Part 17

The Pleasance was largely in receipt of the traffic to and from the south until the construction of the North and South Bridges, opened in 1769 and 1788, diverted it to a higher level. We may look in vain nowadays in the Pleasance for the inns of that day. They are demolished and altered so greatly as to be unrecognisable; but the “White Horse,” which stands in a court away down Canongate, will give us an idea of the kind of place. Situated in “White Horse,” or Davison’s Close in Canongate, and reached from that street by a low-browed archway, it remains a perfect example of the Edinburgh inn of nearly three hundred years ago. An inn no longer, but occupied in tenements, the internal arrangements are somewhat altered, but the time when the house extended a primitive hospitality to travellers is not difficult to reconstruct in the imagination. To it, at the end of their journeys, came those wearied ones, to find accommodation of the most intimate and domestic kind. Kitchen and dining-room were one, and it was scarce possible for a guest to obtain a bedroom to himself. Dirt was accepted as inevitable. In fact, the modern “dosser” is better and more decently housed. To the “White Horse” came others—those about to set out upon their travels. Booted and spurred, wills made and saddle-bags packed, they resorted hither to hire horses for their journeys, and it is not unlikely that the old house saw in early times many a quaking laird, badly wanted by the Government, slinking through the archway from the Canongate, to secure trusty mounts for instant flight. Scott, indeed, has made it the scene of strange doings in his _Waverley_.

[Picture: The “White Horse” Inn]

This is the oldest house in Edinburgh ever used as an inn, but must not be confused with that other “White Horse,” long since demolished, made famous by Doctor Johnson.

It was in 1773 that Johnson reached Edinburgh. He put up at the “White Horse” in Boyd’s Close, called, even in those uncleanly times, “that dirty and dismal” inn, kept by James Boyd. The great man immediately notified his arrival to Boswell in this short note:—

“_Saturday night_.—Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd’s.”

When Boswell arrived, falling over himself in his eagerness, he found the Doctor furiously angry. Doubtless he had been conducted to his room, as was not unusually the case, by some dirty sunburnt wench, without shoes or stockings, a fit object for dislike; but the chief cause of his anger was the waiter, who had sweetened his lemonade without the ceremony of using the sugar-tongs. He threw the lemonade out of window, and seemed inclined to throw the waiter after it.

“Peter Ramsay’s” was a famous inn, situated at the foot of St. Mary’s Wynd, next the Cowgate Port. To it came travellers along both the east and the south roads. Ramsay advertised it in 1776 as being “a good house for entertainment, good stables for above one hundred horses, and sheds for about twenty carriages.” In 1790, he retired with a fortune of £10,000. But in the best of these old Edinburgh inns the beds well merited a description given of them as “dish-clouts stretched on grid-irons.”

First among the innkeepers of this unsanctified quarter to remove from it into the New Town was James Dun. He was a man notable among his kind, having not only been the first to call himself an “innkeeper” instead of a “stabler,” but the greatly daring person who first used the outlandish word “Hotel” in Edinburgh. He began “hotel”-keeping in the flats above the haberdashery shop of John Neale, who, two years before, in 1774, had built the first house in the New Town. Neale himself was a pioneer of considerable nerve, for although the New Town had been projected and building-sites laid out on what is now the chief ornament of it, Princes Street, prospective tenants were shy of so bleak and exposed a situation as this then was. They preferred to live in the dirty cosiness of the old wynds and closes, and so the New Town seemed likely to be a paper project for years to come. At this juncture the Town Council made a sporting offer of exemption from all local taxes for the first who would build a house there. Neale was this pioneer, and he built the house that still stands next the Register House, the most easterly house in Princes Street.

Dun, to whom he had let the upper part, immediately displayed a great gilded sign, “Dun’s Hotel,” whereupon the Lord Provost, representing public feeling, wrote objecting to the foreign word “Hotel,” saying that, whatever might be the real character of his establishment, he might at least avoid the scandalous indecency of publicly proclaiming it!

XXXIV

THESE concluding pages of a book on the road to Edinburgh form no fitting place to attempt the description or history of so ancient and historic a town. Our business is to reach the northern capital, leaving the story of Edwin’s Burgh to be told by others. Yet we cannot leave it thus without some brief survey.

[Picture: “Squalor and Picturesqueness”] The modern traveller by road, coming in by the London Road, Greenside, Leith Street, and Princes Street, comes in by the New Town, and sees on his left, across a deep ravine, partly occupied by a huge railway station and partly by beautiful public gardens, the dark mass of the Castle and the Old Town crowning the opposite heights, grey and stern, in effective contrast with the gay flower-beds down below, the old houses huddling together on the scanty foothold of the ridge and rising to sheer heights. _That_ is the original historic town: _this_, to which the modern traveller comes by road, the new. Little more than a hundred years ago this New Town was not thought of: its site the meadows and wastes that sloped down to the Firth of Forth and the sea, and the site of the railway station and the Princes Street Gardens covered with the dark waters of the Nor’ Loch.

Old-time arrivals in Edinburgh, coming in by Canongate, found themselves in midst of squalor and picturesqueness; and although much of the picturesque is gone, it is still a quaint street and the squalor survives. The poor who live here “hang forth their banners from the outward walls,” in the shape of their domestic washing, fluttering in the breeze from every window, at the end of long poles, and how poor they are may be judged from the condition of the clothes they consider worth keeping. That sometime prison, the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long street, remains one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh’s past. Not a very ancient past, for it was only “biggit” in 1591, but old enough to be regarded with reverence, and quaint to admiration, with its spired tower and tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the French influence in architecture was yet strong. You can match those curious spires time and time again among the old châteaux of the Loire, and in Brittany; just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can find the counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse Close, near by.

[Picture: Canongate]

From here, those travellers saw the Old Town ahead and, progressing up High Street, came successively to the Tron Church, the Market Cross, St. Giles’s Cathedral, and, before 1817—when it was pulled down—to the Old Tolbooth. Beyond this, the Lawnmarket conducted to the Castle, which then marked the end of the town. In this progress the tall and crowded houses and darkening wynds and closes stood to right and left. Later years have seen the disappearance of many of these places, where in old times the ferocious Scots nobles lived, poor and proud, bloodthirsty and superstitious, but those that are left are very grim, dark, and dirty, and the ten-and eleven-storied houses of such a height that only by great exertions is it possible to crane the neck and lift the eyes to the skyline, against which the belching chimneys of the piled-up “lands” are projecting the smoke of domestic hearths and eternally justifying the old Scots term of endearment for Edinburgh. The nobles are gone, lang syne, their old dens occupied now by the very poorest of Edinburgh’s poor; but sanitary conditions, even with the present occupants, are not so degraded as they were when the flower of Scotland’s nobility dwelt here; when pigs and fowls were herded in the basements, or ran unheeded in the alleys, and wayfarers skulked under the walls at the sound of voices above, calling “gardy-loo”—a call which accompanied a discharge of overflowing household utensils from inconceivable heights into the gutters below. “Gardy-loo” was a term which, with this dreadfully unclean custom, derived from France, having been originally _gardez-l’eau_; just as the cakes sold at Craigmillar, called “petticoat tails” were originally _petits gateaux_.

Still, the Old Town is sufficiently grimy and huddled yet to fitly illustrate the Scottish saying “The clartier (_i.e._ the dirtier) the cosier.”

[Picture: Old Inscription, Lady Stair’s House]

Nothing is more characteristic of the Old Town than the religious texts carved upon the stone door lintels of these ancient houses. Few are without them. To a stranger they would seem to tell of a fervent piety, but they meant more than that. They were always accompanied with a date and with the initials—sometimes also the arms—of their owners; as in the beautiful example still remaining in Lady Stair’s Close, and represented both pride and a fearful superstition. Superstition, because the improving texts and pious ejaculations meant little beyond talismanic protection against “Auld Hornie,” wizards, and warlocks, wehr-wolves, and all those frightful inhabitants of Satan’s invisible world in which the Scotch most fervently believed, from king to peasant. Thus when we read over one of these old doorways the queerly spelled

Blissit be God in all His giftis,

we know that this was little less than an incantation, and marked a lively sense of favours to come; and when our eye lights upon the inscription next door,

Pax intrantibus: Salus exevntibvs,

we know that the good feeling thus prominently displayed would by no means have prevented the fierce lord of the house from stabbing his guest in a dark corner, if he had a mind to it.

[Picture: The “Heave Awa” Sign] A highly interesting book might be written on these old sculptured stones alone. Nor are they in every instance old. Some modern ones exist, and the entirely laudable passion for commemoration has caused interesting tablets to be set up, marking many of Edinburgh’s famous spots. A curious modern piece of sculpture decorates more or less artistically the archway leading from the High Street into Paisley Close, supporting a tall building erected in 1862. It represents the bust of a boy, and includes an inscribed label. It seems that the old building standing on this site suddenly collapsed on a Sunday morning in 1861, and buried a number of people in the ruins, thirty-five actually dying from their injuries. Some were fortunate enough to be screened from the heavy masses of stone and brick by timbers which in falling had imprisoned them. Among these was the lad whose face is represented in the carving. The rescuers who came with pick and shovel to dig out the survivors had succoured many, and were turning back when they heard the muffled cry, “Heave awa, lads, I’m no’ deid yet,” and redoubling their efforts, extricated the author of it.

No relic now remains upon the door-posts of these old houses of the curious contrivance which preceded the door-knocker, and for the sight of a “tirle-pin” the stranger must needs go to the museum of the Royal Scottish Society of Antiquaries, to which the last example was long since removed, from an old house in the Canongate.

[Picture: A Tirle-Pin] The tirle-pin had a variety of names. Sometimes it would be called a “risp” or a “ringle,” and there were those who knew it as a “craw”; that is to say, a crow, from the harsh crow-like sound produced by its use. A tirle-pin was just a rasping contrivance made of a twisted bar of iron fixed against the door post with an iron ring hanging loosely from it, as in the accompanying sketch. Instead of knocking, one who desired admittance would seize the ring and rasp it up and down the twisted iron, producing a noise which could be distinctly heard within.

The origin of the tirle-pin, like that of many another Scottish custom, was French. It originated in France in the times of the Valois, in days when it was not etiquette to knock at the doors of royal personages. In face of this, courtiers were reduced to scratching with the finger-nails—a disagreeable sensation when practised upon wood, as any one who tries it may readily discover for himself. Perhaps from this cause, or because the scratching was not loud enough (or, perhaps, even because the polish began to disappear from the royal portals) this mechanical scratcher was invented. The fashion spread from France to Scotland in times when the two countries were linked in close ties of friendship. From the palace it spread down to the mansions of the nobles and the houses of the merchants, finally coming into general use. It was never acclimatised in England, although another kind of scratching was, if we may believe the satirists, who say that James the First and his Scottish followers imported the itch.

However, the tirle-pin is obsolete, but it did not disappear without leaving a trace of its existence in old Scots ballads; as, for instance, that of _Sweet William’s Ghaist_:—

There cam a ghaist to Margaret’s door, Wi’ mony a grievous groan; And aye he tirled upon the pinne, But answer made she nane.

Is that my father Philip? Or is’t my brother John, Or is’t my true love Willie To Scotland now come home?

XXXV

A GRIM old town, Edinburgh, dominated by the ancient castle from its rock, bodeful with the story of a thousand years. Newer new towns have sprung up around it to south and west, and hem the old fortress in with a bordure of unhistoric suburbs, so that from the topmost battlements you see how small the original Edinburgh is, compared with its surroundings. Places of pilgrimage are not lacking in the old streets. There are John Knox’s house, one of the queerest, three-storied, and gabled, the very ideal of rugged strength; and the Parliament Square, once St. Giles’s churchyard, where “I K 1572,” on a stone in the pavement, marks the site of Knox’s grave. Passers-by walk over it, curiously fulfilling Johnson’s aspiration, made years before the churchyard was destroyed, by which he hoped that the dour Presbyterian was buried on a highway. While we are on the subject of tombs, let us mention that other place of pilgrimage, Greyfriars churchyard, that grisly place where Robert Louis Stevenson was accustomed in his youth to make assignations with parlour-maids. Few places so grim as a Scottish burial-ground, and Greyfriars is of these the grimmest. Dishevelled backs of houses look down upon the mouldering tombs, and kitchens and living-rooms open into the houses of the dead. Rusty iron railings, bolts and bars, guard the blackened and broken mausoleums and give the pilgrim the weird idea that the living have taken extraordinary precautions to imprison those who are never likely to break out. The only living things here are the foul grass that grows within the sepulchral enclosures, and the demon cats of an heraldic slimness that haunt the churchyard in incredible numbers, and stealing victuals from the neighbouring houses, gnaw them within the tombs. Many martyrs for religion have their resting-place here, together with those who martyred them. Persecutors and persecuted alike rest here now.

[Picture: Greyfriars]

Sympathies will ever be divided between the Covenanters and their oppressors. As you read how they upheld their faith and signed their names to the Covenant in this gruesome yard of Greyfriars, so ominously on that flat tombstone which even now remains, you are fired with an enthusiasm for those rejecters of a liturgy alien from their convictions, and can curse “Claverse” with the best of those who do not forget the heavy ways of “bonnie Dundee” with them. But the Covenanters were as intolerant with those when they came to rule. The men of both sides were men of blood. The strain of intolerance remains, and the tomb of that other persecutor of the Covenanters, Sir George Mackenzie, has always been, and still is, with the people “bloody Mackenzie’s.”

Old Edinburgh life centred at the Market Cross, happily restored in 1885 by Mr. Gladstone. The Cross has had a troubled history. Reconstructed from a much older one in 1617, it remained here until 1756, when the “improving” fanatics of that time swept the historic structure away, without a thought of the associations belonging to it. They were associations of every kind. Kings had been proclaimed at it by heralds with fanfare of trumpet; patriots and traitors with equal contumely had been done to death beside it; and the continual round of punishments which gave the common hangman a busy time were inflicted here. In fact, were a rogue to be pilloried or a king’s birthday to be kept with becoming ceremony, the Cross was the place. Let us see what those punishments were like, from one example illustrative of the general run of them. Here is what they did in 1655 to “Mr. Patrik Maxwell, ane arrant decevar.” They brought him here “quhair a pillorie was erectit, gairdit and convoyed with a company of sodgeris; and their, eftir ane full houris standing on that pillorie, with his heid and handis lyand out and hoilis cuttit out for that end, his rycht lug was cuttit of; and thaireftir careyit over to the town of St. Johnnestoun, quhair ane uther pillorie wes erectit, on the quhilk the uther left lug wes cuttit af him. The caus heirof wes this; that he haid gevin out fals calumneis and leyis aganes Collonell Daniell, governour of Peirth. Bot the treuth is, he was ane notorious decevar and ane intelligencer, sumtyme for the Englesches, uther tymes for the Scottis, and decevand both of thame: besyde mony prankis quhilk wer tedious to writt.” Quite so; but if all deceivers had their ears cut off, how few would retain them! A ferocious folk, those old Scots, and petty delinquents supped sorrow at their hands with a big spoon. Sorry the lot of scandal-mongers and the like, seated on a wooden horse with hands and legs tied, and permission freely accorded to all for the throwing of missiles. Ferocity, however, should go hand in hand with courage—a quality apparently not possessed by the citizens of Edinburgh when Prince Charlie and his Highlanders came, in 1745. Incredulous of the wild clansmen ever daring to attack the town, they laughed at the very idea; but when they heard of his small force having eluded the force of Johnny Cope, sent to intercept them, and advancing in earnest, things took a very different colour. Those who were loyal to the House of Hanover were quaking in their shoes, and the Jacobites rejoicing. The city armed, even to the clergymen, who, on the Sunday before the surrender, preached in the churches with swords and daggers buckled on under their gowns. Bands of volunteers were raised, and on the report that the Pretender was near, were marched outside the walls to dispute his entry, despite their murmurs that they had volunteered to defend the city from the inside, and were not prepared to go out to be cut to pieces with the invaders’ claymores. Captain ex-Provost Drummond marched with his company down the West Bow towards the West Port. Looking round when he had reached it, he to his astonishment found himself alone. The volunteers had vanished down the back lanes or closes! But the dragoons were as bad. Coming near the enemy at Corstorphine, two miles out, they bolted without firing a shot, and so back into Edinburgh and through it and out at the other end. It was the ferocious appearance of the Highlanders that caused this terror. They were comparatively few; ill-armed, ragged, and ill-fed. But their strange dress, their wild looks, shaggy locks, and generally outlandish appearance, frightened the good Lowlanders, who knew almost as little of these Gaelic tribes as Londoners themselves. The old-time warfare of the Japanese and the Chinese, with their hideous masks; the dismal tom-toming of the African savage; the war-paint of the Red Indian, are justified of their existence, for the strange and hideous in warfare is very effective in striking a paralysing terror into an enemy. Accordingly, the tartans, the naked legs and arms, and the uncombed locks of the lairds’ uncivilised levies captured Edinburgh for Prince Charlie, who, a few days later, September 17, caused his father, the Old Pretender, to be proclaimed king, by the title of James the Third, at the Cross.

[Picture: The Wooden Horse]

[Picture: The Last of the Town Guard] With the suppression of “the Forty-five,” the stirring warlike story of Edinburgh came to an end; but not until 1807, when the Edinburgh police came into existence, was the semi-military Town Guard, raised in 1682, abolished. The Town Guard and the townspeople were always at odds, and hated one another cordially. Recruited from the army, and armed with the formidable weapons called “Jeddart axes,” it was originally a fine body, designed rather to keep the town in order than to protect it, and its members never lost sight of that fact. In its last years, however, the Town Guard declined in importance and in numbers, and, coming to be regarded as a refuge for old pensioners who could scarcely manage to crawl about, became an object of derision. Then the sins of their forerunners were visited upon the heads of those unhappy old men, and it became a common sight to see them baited by mischievous small boys. The last of the Town Guard tottered about Parliament Square in his queer uniform and three-cornered hat, hardly able to shoulder his axe, and regarded by the inhabitants as one of their most genuine antiquities, until he too followed his comrades to the tomb.

[Picture: Stately Princes Street]

XXXVI

ONE must needs admire Edinburgh. You may have seen the noblest cities of the world; have stood upon the Acropolis at Athens, on the Heights of Abraham at Quebec; have viewed Rome and her seven hills, or Constantinople from the Golden Horn; but Edinburgh still retains her pride of place, even in the eyes of the much travelled. You need not be Scottish to feel the charm of her, and can readily understand why she means so much to the Scot; but your gorge rises at the immemorial dirt of the Old Town, simultaneously with your admiration of its wondrous picturesqueness, and stately Princes Street seems to you a revelation of magnificence even while the bulk of the New Town appears grey, formal, and forbidding. The great gulf fixed between Old Town and New, that ravine in which the railway burrows, and on whose banks the Princes Street Gardens run, renders that thoroughfare, with its one side of grass and trees and the other of fine shops and towering houses, reminiscent to the Londoner of Piccadilly. But Piccadilly has not a towering Castle on one side of it, nor a Calton Hill at the end; nor, on the other hand, does Piccadilly know such easterly blasts as those that sweep down the long length of Princes Street and freeze the very marrow of the Southerner.

[Picture: Edinburgh, New Town, 1817, from Mons Meg Battery]

“The same isothermal line,” wrote Robert Chambers, “passes through Edinburgh and London.” “Still,” James Payn used to say, “I never knew of a four-wheeled cab being blown over by an east wind in London, as has just happened in Edinburgh,” and R.L.S. tells us frankly that his native city has “the vilest climate under heaven.”