XXXIII
Leaving the “Brighton of Scotland” behind, we come to the flat lands of Craigentinny, stretching away from the now suburban highway down to the wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups and the sandpipers make mournful concerts in a minor key, to the accompaniment of the noise of the sullen breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the rustling bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and sound of the tinkling tramcars passing between Joppa, Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that singular monument, “Miller’s Tomb.”
William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this pile of classic architecture, was an antiquary and bibliophile, and obtained his nickname of “Measure Miller” from his habit of measuring the margins of the “tall copies” of the scarce books he bought. His beardless face and shrill voice led to the lifelong belief that he was really a woman. The tomb is elaborately decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the Song of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Miller and his father were both Quakers, and the wealth of which they were possessed derived from a prosperous seedsman’s business in Canongate, Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which does not fall to many men. He was married in 1789 for the third time, when nearly seventy years of age, to an Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.
Passing Craigentinny and Jock’s Lodge we are, in the words of the old song, “Within a mile of Edinburgh town.” The more modern and acceptable name of Jock’s Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the other for over two hundred and seventy years. Who the original Jock was seems open to doubt, but he is supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a hut on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins. Even in 1650, when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the spot had obtained its name, and is referred to as “that place called Jockis Lodge.” Towards the close of the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa here, pulled down in 1793, when barracks—known as Piershill Barracks—were built on the site. It is a district slowly emerging from the reproach of a disreputable past, when footpads and murderers haunted the muddy roads, or took refuge amid the towering rocks of Arthur’s Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs, or hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter’s Bog. Close by the road, at the entrance to the Queen’s Park of Holyrood, is Muschat’s Cairn, the place where Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson. This heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat of Boghall, a surgeon, a man of infamous character, murdered his wife by cutting her throat in 1720, a crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he said was committed by direct personal instigation of the devil. All the same, they hanged him for it in the Grassmarket, where martyrs “testified” of old and the criminals of “Auld Reekie” expiated their crimes.
Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the picturesque standpoint, been spoiled. Ranges of grim stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem in the road and hide the view of Arthur’s Seat and its neighbouring eminences; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose them, the little loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel on the hillside, once guarding the holy well. St. Anthony’s Chapel, within the rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn, for from its tower glimmered a beacon which in the old days guided mariners safely up the Forth, a service paid for out of the harbour dues.
The so-called “London” and “Regent” Roads that now lead directly into the New Town of Edinburgh are modern improvements upon the old approach through Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and winding, the old way was at least more impressive, for it lay within sight of Holyrood Palace and brought the wayfarer into the very heart of Scott’s “own romantic town,” to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from dizzy tiers of windows, showed “Scotia’s darling seat” in its most characteristic aspects.
As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city was beautiful, sang its praises to 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.”
The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The peaked and jagged masses of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered Calton Hill, the Castle Rock—all these combine to make the traveller eager to reach so picturesque a spot. Approaching it and seeing the smoke-cloud drifting with the breeze away from the hollow from which Edinburgh’s million chimneys are seen peering, one instantly notes the peculiar appropriateness of the Scots endearing epithet, “Auld Reekie.” But it was not only—if indeed at all—an admiration of the picturesque that made the sight of Edinburgh so welcome to old-time travellers. It was rather the prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and almost in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered the view so welcome to those who in the last thirty years or so of the coaching era made this trip of almost four hundred miles; but those who had come this way at an earlier period had no such comfortable prospect before them. Instead of putting up at some fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even in the smaller English towns, they were set down at a “stabler’s,” the premises of one whose first business was to horse the coaches and to let saddle-horses, and who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those who were obliged to journey about the country.
A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for instance, had indeed little comfort awaiting him. “One can scarcely form in imagination the distress of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this city,” says one writing at this period. No inn better than an alehouse, no decent or cleanly accommodation, nor in fact anything fit for a gentleman. “On my first arrival,” says this traveller, “my companion and self, after the fatigue of a long day’s journey, were landed at one of these stable-keepers’ (for they have modesty to give themselves no higher denomination) in a part of the town which is called the Pleasance; and on entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl without shoes or stockings, and with only a single linsey-woolsey petticoat which just reached half-way to her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and potatoes. You may guess our amazement when we were informed that this was the best inn in the metropolis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with the company which a stage-coach had that moment discharged. ‘Well,’ said I to my friend, ‘there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.’ Accordingly, on inquiry, we discovered that there was a good dame by the Cross who acted in the double capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to strangers, as we were. She was easily to be found out, and, with all the conciliating complaisance of a Maitresse d’Hôtel, conducted us to our destined apartments, which were indeed six stories high, but so infernal in appearance that you would have thought yourself in the regions of Erebus. The truth is, I will venture to say, you will make no scruple to believe when I tell you that in the whole we had only two windows, which looked into an alley five feet wide, where the houses were at least ten stories high and the alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine that it was impossible to see any object distinctly.”
Private lodgings, just as those described above, were the resort of those who had neither friends nor acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time; but travellers in Scotland were nearly always exercising their ingenuity to come, at the end of their day’s journey, to the house of some friend or some friend’s friend, to whom before starting they had been careful to obtain letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a custom was this that, so far back as 1425, we find an Act of James the First of Scotland actually forbidding all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the “hostillaries,” unless indeed he was a personage of consequence, with a great retinue, in which case he might accept a friend’s hospitality, provided that his “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.
Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into neglect, but the innkeepers, equally of course during a long series of years, almost ceased to exist. A few “stablers’” establishments became known as “inns” at about the period of Doctor Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh. They were chiefly situated in the Pleasance, or in that continuation of it, St. Mary’s Wynd (now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were, burst upon the by no means delighted gaze of the wayfarer from England as he entered the historic town of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally lifted up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so far from home and into so barbarous a country.
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.
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!