the Kyles of Bute; and even Windsor insignificant when contrasted with the grim old castle that frowns beneath Arthur's Seat. No, most assuredly, it is not the Scottish but the English youth who, if he has a spark of poetry or sentiment in his nature, finds his heart strangely stirred when he crosses the Border for the first time-especially if he crosses it by what is known as the Waverley route. No wonders of subsequent travel - not even his first view of St Peter's or of the surf beating on the reefs of Jaffa-will ever obliterate the memory of his entrance into the enchanted land of Sir Walter. All is so strange and yet so familiar, like the realisation of some delightful dream -the Teviot and Liddesdale, the Eildon Hills and Gala Water, Ettrick and Melrose. A thousand memories of the past idealise and dignify the bare and rugged features of the landscape; and the very names of the stations recall a legend or a history. On the wayside platforms he recognises all the familiar types of those immortal novels the laird and the bailie, the captain and the provost's lady, the fish-wife and "the Dougal creature." Hector MacIntyre is there with his gun-case and golf-clubs; and Alan Fairford, advocate; and the burly form of Dandie Dinmont in his homespun. Aye, and if he has eyes in his head, our young traveller soon comes to the conclusion that Scott had not to go far to seek his prototypes of Jeanie Deans or Catherine Seyton, for there are the Scottish lasses, fair and pleasant to look upon, with their auburn tresses and blue eyes, with their gentle manners and soft voices, as charming now as in the days of the "Flower of Strathmore or "Mally Lee." Nor is the first impression of Edinburgh in any sense a disappointment. The view from Princes Street across the valley, with the intervening gardens, strikes and attracts the most ignorant and unobservant tourist. The "Empress of the North" does indeed sit proudly on her throne; and nothing can be finer than the irregular line of buildings which dominate the crags in front of you, storey piled upon storey, and culminating in "a Bass rock upon dry land, carrying a crown of battlements and towers." And, 1 The "Flower of Strathmore" was Miss Murray of Lintrose-the "Phemie " who inspired Burns with one of his most charming songs: "Blithe, blithe and bonnie was she, Blithe was she but and ben; And blithe in Glenturit Glen.' Mally Lee" was a Mrs Sleigh, afterwards married to Lord Lyon, and celebrated by Allan Ramsay in the ballad quoted by David Balfour's disreputable caddie with reference to Catriona : "As Mally Lee cam' doun the street, her capuchin did flee ; And we're a' gaun east and wast, we're a' gaun ajee, Capuchin is a short silk coat, and negligee a loose gown. by way of contrast, nothing ite promenade of fashion on can be more charming on a fine summer afternoon than Princes Street itself-broader than the Corso, statelier than the Rivoli, as crowded as the Quadrant. "Seen in its glory, with soft air coming from the inland hills, military music military music sounding from the hollow of its gardens, and flags all waving on its palaces-it is what Paris ought to be." But picturesque as Edinburgh now appears to the casual visitor, it must have been ten times more so at the beginning of the last century. Judging from old prints and descriptions, no city could have had more charming surroundings; certainly no Scottish city was more strikingly graced by groups of trees and shrubberies. In the old town a line of elms ran along the front of James' Court towards the present Bank of Scotland; College Street was then unbuilt, and the space round the College itself was covered with green fields and gardens; the gardens of the Canongate were full of beautiful trees; there was a fine group on Calton Hill itself; Leith Walk, Lauriston, and the grounds of Heriot's Hospital were all well wooded; while in the environs were charming country seats-Muirhouse, Merchiston Castle, Grange, Lauriston Castle, with their gardens and "policies," lawns and bowling-greens. The new town then stopped short at Queen Street, which commanded a charming prospect of the Firth and the hills of Fife; and here was the favour summer evenings. Close below were the woods and lawns of Lord Moray's house, Drumsheugh, and General Scott's villa of Bellevue, which covered the land between what is now York Place and Canonmills, and was then a wilderness of groves and shrubberies. Streets and squares now occupy the site of this terrestrial paradise, described by Lord Cockburn. The Water of Leith and the little hamlet of Dean still delight the traveller; but the lovely surroundings of Dean itself, the ancient mansion of the Nisbets, with its shrubberies of evergreens, have disappeared; and Lord Cockburn saw the trees cut down "as a drove of hogs would treat a bed of hyacinths." On all sides the city has extended itself in the lines of unlovely villas, anathematised by Ruskin and Louis Stevenson. One continuous suburb, under many namesNewington, Grange, Morningside-stretches from Craig millar Castle, "bosomed high in tufted trees," to Craiglockart. Bruntsfield Links has been encroached upon by builders and deserted by the Honourable Company of Golfers. A suburban railway is carried along the bed of the Pow Burn -once a sparkling stream. The Borough Muir, where Lord Marmion beheld the countless pavilions of the Scottish camp, has long since been covered with houses-which have invaded the lower slopes of the Braid Hills themselves. These, however, have so far escaped the encroachments of the jerry builder: "the northern side is one of the breeziest of public parks and most hazardous of courses. The southern declivities and hollows are similarly occupied as a private course for the Mortonhall Club: gutta balls are now lost where the fairies once danced round the Elf Loch, and long drives are made from beside the Buck Stane." Arthur's Seat still remains inviolate, but the same cannot be said of the little village of Duddingston, nestling beneath its shadow, with its Norman church, and peaceful loch beloved by skaters in a hard winter. If the neighbourhood has lost much of its former picturesqueness, the Old Town has fared even worse. It has been hopelessly modernisedrestored and rebuilt beyond all recognition. So completely have the ancient wynds and closes, the timber-fronted houses and secluded mansions, disappeared, that the sites of many of them are purely conjectural. Their very names have perished with them. Banks, county buildings, newspaper offices, and board schools now occupy the ground formerly covered by a wilderness of "lands" that soared up ten stories and more from the level of the ground. The construc tion of the North Bridge in 1772, across the valley to the New Town,-although, according to Lord Rosebery, it was "the foundation of the city's beauty,"-destroyed at one fell swoop all the picturesque old closes between the Netherbow and the Tron. John Knox's house is almost the only survival of the past in this direction, Sixteen years later, the South Bridge was built across the Cowgate towards the College, and a further demolition of ancient buildings was a necessary consequence. The Bowhead, associated with Major Weir, that magician of accursed memory, has disappeared; and though the West Bow-a narrow and tortuous street which connects the Grassmarket and the Lawnmarket-still retains its name, Victoria Street occupies the greater part of the "sanctified bends" down which Claverhouse rode with his troopers towards the West Port.2 This street was the Via Dolorosa to many an unfortunate wretch on his way "to glorify God in the Grassmarket," where a cross in the pavement still marks the site of the "gallows tree." It was from a dyer's pole, projecting from a house close by, that Porteous was hanged by the mob in 1736. 1 Morton Hall originally belonged to the St Clairs of Roslin, to whose ancestor it was granted by the Bruce as a reward for having saved his life from a buck during a stag hunt; and was held on the condition of winding three blasts on the horn from the "Buck Stane" when the king was in the neighbourhood.— Geddie's 'Romantic Edinburgh,' p. 205. 2 "As he passed down the sanctified bends of the Bow, But some young plants of grace that looked couthy and slee, The scene has been described by a master-hand-the square "crimson with torchlight, spectators filling every window of the tall houses, the Castle standing high above the tumult, amid the blue midnight and the stars." The great fire (or rather fires, for there were three of them) swept away all the closes on the south side of Parliament Square; and both Lord Cockburn and Sir Walter Scott have left us a vivid description of the awful scene they witnessed as one tall "land" after another, some of them fifteen stories high-" vomiting flames like a volcano," and finally the steeple of the Tron Church itself, came crashing down into the abyss of fire. It was inevitable and necessary that many of these narrow and unsavoury wynds and closes should be swept away in spite of their countless legends and traditions, for they were as foul and dirty as the old rookeries of the Seven Dials and Clare Market; indeed some of them were positively unsafe for habitation. The general dirt and squalor were inconceivable. An open sewer ran down the middle of the Cowgate, and, when in flood, this "Coogate Strand" was as filthy and malodorous as the Fleet Ditch described by Gay. Within doors, a Lord of Session thought three rooms and a kitchen "ample room and verge enough" for himself and his family; while "a thriving goldsmith stowed away his menage in a couple of small rooms above his booth, plastered against the walls of St Giles' Church." Windows were rarely opened, and "the clartier the cosier" expressed the feelings of the inmates.1 The supply of water was miserably inadequate, and was carried from house to house by watercaddies in leather jackets and skull caps, resembling the aguadores of Asturias described by George Borrow. It was small wonder that children should have died like sheep in this vitiated and tainted atmosphere. Sir Walter Scott's six elder brothers and sisters, born in the College Wynd, died in their infancy, and his own life was only saved by his being sent to the pure air of SandyKnowe. But though, as we have said, it was inevitable that many of these crazy tenements should be demolished, and light and air admitted through the crowded alleys and closes that shut in both sides of the High Street, yet many of the picturesque mansions of historical interest might well have been spared to us. For instance, Mary of Guise's Palace, near the Castle, with its armorial bearings, its panelled rooms, and its secret oratory, was destroyed in 1846 to make room for the New College. Even more interesting was Robert Gourlay's house, in the Old Bank Close, demolished in 1834,-a picturesque and 1 Clarty=dirty. Abbotsford was known as Clarty Hole" before it was rechristened by Sir Walter. massive edifice, solidly built by a wealthy burgher, with curiously intricate internal arrangements which adapted it admirably for a state prison. But the grossest act of vandalism of all was perpetrated by the city magistrates in 1756, when they pulled down the Market Cross, on the ground of its obstructing the highway. This sacrilege provoked the well-known outburst from Sir Walter Scott "Oh, be his tomb as lead to lead Upon its dull destroyer's head!A minstrel's malison is said."1 same spot, the common hangman had made a bonfire of the standards captured from Charles Edward at Culloden. In more peaceful times the Cross had been the centre of all the characteristic sights and sounds of Edinburgh life, and the space around it was filled every forenoon with & motley throng of all sorts and conditions of men: fine gentlemen in ruffles and periwigs; tradesmen chatting at their doors; fishwives, water-carriers, coalmen, vendors of sand and soot, all bawling their wares at the top of their voices; bedesmen in their blue gowns, town-guardsmen with their Lochaber axes; "caddies," the blackguard and ubiquitous commissionaires of the period, Sir Walter might well be angry; for the Cross had been associated for centuries with stirring events and and tragic memories. It was the focus and centre of the national life all combined to make up an of Scotland. Sometimes it had assemblage as unique as it was been the scene of riotous festiv- picturesque. ity, when the fountain near it flowed with claret on a royal birthday. Sometimes on the scaffold under its shadow the heads of patriots or traitors, such as the great Montrose and his enemy Argyll, had fallen beneath the axe of the Maiden. Here one king after another had been proclaimed and the Scottish laws promulgated; and here, on the eve of Flodden, ghostly heralds were said to have summoned King James and his lords to appear before Pluto. Here, too, the Solemn League and Covenant had been publicly burnt in 1682; and later, on the Close to the Cross were the Luckenbooths, a range of tall buildings which blocked up the main thoroughfare of the High Street and were not removed till 1817. Between them and St Giles' Church were the Krames, a range of booths tenanted (as Carlyle remembered them) by "eager little old women in miniature shops," who kept a paradise of toys for children. The High Street itself had been the admiration of every traveller from Defoe and Pennant to Dr Johnson himself, from its space and breadth and the tall and picturesque houses which lined 1 The broken shaft of the Cross has been re-erected, not far from its original position, on an octagonal pedestal, with an inscription, by the late W. E. Gladstone. VOL. CLXXVIII.-NO. MLXXVII. G |