Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats

Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,—

And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage

Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.”

At the time with which we are concerned this city had the advantage of containing, as has been said, only about eighty thousand people. For comfortable social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is overwhelming and paralysing. There can be no intimacy, no unity of interest, in such a vast concourse. Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John’s Wood would know nothing of either fact till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. Hardly since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been all agitated simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we have an illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and produce. That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades, Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see now far distributed through space and time, nantes rari in gurgite vasto,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so in such a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in greatness should have been kept up by so small a population for several ages, seems miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had something to do with the miracle; but the compactness of the place,—the aggregation of so many finely and variously endowed human beings precisely in such numbers as to keep up among them a daily sense of mutual companionship,—must also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens” the conditions of its ancient namesake are not all reproduced. To say nothing of any difference that there may be in respect of original brain-and-nerve equipment between the modern and the ancient Athenian, “Modern Athens” is, unfortunately, not a separate body-politic, with separate interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no walls now round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people the privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with even the nearest portions of the rest of Great Britain. They cannot meet periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws for themselves in popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches beginning “O men of Edinburgh.” But, with many such differences, there are some similarities. Everybody in Edinburgh knows, or may know, everybody else, at least by sight; everybody meets everybody else in the street at least once every day or two; the whole town is within such convenient compass that, even to go from one extremity of it to the other extremity, there is no need to take a cab unless it rains. It is a city capable of being simultaneously and similarly affected in all its parts. An idea administered to one knot of the citizens is as good as administered to the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at noon will ripple gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding country, before the evening. If such is the case even now, when the population is over 260,000, must it not have been still better when the population was only 80,000, and that population was more shut in within itself by the absence as yet of telegraphs and railroads?

Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh when Henry Dundas ruled Scotland were people of a rather peculiar, and yet rather superior, mixture of sorts. There never has been any very large amount of trade or of manufacture in Edinburgh, nor much of the wealth or bustle that arises from trade and manufacture. For the roar of mills and factories, and for a society ranging correspondingly from the great millionaire uppermost to crowds of operatives below, all toiling in the pursuit of wealth, one must go to Glasgow. In Edinburgh the standard of the highest income is much lower, and the standard of the lowest is perhaps higher, than in Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative importance in the social estimate. Roughly classified, the society of Edinburgh in the days to which we are now looking back consisted, as the society of Edinburgh still consists, of an upper stratum of lawyers and resident gentry, college officials, and clergy, reposing on, but by no means separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient for the wants of the place. Let us glance at these components of the society of Old Edinburgh in succession:—

First, The Lawyers and Resident Gentry.—These two classes may be taken together, as to a certain extent identical. From the time of the Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then remained in their native country, occupying for a part of the year the homely but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the Old Town of Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and, indeed, absorbing such families of the old nobility as had remained, there had sprung up,—as might have been expected from the fact that Edinburgh, though it had parted with its Court and Legislature, was still the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts,—a new aristocracy of lawyers. The lawyers,—consisting, first, of the judges as the topmost persons, with their incomes of several thousands a year, and then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out of practice, but including also the numerous body of the “Writers to the Signet” and other law-agents,—are now, and for the last century or two have been, the dominant class in the Edinburgh population. From the expense attending education for the legal profession, the members of it, till within a time comparatively recent, were generally scions of Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed, it was not unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become nominally members of the Scottish bar, even when they did not intend to practise. The fact of the substitution of the legal profession for the old Scottish aristocracy in the dominant place in Edinburgh society is typified by the circumstance that the so-called “Parliament House,”—retaining that name because it enshrines the hall where the Estates of the Scottish Kingdom held their meetings during the last eighty years of the time when Scotland had no Parliaments but her own,—is now the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts, and the daily resort of the interpreters of the laws in these courts. Any day yet, while the courts are in session, the Parliament House, with its long oaken ante-room, where scores of barristers in their wigs and gowns, accompanied by writers in plainer costume, are incessantly pacing up and down, and its smaller inner chambers, where the judges on the bench, in their crimson robes, are trying cases, is the most characteristic sight in Edinburgh. Even now the general hour of breakfast in Edinburgh is determined by the time when the courts open in the morning; and, dispersed through their homes, or at dinner-parties, in the evening, it is the members of the legal profession that lead the social talk. In the old Dundas days it was the same, with the addition that then the lawyers were perhaps more numerous in proportion to the rest of the community than they are now, and were more closely inter-connected by birth and marriage with the Scottish nobility and lairds.

Of hardly less importance socially was the Academical Element. As Edinburgh possesses a University, as its University has long been in high repute, and as, by reason of the comparative cheapness of board and education in Edinburgh, many families, after a residence in England or the Colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake of the education of their sons, or, without going thither themselves, have sent their sons thither, the business of education has always been prominent, if not paramount, among the industries of the city. The teachers of the public and of other schools have always formed a considerable class numerically, as well as in rank; while to the University professors, partly from the higher nature of their teaching-duties, partly from the traditional dignity conferred on them by the great reputation of some of their body in past times, and partly from some superiority in their emoluments, there has alway been accorded a degree of social consideration not attached to the same function anywhere out of Scotland. The reputation of the Medical School of Edinburgh, in particular, has always invested the professors in the Medical Faculty of the University with special distinction; and, as these professors have been generally also at the head of the medical practice of the city, the Medical element, and with it the Scientific element, in Edinburgh society have from times long past been, to a considerable extent, in union with the professorial.

In all Scottish cities The Clergy have, from time immemorial, exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology with which they have been saturated through so many centuries of clerical teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation there of relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was completely brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in consequence of the presence in society of a distinct intellectual element in the lawyers, the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively, the same weight as in other towns. Still they were powerful even in the old Edinburgh of the Dundas rule. At the very least, a negative respect was paid to them by the preservation throughout the place of an external Presbyterian decorum and strictness; and in all houses “the minister” was treated with distinction. Add to this that there generally were among the Edinburgh clergy men possessing claims to respect in addition to those belonging to their profession. Some, even in that age of “Moderatism,” were remarkable for their eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors; others had literary pretensions; and others were professors in the University as well as parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the professorial and the clerical elements were then intermixed in Edinburgh. Perhaps, however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the clerical or ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting in that city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is, perhaps, no one fact of greater importance than the regular and uninterrupted succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in Edinburgh for the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let an Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been no Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of the House of Commons, but that regularly during that period there had been annual convocations of representatives of the whole body of the English Clergy, together with such leading members of the laity as churchwardens or the like from all the English parishes, and that these convocations had sat ten days in every year, discussing all public matters in any way bearing on the Church, and making laws affecting the entire ecclesiastical organisation of England, and he will have an idea of the extent to which the national history of Scotland since her union with England is bound up in the records of her “General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in fact, from the year 1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was, to some extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the secular Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland still saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the year the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again, with some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called “presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings, periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand rendezvous of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical legislation, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time of its meeting was one of bustle and excitement. Black coats swarmed in the streets; the Assembly was opened with military pomp and circumstance by a Lord High Commissioner representing the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne during the meetings, and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood Palace all through the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives, some of whom were usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated during those ten days, under a president of their own choosing called the “Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers were called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular law-courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a very high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in these later days in the British Parliament; while at the same time there was ample opportunity for the exercise of business talent and of all the tact and skill of party-leadership. Much of the general politics of Scotland took necessarily the form of church politics; and, indeed, the connections between church politics and state politics were pretty close. The vast majority of the clergy were adherents of Dundas in general politics, and bent on swaying church polity in the same direction; while the small minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-Fliers,” as they were called, corresponded to the proscribed “Liberals” in secular politics. The leading clergymen of both parties were to be found in or near Edinburgh.

Respecting the Mercantile and Artisan classes it need only be repeated that they were by no means separated by any social demarcation from the fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined with these by family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies belonging to superior natural intelligence and superior education. Booksellers and printers were more numerous in Edinburgh proportionally than in any other British town.