“Wha’ll buy caller herrin’?
They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’;
Buy my caller herrin’,
New drawn frae the Forth.”
To stroll down High Street is to unscroll Scottish history and survey Edinburgh of to-day at one and the same time. “Hie-gait,” as the old fellows still occasionally call it, is the “historic mile” par excellence of Scotland. In its independent fashion it assumes new names as it meanders along, first Castle Hill, then Lawnmarket, then High Street, and finally Canongate. Even the afternoon sun ventures guardedly among the nest of tall, gaunt lands that scowl at each other across its war-worn way. Bleak and glum to the peaked and gabled roofs, eight and ten stories above the sidewalk, they have resisted dry rot by a miracle of mortar and still hang together, doubtless to their own amazement, huddling a perfect enmeshment of tiny homes like some ingenious nest of boxes. It would be hard to imagine more drear and rickety domiciles or any more nervously overshadowed with an impending doom of dissolution. One looks anxiously about to see some venerable veteran give it up with a dismal, weary groan and collapse in a vast huddle of domestic wreckage. Fancy living where you have to scale breakneck stairs to a dizzy height and then reach your remote eyrie by a trembling gangway over an air well! The closes or wynds that are engulfed among these flat-chested ancients are equally surprising. One passes in from the street through a dirty entrance with a worn stone sill and a rudely carven doorhead inscribed with Scriptural and moral injunctions, and finds himself in an inner court fronted by dirty doors and palsied windows full of frowzy women, a cobbled pavement littered with refuse and a patch of sky half-hidden by fragments of laundry. And, mind you, these retreats are not without pride of tradition; many of them have entertained riches and royalty—but that was not last week. Lady Jane Grey was once hidden in famous White Horse Close, which must have fallen further than Lucifer to reach its present condition. Douglas Tavern was in one of them, where Burns and his brethren of the “Crochallan Club” were wont to revel with “Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie, and amang guid companie.” Legends, of course, abound. There was the case of the two stubborn sisters who quarreled one night and never spoke to each other again, though they lived the remainder of their lives together in the selfsame room. There’s Scotch persistence! Deacon Brodie was another instance, the “Raffles” of his time. He it was who used to ply his nefarious trade by night on the friends who knew him by day as a highly respectable cabinet-worker; and if you look furtively aloft at some dusty, closed shutter you can fancy the dark lantern glowing and the file rasping and the black mask drawn to his chin. Happily, they hanged him eventually; and, singularly enough, on the very gallows for which he had himself invented a very superior drop.
A close, therefore, is so cheerless a spot that you could not well be worse off if you were to dive down the steep, wet steps of a neighboring slit of an alley and come out on the old Grassmarket of sinister renown where they hanged the Covenanters of the Moss Hags. As you gaze about on this ill-omened slum, once the home of many a prosperous and respected “free burgess,” but now given over to drovers and visiting farmers, and peer suspiciously up the adjoining West Port where Burke and Hare conducted their murders to get bodies for the surgeons, you are very apt to beat a hurried retreat and cry out with Claverhouse, “Come, open the West Port and let me gang free!”
After one or two such explorations a stranger is content to pursue his investigation in the broad light of High Street. It seems delightful then to watch the barefooted boys in the street and the little girls in aprons and “pigtails.” And happily he may come across a shaggy steely-eyed old Highlander growling to a comrade in the guttural Gaelic, or perhaps a soldier in kilts and sporan. At this hour he will certainly see around Parliament Square groups of advocates and solicitors and “writers to the Signet,” and, it may be, some judge of the “Inner House” or “Outer House,” and possibly the Lord President himself. Otherwise he can take note of the uninviting shop-windows and the piles of merchandise on the sidewalks, and find entertainment in such unfamiliar signs as “provisioners,” “spirit merchants,” “bootmakers,” “hairdressers,” etc., with prices set forth in shillings and pence, or rejoice in a hostelry with so unusual a name as “The Black Bull Lodgings for Travellers and Working Men.”
There are pleasant surprises. For instance, you find in the cobbled pavement the outline of a heart—and you do not have to be told that you are standing on the site of the terrible old Tolbooth prison, at the Heart of Midlothian. And what rushes to mind and displaces all other associations if not the fine story Sir Walter gave us under that name! Here, then, the Porteous mob swarmed and raged in its struggle to burn this savage Bastile, and here they tried and condemned poor Effie Deans and locked her up while the faithful Jeanie turned heaven and earth to save her, and the heart of old David broke. “The Heart of Midlothian!” Why, it is like being a boy all over again!
Encouraged by this discovery, like a man who has just found a gold-piece, you keep a sharp lookout on the pavements, and presently comes a second reward in the shape of a brass tablet in the ground marking the last resting-place of stern John Knox. “There!” say you; “Dr. Johnson said he ought to be buried in the public road, and sure enough, he is!” What a man! He dared all things and feared nothing. How many a long discourse did Queen Mary herself supply him a topic for, and how often did he assail even her with personal rebukes and virulent public tirades! Thanks to the Free Church, his dwelling stands intact, farther down the street at the site of the Netherbow; and a fine specimen it is of sixteenth-century domestic Scotch architecture, with low ceilings and stairways scarce two feet wide—but, like its former austere tenant, narrow, cornery, and unpleasant. Implacable, unbending old John Knox! There is nothing in Browning more shuddering in imaginative flight than the quatrain:—
“As if you had carried sour John Knox