops, the trinkets seen by bleared gaslight,
are the most melancholy sights I know. Watches hang there that once
ticked comfortably in the fobs of prosperous men, rings that were once
placed by happy bridegrooms on the fingers of happy brides, jewels in
which lives the sacredness of death-beds. What tragedies, what
disruptions of households, what fell pressure of poverty brought them
here! Looking in through the foul windows, the trinkets remind one of
shipwrecked gold embedded in the ooze of ocean—gold that speaks of
unknown, yet certain, storm and disaster, of the yielding of planks, of
the cry of drowning men. Who has the heart to buy them, I wonder? The
Cowgate is the Irish portion of the city. Edinburgh leaps over it with
bridges; its inhabitants are morally and geographically the lower
orders. They keep to their own quarters, and seldom come up to the light
of day. Many an Edinburgh man has never set his foot in the street; the
condition of the inhabitants is as little known to respectable Edinburgh
as are the habits of moles, earth-worms, and the mining population. The
people of the Cowgate seldom visit the upper streets. You may walk about
the New Town for a twelvemonth before one of these Cowgate pariahs comes
between the wind and your gentility. Should you wish to see that strange
people "at home," you must visit them. The Cowgate will not
come to you: you must go to the Cowgate. The Cowgate holds high drunken
carnival every Saturday night; and to walk along it then, from the West
Port, through the noble open space of the Grassmarket—where the
Covenanters and Captain Porteous suffered—on to Holyrood, is one of
the world’s sights, and one that does not particularly raise your
estimate of human nature. For nights after your dreams will pass from
brawl to brawl, shoals of hideous faces will oppress you, sodden
countenances of brutal men, women with loud voices and frantic
gesticulations, children who have never known innocence. It is amazing
of what ugliness the human face is capable. The devil marks his children
as a shepherd marks his sheep—that he may know them and claim them
again. Many a face flits past here bearing the sign-manual of the fiend.
But Edinburgh keeps all
these evil things out of sight, and smiles, with Castle, tower,
church-spire, and pyramid rising into sunlight out of garden spaces and
belts of foliage. The Cowgate has no power to mar her beauty. There may
be a canker at the heart of the peach—there is neither pit nor stain
on its dusty velvet. Throned on crags, Edinburgh takes every eye; and,
not content with supremacy in beauty, she claims an intellectual
supremacy also. She is a patrician amongst British cities, "A
penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree." She has wit if she lacks
wealth: she counts great men against millionaires. The success of the
actor is insecure until thereunto Edinburgh has set her seal. The poet
trembles before the Edinburgh critics. The singer respects the delicacy
of the Edinburgh ear. Coarse London may roar with applause: fastidious
Edinburgh sniffs disdain, and sneers reputations away. London is the
stomach of the empire—Edinburgh the quick, subtle, far-darting brain.
Some pretension of this kind the visitor hears on all sides of him. It
is quite wonderful how Edinburgh purrs over her own literary
achievements. Swift, in the dark years that preceded his death, looking
one day over some of the productions of his prime, exclaimed, "Good
heaven! what a genius I once was!" Edinburgh, looking some fifty
years back on herself, is perpetually expressing astonishment and
delight. Mouldening Highland families, when they are unable to retain a
sufficient following of servants, fill up the gaps with ghosts. Edinburgh
maintains her dignity after a similar fashion, and for a similar reason.
Lord-Advocate Moncreiff, one of the members for the city, hardly ever
addresses his fellow-citizens without recalling the names of Jeffrey,
Cockburn, Rutherfurd, and the other stars that of yore made the welkin
bright. On every side we hear of the brilliant society of forty years
ago. Edinburgh considers herself supreme in talent—just as it is taken
for granted to-day that the present English navy is the most powerful in
the world, because Nelson won Trafalgar. The Whigs consider the Edinburgh
Review the most wonderful effort of human genius. The Tories would
agree with them, if they were not bound to consider Blackwood’s
Magazine a still greater effort. It may be said that Burns, Scott,
and Carlyle are the only men really great in literature—taking great in a European sense—who, during the last eighty years, have been
connected with Edinburgh. I do not include Wilson in the list; for
although he was as splendid as any of these for the moment, he was
evanescent as a Northern light. In the whole man there was something
spectacular. A review is superficially very like a battle. In both there
is the rattle of musketry, the boom of great guns, the deploying of
endless brigades, charges of brazen squadrons that shake the ground—only
the battle changes kingdoms, while the review is gone with its own
smoke-wreaths. Scott lived in or near Edinburgh during the whole course
of his life. Burns lived there but a few months. Carlyle went to London
early, where he has written his important works, and made his
reputation. Let the city boast of Scott—no one will say she does wrong
in that—but it is not so easy to discover the amazing brilliancy of
her other literary lights. Their reputations, after all, are to a great
extent local. What blazes a sun at Edinburgh, would, if transported to
London, not unfrequently become a farthing candle. Lord Jeffrey—when
shall we cease to hear his praises? With perfect truthfulness one may
admit that his lordship was no common man. His "vision" was
sharp and clear enough within its range. He was unable to relish certain
literary forms, as some men are unable to relish certain dishes—an
inaptitude that might arise from fastidiousness of palate, or from
weakness of digestion. His style was perspicuous; he had an icy sparkle
of epigram and antithesis, some wit, and no enthusiasm. He wrote many
clever papers, made many clever speeches, said many clever things. But
the man who could so egregiously blunder as to "Wilhelm
Meister," who hooted Wordsworth through his entire career, who had
the insolence to pen the sentence that opens the notice of the
"Excursion" in the Edinburgh Review, and who, when
writing tardily, but really well, on Keats, could pass over the "Hyperion"
with a slighting remark, might be possessed of distinguished parts, but
no claim can be made for him to the character of a great critic. Hazlitt,
wilful, passionate, splendidly- gifted, in whose very eccentricities and
fierce vagaries there was a generosity which belongs only to fine
natures, has sunk away into an almost unknown London grave, and his
works into unmerited oblivion; while Lord Jeffrey yet makes radiant with
his memory the city of his birth. In point of natural gifts and
endowment — in point, too, of literary issue and result — the
Englishman far surpassed the Scot. Why have their destinies been so
different? One considerable reason is that Hazlitt lived in London—Jeffrey
in Edinburgh. Hazlitt was partially lost in an impatient crowd and rush
of talent. Jeffrey stood, patent to every eye, in an open space in which
there were few competitors. London does not brag about Hazlitt
— Edinburgh brags about Jeffrey. The Londoner, when he visits
Edinburgh, is astonished to find that it possesses a Valhalla filled
with gods — chiefly legal ones — of whose names and deeds he was
previously in ignorance. The ground breaks into unexpected flowerage
beneath his feet. He may conceive to-day to be a little cloudy—may
even suspect east wind to be abroad, but the discomfort is balanced by
the reports he hears on every side of the beauty, warmth, and splendour
of yesterday. He puts out his hands and warms them, if he can, at that
fire of the past. "Ah! that society of forty years ago! Never on this earth did the like exist. Those astonishing men, Homer,
Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd! What wit was theirs— what eloquence,
what genius! What a city this Edinburgh once was!"
Edinburgh is not only in
point of beauty the first of British cities—but, considering its
population, the general tone of its society is more intellectual than
that of any other. In no other city will you find so general an
appreciation of books, art, music, and objects of antiquarian interest.
It is peculiarly free from the taint of the ledger and the
counting-house. It is a Weimar without a Goethe—Boston without its
nasal twang. But it wants variety; it is mainly a city of the
professions. London, for instance, contains every class of people; it is
the seat of legislature as well as of wealth; it embraces Seven Dials as
well as Beigravia. In that vast community class melts imperceptibly into
class, from the Sovereign on the throne to the wretch in the condemned
cell. In that finely-graduated scale, the professions take their own
place. In Edinburgh matters are quite different. It retains the gauds
which royalty cast off when it went South, and takes a melancholy
pleasure in regarding these—as a lady the love-tokens of a lover who
has deserted her to marry into a family of higher rank. A crown and
sceptre lie up in the Castle, but no brow wears the diadem, no hand
lifts the golden rod. There is a palace at the foot of the Canongate,
but it is a hotel for her Majesty, en route for Balmoral—a
place where the Commissioner to the Church of Scotland holds his phantom
Court. With these exceptions, the old halls echo only the footfalls of
the tourist and sight-seer. When royalty went to London, nobility
followed; and in Edinburgh the field is left now, and has been so left
for a long time back, to Law, Physic, and Divinity. The professions
predominate: than these there is nothing higher. At Edinburgh a Lord of
Session is a Prince of the Blood, a Professor a Cabinet Minister, an
Advocate an heir to a peerage. The University and the Courts of Justice
are to Edinburgh what the Court and the Houses of Lords and Commons are
to London. That the Scottish nobility should spend their seasons in
London is not to be regretted for the sake of Edinburgh shopkeepers only—their
absence affects interests infinitely higher. In the event of a
superabundance of princes, and a difficulty as to what should be done
with them, it has been frequently suggested that one should be stationed
in Dublin, another in Edinburgh, to hold Court in these cities Gold is
everywhere preferred to paper; and in the Irish capital royalty in the
person of Prince Patrick would be more satisfactory than its shadow in
the person of a Lord-Lieutenant. A Prince of the Blood in Dublin would
be gratefully received by the warm-hearted Irish people. His permanent
presence amongst them would cancel the remembrance of centuries of
misgovernment; it would strike away for ever the badge and collar of
conquest. In Edinburgh we have had princes of late years, and seen the
uses of them. A prince at Holyrood would effect for the country what
Scottish Rights’ Associations and University reformers have so long
desired. The nobility would again gather—for a portion of the year at
least—to their ancient capital; and their sons, as of old, would be
found in the University class-rooms. Under the new influence, life would
be gayer, airier, brighter. The social tyranny of the professions would
to some extent be broken up, the atmosphere would become less legal, and
a new standard would be introduced whereby to measure men and their
pretensions. For the Prince himself, good results might be expected. He
would at the least have some specific public duties to perform; and he
would, through intercourse, become attached to the people, as the people
in their turn would become attached to him. Edinburgh needs some little
gaiety and courtly pomp to break the coldness of gray stony streets; to
brighten a somewhat sombre atmosphere; to mollify the east wind that
blows half the year, and the "professional sectarianism" that
blows the whole year round. You always suspect the east wind, somehow,
in the city. You go to dinner: the east wind is blowing chillily from
hostess to host. You go to church, a bitter east wind is blowing in the
sermon. The text is that divine one, GOD IS LOVE; and the discourse that
follows is full of all uncharitableness.
Of all British cities,
Edinburgh—Weimar-like in its intellectual and aesthetic leanings,
Florence-like in its freedom from the stains of trade, and more than
Florence-like in its beauty—is the one best suited for the conduct of
a lettered life. The city as an entity does not stimulate like London,
the present moment is not nearly so intense, life does not roar and
chafe—it murmurs only; and this interest of the hour, mingled with
something of the quietude of distance and the past—which is the
spiritual atmosphere of the city—is the most favourable of all
conditions for intellectual work or intellectual enjoyment. You have
libraries—you have the society of cultivated men and women—you have
the eye constantly fed by beauty—the Old Town, jagged, picturesque,
piled up; and the airy, open, coldly-sunny, unhurried, uncrowded streets
of the New Town—and, above all, you can "sport your oak," as
they say at Cambridge, and be quit of the world, the gossip, and the
dun. In Edinburgh, you do not require to create quiet for yourself; you
can have it ready-made. Life is leisurely; but it is not the leisure of
a village, arising from a deficiency of ideas and motives — it is the
leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history, which has
done its work, which does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig
its own coals, to smelt its own iron. And then, in Edinburgh, above all
British cities, you are released from the vulgarising dominion of the
hour. The past confronts you at every street corner. The Castle looks
down out of history on its gayest thoroughfare. The winds of fable are
blowing across Arthur’s Seat. Old kings dwelt in Holyrood. Go out of
the city where you will, the past attends you like a cicerone. Go down
to North Berwick, and the red shell of Tantallon speaks to you of the
might of the Douglases. Across the sea, from the gray-green Bass,
through a cloud of gannets, comes the sigh of prisoners. From the long
sea-board of Fife—which you can see from George Street—starts a
remembrance of the Jameses. Queen Mary is at Craigmillar, Napier at
Merchiston, Ben Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, Prince Charles in
the little inn at Duddingston; and if you go out to Linlithgow, there is
the smoke of Bothwellhaugh’s fusee, and the Great Regent falling in
the crooked street. Thus the past checkmates the present. To an
imaginative man, life in or near Edinburgh is like residence in an old
castle:—the rooms are furnished in consonance with modern taste and
convenience; the people who move about wear modern costume, and talk of
current events in current colloquial phrases; there is the last
newspaper and book in the library, the air from the last new opera in
the drawing-room; but while the hour flies past, a subtle influence
enters into it—enriching, dignifying—from oak panelling and carvings
on the roof—from the picture of the peaked-bearded ancestor on the
wall—from the picture of the fanned and hooped lady—from the old
suit of armour and the moth-eaten banner. On the intellectual man,
living or working in Edinburgh, the light comes through the stained
window of the past. To-day’s event is not raw and brusque; it
comes draped in romantic Colour, hued with ancient gules and or. And
when he has done his six hours’ work, he can take the noblest and most
renovating exercise. He can throw down his pen, put aside his papers,
and walk round the Queen’s Drive, where the wind from the sea is
always fresh and keen; and in his hour’s walk he has wonderful variety
of scenery—the fat Lothians—the craggy hillside—the valley, which
seems a bit of the Highlands—the wide sea, with smoky towns on its
margin, and islands on its bosom—lakes with swans and rushes—ruins
of castle, palace, and chapel—and, finally, homeward by the high
towering street through which Scottish history has rushed like a stream.
There is no such hour’s walk as this for starting ideas, or, having
started, captured, and used them, for getting quit of them again.
Edinburgh is at this
moment in the full blaze of her beauty. The public gardens are in
blossom. The trees that clothe the base of the Castle rock are clad in
green: the "ridgy back" of the Old Town jags the clear azure.
Princes Street is warm and sunny—’tis a very flower-bed of parasols,
twinkling, rainbow-coloured. Shop windows are enchantment, the flag
streams from the Halfmoon Battery, church-spires sparkle sun-gilt, gay
equipages dash past, the military band is heard from afar. The tourist
is already here in wonderful Tweed costume. Every week the wanderers
increase, and in a short time the city will be theirs. By August the
inhabitants have fled. The University lets loose, on unoffending
humanity, a horde of juvenile M.D.’s warranted to dispense— with the
sixth commandment. Beauty listens to what the wild waves are saying.
Valour cruises in the Mediterranean; and Law, up to the knees in
heather, stalks his stag on the slopes of Ben-Muichdhui. Those who, from
private and most urgent reasons, are forced to remain behind, put brown
paper in their front windows; inform the world by placard that letters
and parcels may be left at No. 26 round the corner, and live
fashionably in their back-parlours. At twilight only do they adventure
forth; and if they meet a friend—who ought like the rest of the world
to be miles away—they have only of course come up from the sea-side,
or their relation’s shooting-box, for a night, to look after some
imperative business. Tweed - clad tourists are everywhere: they stand on
Arthur’s Seat, they speculate on the birthplace of Mons Meg, they
admire Roslin, eat haggis, attempt whisky-punch, and crowd to Dr Guthrie’s
church on Sundays. By October the last tourist has departed, and the
first student has arrived. Tailors put forth their gaudiest fabrics to
attract the eye of ingenuous youth. Whole streets bristle with
"lodgings to let" Edinburgh is again filled. The University
class-rooms are crowded; a hundred schools are busy; and Young Briefless,
"Who never is, but
always to be, fee’d,"
the sun-brown yet on his
face, paces the floor of the Parliament House, four hours a day, in his
professional finery of horse-hair and bombazine. During the winter-time
are assemblies and dinner-parties. There is a fortnight’s opera, with
the entire fashionable world in the boxes. The Philosophical Institution
is in full session; while a whole army of eloquent lecturers do battle
with ignorance on public platforms—each effulging like Phoebus, with
his waggon-load of blazing day—at whose coming night perishes, shot
through with orient beams. Neither mind nor body is neglected during the
Edinburgh season.
In spring time, when the
east winds blow, and grey walls of haar—clammy, stinging, heaven-high,
making disastrous twilight of the brightest noon—come in from the
German Ocean, and when coughs and colds do most abound, the Royal
Scottish Academy opens her many-pictured walls. From February to May
this is the most fashionable lounge in Edinburgh. The rooms are warm, so
thickly carpeted that no footfall is heard, and there are seats in
abundance. It is quite wonderful how many young ladies and gentlemen get
suddenly interested in art. The Exhibition is a charming place for
flirtation; and when Romeo is short in the matter of small talk—as
Romeo sometimes will be—there is always a picture at hand to suggest a
topic. Romeo may say a world of pretty things while he turns up the
number of a picture in Juliet’s catalogue—for without a catalogue
Juliet never appears in the rooms. Before the season closes, she has her
catalogue by heart, and could repeat it to you from beginning to end
more glibly than she could her Catechism. Cupid never dies; and fingers
will tingle as sweetly when they touch over an Exhibition catalogue as
over the dangerous pages of "Lancelot of the Lake." If many
marriages are not made here, there are gay deceivers in the world, and
the picture of deserted Ophelia—the blank smile on her mouth,
flowerets stuck in her yellow hair—slowly sinking in the weedy pool,
produces no suitable moral effect. To other than young ladies and
gentlemen the rooms are interesting, for Scottish art is at this moment
more powerful than Scottish literature. Perhaps some half-dozen pictures
in each Academy’s Exhibition are the most notable intellectual
products that Scotland can present for the year. The Scottish brush is
stronger than the Scottish pen. It is in landscape and—at all events
up till the other day, when Sir John Watson Gordon died—in portraiture
that the Scotch school excels. It excels in the one in virtue of the
national scenery, and in the other in virtue of the national insight and
humour. For the making of a good portrait a great deal more is required
than excellent colour and dexterous brush-work—shrewdness, insight,
imagination, common sense, and many another mental quality besides, are
needed. No man can paint a good portrait unless he knows his sitter
thoroughly; and every good portrait is a kind of biography. It is
curious, as indicating that the instinct for biography and
portrait-painting are alike in essence, that in both walks of art the
Scotch have been unusually successful. It would seem that there is
something in the national character predisposing to excellence in these
departments of effort. Strictly to inquire how far this predisposition
arises from the national shrewdness or the national humour, would be
needless; thus much is certain, that Scotland has at various times
produced the best portrait-painters and the best writers of biography to
be found in the compass of the islands. In the past, she can point to
Boswell’s "Life of Johnson" and Raeburn’s portraits: she
yet can claim Thomas Carlyle; and but lately she could claim Sir John
Watson Gordon. Thomas Carlyle is a portrait-painter, and Sir John Watson
Gordon was a biographer.
On the walls of the
Exhibition, as I have said, will be found some of the best products of
the Scottish brain. There, year after year, are to be found the pictures
of Mr Noel Paton—some, of the truest pathos, like the "Home from
the Crimea;" or that group of ladies and children in the cellar at
Cawnpore, listening to the footsteps of deliverers, whom they conceive
to be destroyers; or "Luther at Erfurt," the gray morning
light breaking in on him as he is with fear and trembling working out
his own salvation—and the world’s. We have these, but we have at
times others quite different from these, and of a much lower scale of
excellence, although hugely admired by the young people aforesaid —
pictures in which attire is painted instead of passion; where the merit
consists in exquisite renderings of unimportant details— jewels,
tassels, and dagger hilts; where a landscape is sacrificed to a bunch of
ferns, a tragic situation to the pattern on the lady’s zone, or the
slashed jacket and purple leggings of the knight. Then there are Mr
Drummond’s pictures from Scottish history and ballad poetry—a string
of wild moss-troopers riding over into England to lift cattle; John Knox
on his wedding-day leading his wife home to his quaint dwelling in the
Canon-gate; the wild lurid Grassmarket, crowded with rioters, crimson
with torchlight, spectators filling every window of the tall houses,
while Porteous is being carried to his death—the Castle standing high
above the tumult against the blue midnight and the stars; or the death
procession of Montrose— the hero seated on hurdle, not on
battle-steed, with beard untrimmed, hair dishevelled, dragged through
the crowded street by the city hangman and his horses, yet proud of
aspect, as if the slogans of Inverlochy were ringing in his ears, and
flashing on his enemies on the balcony above him the fires of his
disdain. Then there are Mr Harvey’s solemn twilight moors, and
covenanting scenes of marriage, baptism, and funeral. And drawing the
eye with a stronger fascination—because they represent the places in
which we are about to wander—the landscapes of Horatio Macculloch—stretches
of Border moorland, with solitary gray peels on which the watery sunbeam
strikes, a thread of smoke rising far off from the gipsy’s fire; Loch
Scavaig in its wrath, the thunder gloom blackening on the peaks of
Cuchullin, the fierce rain crashing down on white rock and shingly
shore; sunset on Loch Ard, the mountains hanging inverted in the golden
the winding Awe. He is the most national of the northern
landscape-painters; and although he can, on occasion, paint grasses and
flowers, and the shimmer of reed-blades in the wind, he loves mirror, a
plump of water-fowl starting from the reeds in the foreground, and
shaking the splendour into dripping wrinkles and widening rings; Ben
Cruachan wearing his streak of snow at midsummer, and looking down on
Kilchurn Castle and vast desolate spaces, the silence of the Highland
wilderness where the wild deer roam, the shore on which subsides the
last curl of the indolent wave. He loves the tall crag wet and gleaming
in the sunlight, the rain-cloud on the moor, blotting out the distance,
the setting sun raying out lances of flame from behind the stormy
clouds—clouds torn, but torn into gold, and flushed with a brassy
radiance.
May is an exciting month
in Edinburgh, for, towards its close, the Assemblies of the Established
and Free Churches meet. For a fortnight or so the clerical element
predominates in the city. Every presbytery in Scotland sends up its
representative to the metropolis, and an astonishing number of black
coats and white neckcloths flit about the streets. At high noon the
gaiety of Princes Street is subdued with innumerable suits of sable.
Ecclesiastical newspapers let the world wag as it pleases, so intent are
they on the debates. Rocky-featured elders from the far north come up
interested in some kirk dispute; and junior counsel waste the midnight
oil preparing for appearance at the bar of the House. The opening of the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is attended with a pomp and
circumstance which seems a little at variance with Presbyterian quietude
of tone and contempt of sacerdotal vanities. Her Majesty’s Lord High
Commissioner resides at Holyrood, and on the morning of the day on which
the Assembly opens he holds his first levee. People rush to warm
themselves in the dim reflection of the royal sunshine, and return with
faces happy and elate. On the morning the Assembly opens, the military
line the streets from Holyrood to the Assembly Hall. A regimental band
and a troop of lancers wait outside the palace gates while the
procession is slowly getting itself into order. The important moment at
length arrives. The Commissioner has taken his seat in the carriage. Out
bursts the brass band, piercing every ear; the lancers caracole; an
orderly rides with eager spur; the long train of carriages begins to
crawl forward in an intermittent manner, with many a dreary pause. At
last the head of the procession appears along the peopled way. First
come, in hired carriages, the city councillors, clothed in scarlet
robes, and with cocked hats upon their heads. The very mothers that bore
them could not recognise them now. They pass on silent with dignity.
Then comes a troop of halberdiers in mediaeval costume, and looking for
all the world as if the Kings, Jacks, and Knaves had walked out of a
pack of cards. Then comes a carriage full of magistrates, wearing their
gold chains of office over their scarlet cloaks, and eyeing sternly the
small boy in the crowd who, from a natural sense of humour, has given
vent to an irreverent observation. Then comes the band; then a squadron
of lancers, whose horses the music seems to affect; then a carriage
occupied with high legal personages, with powder in their hair, and
rapiers by their sides, which they could not draw for their lives. Then
comes the private carriage of his Grace, surrounded by lancers, whose
mercurial steeds plunge and rear, and back and sidle, and scatter the
mob as they come prancing broadside on to the pavement, smiting sparks
of fire from the kerbstones with their iron hoofs. Thereafter, Tom,
Jack, and Harry, for every cab, carriage, and omnibus of the line of
route is now allowed to fall in—and so, attended by halberdiers, and
soldiers, and a brass band, her Majesty’s Commissioner goes to open
the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. As his Grace has to
attend all the sittings of the reverend court, the Government, it is
said, generally selects for the office a nobleman slightly dull of
hearing. The Commissioner has no power, he has no voice in the
deliberations; but he is indispensable, as a corporation mace is
indispensable at a corporation meeting. While the debate is going on
below, and two reverend fathers are passionately throttling each other,
he is not unfrequently seen, with spectacles on nose, placidly perusing
the Times. He is allowed two thousand pounds a year, and his duty
is to spend it. He keeps open table for the assembled clergymen. He
holds a grand evening levee, to which several hundred people are
invited. If you are lucky enough to receive a card of invitation, you
fall into the line of carriages opposite the Register House about eight
o’clock, you are off the High School at nine, ten peals from the
church-spires when you are at the end of Regent Terrace, and by eleven
your name is being shouted by gorgeous lackeys —whose income is
probably as great as your own— through the corridors of Holyrood as
you advance towards the presence. When you arrive you find that the
country parson, with his wife and daughter, have been before you, and
you are a lucky man if, for refreshment, you can secure a bit of
remainder sponge-cake and a glass of lukewarm sherry. On the last
occasion of the Commissioner’s levee the newspapers inform me that
seventeen hundred invitations were issued. Think of it—seventeen
hundred persons on that evening bowed before the Shadow of Majesty, and
then backed in their gracefulest manner. On that evening the Shadow of
Majesty performed seventeen hundred genuflections! I do not grudge the
Lord Commissioner his two thousand pounds. Verily, the labourer is
worthy of his hire. The vale of life is not without its advantages. |
