Part 2
Quite worthy of this savage stronghold is the inspiring outlook from its parapets over hills and rivers and storied glens. One turns impatiently from “Mons Meg,” which may have been a big gun in some past day of little ones, to gaze afar over the carse of Stirling and the trailing silver links of the Forth to where the snow shines in the clefts of Ben Ledi, or out over the Pentland Hills where the “Sweet Singers” awaited the Judgment. The sportsman will think of the grouse-shooting at Loch Earn; the sentimentalist will reflect that when night settles over Aberdeenshire the pipers will strike up their strathspeys and there will be Scotch reels by torchlight. Scotland seems unrolled at your feet and Scottish songs rush to mind until you fairly bound the region in verse and story: To the north and northwest, “Bonnie Dundee,” the glens of “Clan Alpine’s warriors true,” Bannockburn and “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” and “The Banks of Allan Water”; to the north and east, the Firth of Forth where the fishwives’ “puir fellows darkle as they face the billows”; to the west and southwest, “The banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,” “Tam o’Shanter’s” land, “Sweet Afton” and “Bonnie Loch Leven” whence “the Campbells are comin’”; and to the south, “The braes of Yarrow,” “Norham’s castled steep, Tweed’s fair river, broad and deep, and Cheviot’s mountains lone,” and, most sung of all, “The Border”:—
“England shall, many a day, tell of the bloody fray When the blue bonnets came over the border.”
The afternoon sun rests brightly on the pretty glen in the foreground where lie the dismal, bat-flown ruins of Rosslyn Castle, loopholed for archers and shadowed in ancient yews that have overhung the Esk for a thousand years, and on the delicate chapel of stone-lace where the barons of Rosslyn await the Judgment in full armor with finger-tips joined in prayer. And there, too, are the cool, dark thickets of Hawthornden, recalling the ever-popular
“Gang down the burn, Davy Love, And I will follow thee.”
One cannot forbear a smile as he surveys the noble bridge that spans the Forth and recalls the insistent pride of Edinburgh in the same. Here is an achievement over which all visitors are expected to exclaim in amazement—and engineers, I presume, invariably do. On this point your Edinburgh man is immovable. He scorns to elaborate and he will not descend to eulogy. He merely indicates it with a reverent inclination of the head, and turns and looks you in the eye; you are supposed to do the rest. Personally, while I give the great structure its dues, which are many, I like what flows under it more.
And there is one thing about the Forth that Edinburgh people never forget, nor do the visitors who find it out: “Caller herrin’!” It must have taxed the resources of even such a genius as Lady Nairne, whose home one may see if he looks beyond Holyrood to the villas of Duddingston, to have written two such dissimilar songs as the heart-melting “Land o’ the Leal” and the cheery “Caller Herrin’.” There’s the king of all marketing songs. It really compels one to think with despair of what a dreary mockery life would be were this, of all harvests, to fail. For love of that song I could defend the Forth herring against all competitors whatsoever. Loch Fyne herring? Fair fish, yes; but really, now, you would hardly say they have that racy flavor we get in the Forth article. Caller salmon? Oh, pshaw, you are from Glasgow; you have been swearing by caller salmon for five hundred years; have it on your coat of arms; used to draw it on legal papers as other people do seals;—but, honestly, have you ever seen a salmon in the Clyde, anywhere near Glasgow, in all your life? And if you did, would you eat it? Certainly not! So “give over,” as they say in England. Certainly there never was such pathos and unction devoted to just such a subject. And the music, too! How it compels you with its appealing monotones and rebukes you with the brave huckster cries on high F! So when you are passing near Waverley Market and encounter one of the picturesque Scandinavian fishwives, who has trudged in with her “woven willow” from her little stone house at Newhaven with the patched roof and quaint fore-stairs, unless you are willing to buy a herring then and there and carry it around in your pocket, run for your life before she starts singing:—
“When ye were sleeping on your pillows, Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows, Darkling as they face the billows, A’ to fill our woven willows!
“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’? They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’; Buy my caller herrin’, New drawn frae the Forth.”
To stroll down High Street is to unscroll Scottish history and survey Edinburgh of to-day at one and the same time. “Hie-gait,” as the old fellows still occasionally call it, is the “historic mile” _par excellence_ of Scotland. In its independent fashion it assumes new names as it meanders along, first Castle Hill, then Lawnmarket, then High Street, and finally Canongate. Even the afternoon sun ventures guardedly among the nest of tall, gaunt _lands_ that scowl at each other across its war-worn way. Bleak and glum to the peaked and gabled roofs, eight and ten stories above the sidewalk, they have resisted dry rot by a miracle of mortar and still hang together, doubtless to their own amazement, huddling a perfect enmeshment of tiny homes like some ingenious nest of boxes. It would be hard to imagine more drear and rickety domiciles or any more nervously overshadowed with an impending doom of dissolution. One looks anxiously about to see some venerable veteran give it up with a dismal, weary groan and collapse in a vast huddle of domestic wreckage. Fancy living where you have to scale breakneck stairs to a dizzy height and then reach your remote eyrie by a trembling gangway over an air well! The _closes_ or _wynds_ that are engulfed among these flat-chested ancients are equally surprising. One passes in from the street through a dirty entrance with a worn stone sill and a rudely carven doorhead inscribed with Scriptural and moral injunctions, and finds himself in an inner court fronted by dirty doors and palsied windows full of frowzy women, a cobbled pavement littered with refuse and a patch of sky half-hidden by fragments of laundry. And, mind you, these retreats are not without pride of tradition; many of them have entertained riches and royalty—but that was not last week. Lady Jane Grey was once hidden in famous White Horse Close, which must have fallen further than Lucifer to reach its present condition. Douglas Tavern was in one of them, where Burns and his brethren of the “Crochallan Club” were wont to revel with “Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie, and amang guid companie.” Legends, of course, abound. There was the case of the two stubborn sisters who quarreled one night and never spoke to each other again, though they lived the remainder of their lives together in the selfsame room. There’s Scotch persistence! Deacon Brodie was another instance, the “Raffles” of his time. He it was who used to ply his nefarious trade by night on the friends who knew him by day as a highly respectable cabinet-worker; and if you look furtively aloft at some dusty, closed shutter you can fancy the dark lantern glowing and the file rasping and the black mask drawn to his chin. Happily, they hanged him eventually; and, singularly enough, on the very gallows for which he had himself invented a very superior drop.
A _close_, therefore, is so cheerless a spot that you could not well be worse off if you were to dive down the steep, wet steps of a neighboring slit of an alley and come out on the old Grassmarket of sinister renown where they hanged the Covenanters of the Moss Hags. As you gaze about on this ill-omened slum, once the home of many a prosperous and respected “free burgess,” but now given over to drovers and visiting farmers, and peer suspiciously up the adjoining West Port where Burke and Hare conducted their murders to get bodies for the surgeons, you are very apt to beat a hurried retreat and cry out with Claverhouse, “Come, open the West Port and let me gang free!”
After one or two such explorations a stranger is content to pursue his investigation in the broad light of High Street. It seems delightful then to watch the barefooted boys in the street and the little girls in aprons and “pigtails.” And happily he may come across a shaggy steely-eyed old Highlander growling to a comrade in the guttural Gaelic, or perhaps a soldier in kilts and sporan. At this hour he will certainly see around Parliament Square groups of advocates and solicitors and “writers to the Signet,” and, it may be, some judge of the “Inner House” or “Outer House,” and possibly the Lord President himself. Otherwise he can take note of the uninviting shop-windows and the piles of merchandise on the sidewalks, and find entertainment in such unfamiliar signs as “provisioners,” “spirit merchants,” “bootmakers,” “hairdressers,” etc., with prices set forth in shillings and pence, or rejoice in a hostelry with so unusual a name as “The Black Bull Lodgings for Travellers and Working Men.”
There are pleasant surprises. For instance, you find in the cobbled pavement the outline of a heart—and you do not have to be told that you are standing on the site of the terrible old Tolbooth prison, at the Heart of Midlothian. And what rushes to mind and displaces all other associations if not the fine story Sir Walter gave us under that name! Here, then, the Porteous mob swarmed and raged in its struggle to burn this savage Bastile, and here they tried and condemned poor Effie Deans and locked her up while the faithful Jeanie turned heaven and earth to save her, and the heart of old David broke. “The Heart of Midlothian!” Why, it is like being a boy all over again!
Encouraged by this discovery, like a man who has just found a gold-piece, you keep a sharp lookout on the pavements, and presently comes a second reward in the shape of a brass tablet in the ground marking the last resting-place of stern John Knox. “There!” say you; “Dr. Johnson said he ought to be buried in the public road, and sure enough, he is!” What a man! He dared all things and feared nothing. How many a long discourse did Queen Mary herself supply him a topic for, and how often did he assail even her with personal rebukes and virulent public tirades! Thanks to the Free Church, his dwelling stands intact, farther down the street at the site of the Netherbow; and a fine specimen it is of sixteenth-century domestic Scotch architecture, with low ceilings and stairways scarce two feet wide—but, like its former austere tenant, narrow, cornery, and unpleasant. Implacable, unbending old John Knox! There is nothing in Browning more shuddering in imaginative flight than the quatrain:—
“As if you had carried sour John Knox To the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich, Fastened him into a front-row box, And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
One makes a long stop before the far-famed church of St. Giles, half a thousand years old and the battle-ground of warring creeds. Its crown-shaped tower top is one of the familiar landmarks of Edinburgh. Within you may study to heart’s content the grim barrel vaulting and massive Norman piers and the tattered Scottish flags in the nave, but there is scope for many an agreeable thought outside if one conjures up the little luckenbooth shops that once clustered between its buttresses, and imagines Allan Ramsay in his funny nightcap selling wigs, or “Jingling Geordie” Heriot, of “The Fortunes of Nigel,” gossiping with his friend King James VI over his jewelry counter. Nor would you forget Jenny Geddes and how she seized her stool in disgust when the Dean undertook to introduce the ritual, and let it fly at the good man’s head with the sizzling invective, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye! Would ye say mass i’ my lug!”
Old Tron Kirk, farther on, is still an active feature of Edinburgh life, and particularly on New Year’s Eve when the crowds rally here as the old year dies. Beyond it the Canongate extends itself in a rambling, happy-go-lucky fashion, lined with curious timber-fronted houses with “turnpike” stairs. It is like sitting down to “Humphrey Clinker” once more; or better still, perhaps, to the poems of Fergusson; and we smile at thoughts of the scowling, early-risen housewives of other days who would
“Wi’ glowering eye Their neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
and fancy how the convivial revelers would foregather by night and
“sit fu’ snug, Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin, Or haddock lug.”
But lingering along the Canongate is a negligible pleasure. There is nothing in the whole architectural world more jailish and pitiless than the gaunt Tolbooth and all its grim neighbors. It is as if the conception of anything suggestive of beauty or ornamentation had been harshly repressed, and ugliness and the most naked utility sternly insisted upon. One may, however, if he is interested in slums, pause a moment to look down through the railings of the South Bridge on the screaming peddlers and flaunting shame of bedraggled Cowgate, and behold a district which stands to Edinburgh in the relative position of Rivington Street to New York, or Petticoat Lane to London, or Montmartre to Paris.
The end of the Canongate, a few steps farther on, debouches unexpectedly, and with a sudden unpreparedness for the stranger, on the great open square before Holyrood. There it stands, black and dismal; more like a prison than a palace! The Abbey ruins, in the rear, supply all the atmosphere of romance that the eye will get here. But the eye is better left as a secondary aid in comprehending Holyrood; history and imagination do the work. Cowering sorrowfully in its gloomy hollow, it has the look of a moody, forsaken thing brooding over a neglectful world. Its memories are of the dead. Its sole companionship is in the mosses and grassy aisles of the crumbling Abbey chapel, where lie the bones of Scottish royalty that ruled and reveled here its allotted time and left scarce a memory behind. It was here they slew Rizzio as he dined with Queen Mary; and perhaps that is romance enough.
The fumes and cobwebs of murky tradition dissipate in the keen, vigorous air of Calton Hill. Breezes from over the level shore-sands of Leith taste sharp of salt and excite bracing thoughts of the sea. Like a map, the whole environ of Edinburgh lies exposed from the Pentlands to the Firth. There is the steepled city, rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean, and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen’s cottages, and farther still the Meadows and their archery grounds, “the furzy hills of Braid” and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence “Marmion” and his bard looked down on “mine own romantic town,” and, on the southern horizon, the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too. To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying courses for the Baltic. In the distance, over Leith, looms the tall lighthouse of the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad. Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling little Water of Leith, where “David Balfour” kept tryst with “Alan Breck,” and many a sturdy little “brig” leaps across it as it hurries along, “brimmed,” wrote Stevenson, “like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds.” Still farther to the westward, where the old Queens Ferry Coach Road appears as a faint white tracing, within many “a mile of Edinborough Town,” thin vapors of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brooksides; and one knows that the rowans there are white with bloom and the meadows flecked with daisies, and that bees are droning in the foxglove and blackbirds singing in the hawthorn.
Calton Hill itself scarcely improves on acquaintance, but loses rather. Its meagre scattering of monuments would barely excite a passing interest were it not for their conspicuous location and that suggestion of the Athenian Acropolis. A paltry array—a tall, ugly column to Nelson, a choragic monument like the one to Burns on a hillside near Holyrood, an old observatory with a brown tower and a new one with a colonnaded portico and a dome, and, most mentioned of all, the so-called “ruin” of the proposed national monument to the Scotch dead of Waterloo and the Peninsula, which got no farther than a row of columns and an entablature when funds failed and work stopped. Many a bitter shaft of scorn and mockery has this ill-starred undertaking pointed for the disparagers of Scotland. However, in its present condition it has done more than any other agency to stimulate the pleasant illusion of the “Modern Athens.” The hill itself is a favorite resort, lofty, and with a broad, rounded top. The eastern slopes are terraced and set with gardens, and the western and northern sides are steep verdant braes. One yields the palm for reckless daring to Bothwell; not every one would care to speed a horse down such a course even to win attention from eyes so bright and important as Queen Mary’s.
It was on Calton Hill I had my first experience of the old school of Scotchmen, in the person of a dry and withered chip of Auld Reekie, combative, peppery, brusque and sententious, and abounding in that peculiar admixture of braggadocio and repression so characteristic of the class. He had evidently been nurtured from infancy on Allan Ramsay’s collection of Scotch proverbs, for he quoted them continually, giving the poet credit for their origin. He was sitting in the shade of Nelson’s column in shirt sleeves and cap, absorbed to all appearances in a copy of “The Scotsman,” though I suspect he had been regarding me for some while with quite as much curiosity as I now did him. He was a grim, self-contained old party, as dignified as the Lord Provost himself, with gray, shaggy eyebrows and a thin, wry mouth that gripped a cutty pipe; and he looked so much a part of the surroundings, so settled and weather-beaten, that one might almost have passed him over for some memorial carving or, at least, an “animated bust.” Him I beheld with vast inner delight and gingerly approached, giving “Good day” with all the cordiality in the world. The reward was a curt nod and a keen scrutiny from a pair of hard and twinkling blue eyes that had an appearance under the grizzled brows of stars in a frosty sky. I observed upon the fineness of the day; he opined “There had been waur, no doot.” I noted what a capital spot it was for a quiet smoke; he allowed I might “gang far an’ find nane better.” Here I made proffer of a cigar and, presumably, with acceptable humility, for he took it with an “Ah, weel, I dinna mind,” of gloomy resignation—and so we got things going.
The conversation that followed I venture to give in some detail as illustrating, possibly, the peculiarities of a type to be encountered on every Edinburgh street corner—whimsical, conservative, witty, cautious in opinion, and surcharged with local pride.
“A man can take life pleasantly here,” said I, when we had lighted up.
“Aye, aye,” said he; “even a hard-workin’ one like mysel’, as Gude kens. But a bit smoke frae ane an’ twa o’ the day hurts naebody, I’m thinkin’; an’ auld Allan Ramsay was richt eneuch, ‘Light burdens break nae banes.’”
“You will never be leaving Edinburgh, I’ll warrant.”
“Na, na. Ye’ll have heard tell the sayin’, ‘Remove an auld tree an’ it will wither.’”
“There’s more money to be made elsewhere, perhaps.”
“I’m no so sure o’ that. Forbye, ‘Little gear the less care.’”
“One wouldn’t find a handsomer city than this, at all events.”
“Aweel, aweel, a’body kens that. Ye’ll no so vera frequently see the bate o’ it, I’m thinkin’. Them that should ken the best say sae.”
“How many people are there here, sir?”
“Mare than three hunner an’ fifty thoosan’, I’m telt.”
“No more? It is small for its fame. Why, Glasgow must be three times as large,” I ventured, resolved to stir him up a little.
“Glesgie, is it! Think shame o’ yersel’, mon, to say the same! A grippie carlin, Glesgie! Waur than the auld wife o’ the sayin’, ‘She’ll keep her ain side o’ the hoose, and gang up an’ doon in yours.’ Ye canna nay-say me there. Gae wa’ wi’ ye!”
“But you must admit it is a great port. The receipts are enormous, I’m told.”
“Aye, an’ it’s muckle ye’ll be telt ye’ll never read in the Guid Buik! Port, are ye sayin’? Hae ye na thought o’ Leith? Or the bonny sands an’ gardens o’ Portobello? Or Granton, forbye, wi’ the three braw piers o’ the Duke o’ Buccleuch? Ye’ll no be kennin’ they’re a’ a part o’ Ed’nboro, maybe.”
“But how about the ship-building on the Clyde?”
“An’ what wad ye make o’ that? How ony mon in his senses could gang to think sic jowkery-packery wi’ the gran’ brewin’ ayont the Coogait is mair than ever I could win to understan’. It’s by-ordinar, fair! An’ dinna loup to deecesions frae the claver an’ lees aboot muckle things. ’Twas Allan Ramsay himsel’ said, ‘Mony ane opens their pack an’ sells nae wares.’ It’s unco strange that a body should tak nae notice o’ the learnin,’ an’ the gran’ courts, an’ the three hunner congregeetions, an’ a’ the bonny kirks we hae in Ed’nboro, but must ever be spairin’ o’ the siller. Do ye think, noo, it’s sae vera wonderful to ‘Put twa pennies in a purse, an’ see them creep thegither’? Glesgie may ken a’ sic-like gear, I’m nae sayin’; but there’s no sae muckle worth in that, as ye’ll be findin’ oot, though ye read in the books til the morn’s mornin’. It’s a fair disgrace to hae sic thochts. Mon can sae nae mair.”
“At any rate, there’s a fine university there.”
“It’s easy sayin’ sae. Muckle service is it! Gude kens a’ they learn there! Gin it’s cooleges ye’ll be admirin’, maybe ye’ll no be so vera well acquaint wi’ our ain toun? There’s nane in a’ Glesgie like the ane ye see the day. Mon, it’s fair dementit ye’ll be.”
It took time and diplomacy and many a round compliment on Edinburgh to bring him out of his sulk; but eventually he yielded.
“Aye,” said he, “I believe ye’ll be in the richt the noo. It’s gran’ up here, dinna misdoot it. Mony’s the braw sicht to be had, that’s a fac’, an’ I ken them a’ like the back o’ my hand. Sin lang afore yon trees were plantit, mare than ane fine dander hae I taen mysel’, bonny simmer days, lang miles o’er the heather. Ye’ll believe me, I’d gang hame and sleep soun’. It’s na sae pleesant, maybe, in winter, wi’ the dour haars an’ the fog an’ the east winds. But I aye like it fine in simmer, wi’ a bit nip o’ wind betimes an’ then fair again. At the gloaming it’s quaiet an’ cauller, and then aiblins I bide a blink an’ hae a bit puff o’ my cutty, an’ syne I’ll gang to my bed wi’ an easy hairt. But, wheesht, mon! It’ll be twa o’ the day by the noo, I’m thinkin’? Is it so! Be gude to us! Weel, weel, I’ll gang my gait. I maunna be late to the wark; it’s a fearsome example to the laddies. ‘A scabbed sheep,’ says auld Allan, ‘smites the hale hirsel’.’ Guid day to ye; an’ keep awa’ frae Glesgie.” And with many a sigh and rheumatic hitch he shuffled off to the steps.