FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SCOTLAND.
The impression which her first view of Edinburgh made upon the Queen was very striking and most favourable. She thought it “beautiful, totally unlike anything else she had seen.” Even Prince Albert, a great traveller while yet in his teens, and who had visited very many great and renowned cities, also said it was unlike anything which he had witnessed. The massive stone buildings, with not a solitary brick used in their construction; the great dorsal fin of the High Street; the magnificent situation of the Castle; the Calton Hill, guarded by mediæval battlements and crowned by Choragic temples, with the noble back-ground of Arthur’s Seat overtopping the whole, together impressed the youthful tourists as “forming altogether a splendid spectacle.”
As the carriages drove through the city, the Earl of Wemyss, who marched by the Queen’s side in his green uniform of a Scottish Archer of the Guard, pointed out to Her Majesty the varied objects of interest on the line of route through the eastern portions of the city to the Duke of Buccleuch’s palace of Dalkeith. When they got into the open country, she was further astonished to find that not only all the cottages, but even the fences dividing field from field, were also built of stone. The peasants by the wayside were equally objects of curiosity and interest, as they had “quite a different character from England and the English.” The close caps—Scottice, “mutches”—of the old women, and the long, flowing hair, frequently red, of the handsome girls and children, were equal novelties to the royal “Southrons.” The Prince was struck with the resemblance of the country people to Germans. Other Scottish specialties appeared at the breakfast-table at Dalkeith, in the form of oatmeal porridge and “Finnan Haddies”—the first of which, at least, found immediate favour with Her Majesty.
The grand ceremonial of entering the ancient city in state was reserved for the Saturday after the arrival; the interval having been devoted by the royal party to quiet and repose in the magnificent domain of Buccleuch, and drives to objects of interest in its neighbourhood. The line of the cavalcade, on this red-letter day, was up the steep ascent of the Canongate, High Street, and Lawnmarket, from the Palace of Holyrood (which the Queen rightly pronounced “a royal-looking old place”) to the Castle which the Black Douglas scaled, where George Buchanan’s pedantic Stuart pupil was born, and from the parapets of which various and shifting prospects are to be descried, which may be equalled, but cannot be surpassed, in any portion of Her Majesty’s dominions.
THE QUEEN IN EDINBURGH CASTLE.
It was indeed historic ground along which the Queen passed this day. Every one of the stupendous houses of eight, ten, or even more stories, which formed a mighty avenue of stone on either side of the ancient causeway along which the steeds which drew her carriage slowly and deliberately proceeded, had some tale of long gone days to tell, many of them being most intimately associated with the fortunes of her Stuart ancestors. On her way she passed the site of that tower in which Darnley, her ancestor, was blown into eternity. Ere she left her Palace of Holyrood and the adjacent ruins of the abbey which was erected by that Scottish king who built and endowed so many abbeys that his subjects piteously exclaimed that he was a “saur saunt for the Croon,” she may have seen the blood-stains of Rizzio, and the somewhat mythical portraits of the Kings of the Houses of Kenneth, Bruce, and the Stuarts. On one side of her was the old mansion of the Regent Moray, on the other the spot where, for the first and only time, the boy Francis Jeffrey set eyes upon Robert Burns. Here was the ancient oaken hall where the Scottish Parliament sate, there the office of that Scottish journal of which Daniel Defoe, the staunch and loyal friend of William III., was the first editor. Here was the house in which John Knox lived and died, there the church in which he preached with such fervour for that Protestant faith, with the establishment of which in Europe both lines of her ancestors were so intimately identified. And when she arrived on the esplanade of the Castle itself, she could look across the Forth on the one side to the minor mountain which casts its morning shadow into Loch Leven, from her captivity on an islet of which Scottish Catholic gentlemen so gallantly rescued her Stuart ancestress; while immediately beneath her lay the Grassmarket—at once the Tower and the Smithfield of Scotland—where Montrose and Argyll expiated respectively their loyalty to the Stuart race, and to freedom of soul and speech.
As the cortège passed up the streets along which Prince Charlie had passed when he held court at Holyrood just ninety-seven years before, as she received at the site of the old Tolbooth the keys of the city from the Lord Provost, bending the knee beside his fellow-burghers, clad in the old costumes of the Trades, and close beside a guard of honour of Highlanders headed by the present Duke of Argyll; or as she stood surveying from the topmost battery of the citadel her fair ancestral domains of Lothian and Fife, and the distant mountains which tower o’er Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, some such proud and pathetic recollections as these must have occupied and touched the heart of the youngest and the mightiest monarch in Europe. Their closer acquaintance with Edinburgh increased the mingled amazement and delight of the Queen and Prince. Prince Albert pronounced the view of it from the margin of the Firth of Forth as “fairy-like,” “what you would imagine as a thing to dream of, or to see in a picture.” He said he felt sure the Acropolis could not be finer, and the Queen at once recognised the appropriateness of the idealised metamorphosis of “Auld Reekie” (Anglice, “Old Smoky”) into “the Modern Athens.” The Leith ticket-porters, mounted on flower-decked horses, with broad, ribbon-decorated Kilmarnock bonnets, and the pretty Newhaven fishwives, with their clear, peachy complexions and Danish costumes, were objects of peculiar interest.
THE QUEEN IN THE HIGHLANDS.
Space fails us to enter into details of the further incidents of this, the Queen’s first visit to her Scottish dominion. Enough to say that she received in the Highlands, where she visited in succession not a few of her oldest nobles of Gaelic and Norman descent, receptions as rapturous as that which she experienced in the Modern Athens. The welcome, if it could not be more hearty, was at least attended with more picturesque accessories in the romantic region where the dialect and the “garb of Old Gael” still to a large extent prevail. At Dupplin Castle, at Scone Palace, where her ancestors were crowned, at Blair Athole, at Taymouth, and at Drummond Castle, she was entertained with equal splendour, and with the true and special elements of “Highland Welcome.” She may be almost said to have passed through a continuous succession of triumphal arches. Every chieftain brought out all his available clansmen, all in kilts, claymores, and Glengarry bonnets, to act as guards of honour. Balls, in which the national dances, performed by the best born cadets of the noble houses of whom she was the guest, constituted the chief feature, alternated with deer-stalking, for the especial behoof of the Prince; processions of boats on the lake through which rolls the Tay, a river only less rapid than the Spey; and visits to places of historic interest or romantic beauty.
The Queen was especially charmed with the beautiful situation of the ancient city of Perth, and the enthusiastic reception which the multitudes there assembled gave to her. Prince Albert, too, was delighted, and likened the appearance of the place to Basle. At Scone Palace, which is within two miles of Perth, a very natural object of peculiar interest was the mound on which all the Scottish kings had been crowned. At Dunkeld the Highlands were fairly entered; and here the Royal party were met and escorted by a guard of Athole Highlanders, armed with halberts, and headed by a piper. One of them danced the sword dance, with which the travellers were greatly amused, and others of them figured in a reel.