CHAPTER IX

SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY

And the days of auld lang syne. BURNS.

Social Edinburgh of yesterday,--that is to say, the social life of Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen Victoria,--what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds of names rise in the memory--names of all sorts and conditions of men, “thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery in the background of all those lives--a piling up of noble architecture against the cloudy Scottish sky; a running up of numberless “long unlovely streets”; a constant pulling down of dear, dirty, historic dwellings; an occasional restoration of some ancient building; a widening out of all the suburbs. It means many statues in the streets of those who once were alive in them. It means the intersection of the heart of the beautiful city by gleaming lines of rail, and overhead by gleaming telegraph and telephone wires; it means the light of electricity flashing suddenly through the town, and the old gas-lamps burning dimly, and then put out for the last time; it means railway whistles and cable tramway bells; it means smoke rising from miles and miles of cold grey streets. But it is still the smoke of domestic fires, as in the days when Gavin Douglas, waking on a winter morning in 1512, “bade beit the fire and the candel allicht,” and _not_ the smoke of belching chimneys of commerce. Edinburgh, as befits her intellect, prints and publishes; and, as befits her climate, she brews and distils; and the streams that flow down her valleys towards the Firth of Forth pass on their way many mills that provide paper for printers and authors; but farther than this she declines to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

great dead, like the faces of our great living, have gone to London, yet there is now a goodly collection of national portraits in the capital of Scotland. And there must not be forgotten the greatest building of all--if building it can be called--that has been achieved near Edinburgh during yesterday: the Forth Bridge, the highest bridge in the world, finished in 1890, with its monster claws planted firmly on either side of the Firth of Forth, just where Queen Margaret and Malcolm Canmore used to be ferried to and fro on their journeyings between Edinburgh Castle and Dunfermline Palace.

It is not only by the building of new edifices that wealthy citizens have generously endowed Edinburgh; there is another form of patriotism which seeks to restore the old, and two such inestimable benefits have been conferred not only on Edinburgh, but on all who visit her, and who venerate the past. In 1883 the late Mr. William Chambers restored with reverence and taste the Church of St. Giles, which had been half ruined by ruthless vandalism in 1829, and in 1892 the late Mr. Thomas Nelson restored magnificently the splendid old hall of the Castle, the scene of so many banquets and so many Parliaments, and of not a few tragedies.[65]