Or haddock lug.”
But lingering along the Canongate is a negligible pleasure. There is nothing in the whole architectural world more jailish and pitiless than the gaunt Tolbooth and all its grim neighbors. It is as if the conception of anything suggestive of beauty or ornamentation had been harshly repressed, and ugliness and the most naked utility sternly insisted upon. One may, however, if he is interested in slums, pause a moment to look down through the railings of the South Bridge on the screaming peddlers and flaunting shame of bedraggled Cowgate, and behold a district which stands to Edinburgh in the relative position of Rivington Street to New York, or Petticoat Lane to London, or Montmartre to Paris.
The end of the Canongate, a few steps farther on, debouches unexpectedly, and with a sudden unpreparedness for the stranger, on the great open square before Holyrood. There it stands, black and dismal; more like a prison than a palace! The Abbey ruins, in the rear, supply all the atmosphere of romance that the eye will get here. But the eye is better left as a secondary aid in comprehending Holyrood; history and imagination do the work. Cowering sorrowfully in its gloomy hollow, it has the look of a moody, forsaken thing brooding over a neglectful world. Its memories are of the dead. Its sole companionship is in the mosses and grassy aisles of the crumbling Abbey chapel, where lie the bones of Scottish royalty that ruled and reveled here its allotted time and left scarce a memory behind. It was here they slew Rizzio as he dined with Queen Mary; and perhaps that is romance enough.
The fumes and cobwebs of murky tradition dissipate in the keen, vigorous air of Calton Hill. Breezes from over the level shore-sands of Leith taste sharp of salt and excite bracing thoughts of the sea. Like a map, the whole environ of Edinburgh lies exposed from the Pentlands to the Firth. There is the steepled city, rising over its ridges and dropping down its valleys like billows of a troubled ocean, and there, too, is the enveloping sweep of suburbs dotted with villas or cross-thatched with streets of workingmen’s cottages, and farther still the Meadows and their archery grounds, “the furzy hills of Braid” and their golf links, Blackford Hill whence “Marmion” and his bard looked down on “mine own romantic town,” and, on the southern horizon, the heathery Pentlands, low and shaggy, with the kine that graze over them low and shaggy too. To the northward, away beyond the cricket greens of Inverleith Park, the blue Firth sparkles in the offing, dotted with fleet steamers and the white spread sails of stately ships laying courses for the Baltic. In the distance, over Leith, looms the tall lighthouse of the Inchcape Rock that Southey made famous with a ballad. Beyond the west end of the city a wavy blue line marks the course seaward of the bustling little Water of Leith, where “David Balfour” kept tryst with “Alan Breck,” and many a sturdy little “brig” leaps across it as it hurries along, “brimmed,” wrote Stevenson, “like a cup with sunshine and the song of birds.” Still farther to the westward, where the old Queens Ferry Coach Road appears as a faint white tracing, within many “a mile of Edinborough Town,” thin vapors of smoke rise from the chimneys of white cottages on peasant greens by brooksides; and one knows that the rowans there are white with bloom and the meadows flecked with daisies, and that bees are droning in the foxglove and blackbirds singing in the hawthorn.
Calton Hill itself scarcely improves on acquaintance, but loses rather. Its meagre scattering of monuments would barely excite a passing interest were it not for their conspicuous location and that suggestion of the Athenian Acropolis. A paltry array—a tall, ugly column to Nelson, a choragic monument like the one to Burns on a hillside near Holyrood, an old observatory with a brown tower and a new one with a colonnaded portico and a dome, and, most mentioned of all, the so-called “ruin” of the proposed national monument to the Scotch dead of Waterloo and the Peninsula, which got no farther than a row of columns and an entablature when funds failed and work stopped. Many a bitter shaft of scorn and mockery has this ill-starred undertaking pointed for the disparagers of Scotland. However, in its present condition it has done more than any other agency to stimulate the pleasant illusion of the “Modern Athens.” The hill itself is a favorite resort, lofty, and with a broad, rounded top. The eastern slopes are terraced and set with gardens, and the western and northern sides are steep verdant braes. One yields the palm for reckless daring to Bothwell; not every one would care to speed a horse down such a course even to win attention from eyes so bright and important as Queen Mary’s.
It was on Calton Hill I had my first experience of the old school of Scotchmen, in the person of a dry and withered chip of Auld Reekie, combative, peppery, brusque and sententious, and abounding in that peculiar admixture of braggadocio and repression so characteristic of the class. He had evidently been nurtured from infancy on Allan Ramsay’s collection of Scotch proverbs, for he quoted them continually, giving the poet credit for their origin. He was sitting in the shade of Nelson’s column in shirt sleeves and cap, absorbed to all appearances in a copy of “The Scotsman,” though I suspect he had been regarding me for some while with quite as much curiosity as I now did him. He was a grim, self-contained old party, as dignified as the Lord Provost himself, with gray, shaggy eyebrows and a thin, wry mouth that gripped a cutty pipe; and he looked so much a part of the surroundings, so settled and weather-beaten, that one might almost have passed him over for some memorial carving or, at least, an “animated bust.” Him I beheld with vast inner delight and gingerly approached, giving “Good day” with all the cordiality in the world. The reward was a curt nod and a keen scrutiny from a pair of hard and twinkling blue eyes that had an appearance under the grizzled brows of stars in a frosty sky. I observed upon the fineness of the day; he opined “There had been waur, no doot.” I noted what a capital spot it was for a quiet smoke; he allowed I might “gang far an’ find nane better.” Here I made proffer of a cigar and, presumably, with acceptable humility, for he took it with an “Ah, weel, I dinna mind,” of gloomy resignation—and so we got things going.
The conversation that followed I venture to give in some detail as illustrating, possibly, the peculiarities of a type to be encountered on every Edinburgh street corner—whimsical, conservative, witty, cautious in opinion, and surcharged with local pride.
“A man can take life pleasantly here,” said I, when we had lighted up.
“Aye, aye,” said he; “even a hard-workin’ one like mysel’, as Gude kens. But a bit smoke frae ane an’ twa o’ the day hurts naebody, I’m thinkin’; an’ auld Allan Ramsay was richt eneuch, ‘Light burdens break nae banes.’”
“You will never be leaving Edinburgh, I’ll warrant.”