Old-time arrivals in Edinburgh, coming in by Canongate, found themselves in midst of squalor and picturesqueness; and although much of the picturesque is gone, it is still a quaint street and the squalor survives. The poor who live here “hang forth their banners from the outward walls,” in the shape of their domestic washing, fluttering in the breeze from every window, at the end of long poles, and how poor they are may be judged from the condition of the clothes they consider worth keeping. That sometime prison, the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long street, remains one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh’s past. Not a very ancient past, for it was only “biggit” in 1591, but old enough to be regarded with reverence, and quaint to admiration, with its spired tower and tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the French influence in architecture was yet strong. You can match those curious spires time and time again among the old châteaux of the Loire, and in Brittany; just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can find the counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse Close, near by.
From here, those travellers saw the Old Town ahead and, progressing up High Street, came successively to the Tron Church, the Market Cross, St. Giles’s Cathedral, and, before 1817—when it was pulled down—to the Old Tolbooth. Beyond this, the Lawnmarket conducted to the Castle, which then marked the end of the town. In this progress the tall and crowded houses and darkening wynds and closes stood to right and left. Later years have seen the disappearance of many of these places, where in old times the ferocious Scots nobles lived, poor and proud, bloodthirsty and superstitious, but those that are left are very grim, dark, and dirty, and the ten-and eleven-storied houses of such a height that only by great exertions is it possible to crane the neck and lift the eyes to the skyline, against which the belching chimneys of the piled-up “lands” are projecting the smoke of domestic hearths and eternally justifying the old Scots term of endearment for Edinburgh. The nobles are gone, lang syne, their old dens occupied now by the very poorest of Edinburgh’s poor; but sanitary conditions, even with the present occupants, are not so degraded as they were when the flower of Scotland’s nobility dwelt here; when pigs and fowls were herded in the basements, or ran unheeded in the alleys, and wayfarers skulked under the walls at the sound of voices above, calling “gardy-loo”—a call which accompanied a discharge of overflowing household utensils from inconceivable heights into the gutters below. “Gardy-loo” was a term which, with this dreadfully unclean custom, derived from France, having been originally gardez-l’eau; just as the cakes sold at Craigmillar, called “petticoat tails” were originally petits gateaux.
Still, the Old Town is sufficiently grimy and huddled yet to fitly illustrate the Scottish saying “The clartier (i.e. the dirtier) the cosier.”
Nothing is more characteristic of the Old Town than the religious texts carved upon the stone door lintels of these ancient houses. Few are without them. To a stranger they would seem to tell of a fervent piety, but they meant more than that. They were always accompanied with a date and with the initials—sometimes also the arms—of their owners; as in the beautiful example still remaining in Lady Stair’s Close, and represented both pride and a fearful superstition. Superstition, because the improving texts and pious ejaculations meant little beyond talismanic protection against “Auld Hornie,” wizards, and warlocks, wehr-wolves, and all those frightful inhabitants of Satan’s invisible world in which the Scotch most fervently believed, from king to peasant. Thus when we read over one of these old doorways the queerly spelled
Blissit be God in all His giftis,
we know that this was little less than an incantation, and marked a lively sense of favours to come; and when our eye lights upon the inscription next door,
Pax intrantibus: Salus exevntibvs,
we know that the good feeling thus prominently displayed would by no means have prevented the fierce lord of the house from stabbing his guest in a dark corner, if he had a mind to it.