Where are the Scotch?—Something wanting in the Landscape.—The Inhabitants.—The Highlanders and the Servant Girls.—Evening in Princes Street.—Leith and the Firth of Forth.—Rossend Castle at Burntisland.—Mary Stuart once more.—I receive Scotch Hospitality in the Bedroom where Chastelard was as enterprising as unfortunate.
ith the exception of the famous tartan shawls, which we come across again in Edinburgh on the backs of the lower-class women, nothing in the costume of the inhabitants could remind you that you were not in Paris, London, Brussels, or any other haunt of that badge of modern civilisation, the chimney-pot. In Glasgow this does not shock you more than it would in Manchester or Birmingham; but, in the romantic city of Edinburgh, even the whistle of the railway engine annoys you; the cap and kilt are sadly felt wanting, and you almost want to stop the passers-by and ask them: "Where are your kilts?" You feel as if you were cheated out of something.
Alas! the national costume of the Scotch is almost a thing of the past: it is no longer a dress—it is a get-up.
You may see it yet at fancy dress balls, in the army of Her Britannic Majesty, at the Paris Opera-Comique, and in the comic papers.
I believe the Royal Princes occasionally don it, when they go to Scotland in the autumn to shoot; but even in the remote Highlands the national costume is dying out, and if you count upon seeing Scotchmen, dressed Scotch fashion in Scotland, you will be disappointed. As well look for lions in the outskirts of Algiers, or a pretty woman in the streets of Berne.
A gentleman in kilts would make as great a sensation in the streets of Edinburgh as he would on the Boulevard des Italiens. Nay, more, if he stood still, he might have pence offered him.
The costume of Dickson in La Dame Blanche is only seen on the backs of those splendid Highlanders whom the maidservants in large towns hire by the afternoon on Sundays to accompany them to the parks.
In London you will sometimes see Highlanders—from Whitechapel—playing the bagpipes and dancing reels, talents which bring an ample harvest of pennies in populous neighbourhoods, but which would fall rather flat in Edinburgh.
I cannot imagine anything much more picturesque than Princes Street at night, when the old city in amphitheatre-shape, on the other side of the valley, stands out from the sky which it seems to touch with its old sombre majestic castle, and its houses ten or twelve stories high, rising tier above tier up the side of the hill, and shining with a thousand lights. I can understand that the inhabitants of Edinburgh enjoy to come out in the evening and feast their eyes on the enchanting sight, and this even in winter, when the street is a very funnel for the east wind which blows across straight from the Scandinavian icebergs.