To the play-house at Paris, Vienna, or Munich,
Fastened him into a front-row box,
And danced off the ballet with trousers and tunic.”
One makes a long stop before the far-famed church of St. Giles, half a thousand years old and the battle-ground of warring creeds. Its crown-shaped tower top is one of the familiar landmarks of Edinburgh. Within you may study to heart’s content the grim barrel vaulting and massive Norman piers and the tattered Scottish flags in the nave, but there is scope for many an agreeable thought outside if one conjures up the little luckenbooth shops that once clustered between its buttresses, and imagines Allan Ramsay in his funny nightcap selling wigs, or “Jingling Geordie” Heriot, of “The Fortunes of Nigel,” gossiping with his friend King James VI over his jewelry counter. Nor would you forget Jenny Geddes and how she seized her stool in disgust when the Dean undertook to introduce the ritual, and let it fly at the good man’s head with the sizzling invective, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye! Would ye say mass i’ my lug!”
Old Tron Kirk, farther on, is still an active feature of Edinburgh life, and particularly on New Year’s Eve when the crowds rally here as the old year dies. Beyond it the Canongate extends itself in a rambling, happy-go-lucky fashion, lined with curious timber-fronted houses with “turnpike” stairs. It is like sitting down to “Humphrey Clinker” once more; or better still, perhaps, to the poems of Fergusson; and we smile at thoughts of the scowling, early-risen housewives of other days who would
“Wi’ glowering eye
Their neighbours’ sma’est faults descry!”
and fancy how the convivial revelers would foregather by night and
“sit fu’ snug,
Owre oysters and a dram o’ gin,