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.
“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.”
Princes Street is perhaps even more like the Brighton Front in its well-dressed crowds and fine shops. With the sea in place of the Gardens and the Castle, the resemblance would be singularly close.
As for Calton Hill, that neo-classic eminence gives form and substance to Edinburgh’s claim to be the “Modern Athens.” Learning had not been unknown in the Old Town, where Hume and Boswell wrote; but, given air and elbow-room, it expanded vastly when the New Town was planned, and with the dawn of the nineteenth century, literature flourished exceedingly. This seems to have inspired the idea of emulating the capital of Greece, to the eye as well as to the mind. Accordingly a copy of the Parthenon was begun on the crest of Calton Hill, as a monument to the Scots soldiers who fell in the campaigns against Napoleon. It cost a huge sum and has never been completed, and so it has familiarly been called “Scotland’s Folly” and “Scotland’s Shame”; but doubtless looks a great deal more impressive in its unfinished state, in the semblance of a ruin, than it would were it ever finished. A variety of other freak buildings keep it company: the Nelson Monument, memorials to Burns, to Dugald Stewart, and to Professor Playfair, together with what the many “guides,” who by some phenomenal instinct scent the stranger from afar, call an “obsairvatory.”
Coaching days at Edinburgh ceased in 1846, when that sole surviving relic of the coaches between London and the North—the Edinburgh and Berwick coach—was discontinued on the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Company, completing the series of lines that connect the two capitals. It is true that passengers could not yet travel through without changing, for the great bridges that cross the Tyne at Newcastle and the Tweed at Berwick were not opened until four years later; but it was possible, with these exceptions, to journey the whole distance by train. The opening of the railway meant as great a change for Edinburgh as did the beginning of the New Town seventy years before. Just what it was like then we may judge from the drawing made from the Castle by David Roberts in 1847. The point of view he has chosen is that from the Mons Meg Battery, and the direction of his glance, omitting the Old Town on the right, is to the northeast. Changes in detail have come about since then, but, as a whole, it is the Edinburgh we all know: the Calton Hill, with its cluster of weird monuments, prominent; the New Town, stretching away vaguely to the water-side; while in the distance, on the right, is seen the shore curving to Portobello; the twin masses of the Bass Rock and North Berwick Law on the horizon. Down in the New Town itself the changes are evident. Where the toy train with its old-fashioned locomotive is crawling out of the tunnel under the Mound, and where the old Waverley Station is seen, alterations have been plenty. The old North Bridge pictured here has given place to a new, spanning the ravine in three spans of steel. Beyond it are still seen the smoked-grimed modern Gothic battlements of the Calton Gaol, but the huge new hotel of the North British Railway has replaced the buildings that rose on that side of the old bridge, while the towering offices of the Scotsman occupy the other, all in that florid French Renaissance that is the keynote of modern Edinburgh’s architectural style. The Scott Monument stands where it did, not, as David Roberts’s drawing shows us, among grounds but little cared for, but amid gay parterres and velvet lawns. The Bank of Scotland has been rebuilt and all the vacant sites long built upon; evidences these of half a century’s progress, the direct outcome of those railways that two generations ago wrote “Finis” to the last chapter in the romantic story of the Great North Road.
