DOORWAY, LADY STAIR'S CLOSE
CHAPTER II
THE GUEST OF EDINBURGH
Royal Edinburgh, the city of the Scots kings and Parliament, the capital of the ancient kingdom, would seem to have become weary somewhere in the eighteenth century of dwelling alone upon her rock. There were, to be sure, reasons more prosaic for the construction of the New Town, the partner and companion of the old historical city. The population had increased, the desire for comfort and space, and many luxuries unknown to the early citizens of Edinburgh, had developed among the new. It was no longer agreeable to the lawyers and philosophers to be crowded up with the other inhabitants of a common stair, to have the din of street cries and commotion ever in their ears, and the lowest of the population always about their feet, as was inevitable when gentle and simple were piled together in the High Street and Canongate. The old houses might be noble houses when they were finally got at, through many drawbacks and abominations—though in those days there was little appreciation even of the stately beauty of old masonry and ornament—but their surroundings became daily more and more intolerable. And it was an anachronism to coop up a learned, elegant, and refined class, living under the Hanoverian Georges in peace and loyalty, within the circle of walls now broken down and useless, which had been adapted to protect the subjects of the old Scottish Jameses from continual attacks.
Happily the nature of the situation prevented any amalgamation or loss of the old boundaries and picturesque features of the ancient city, in the new. There was no question of continuation or enlargement. Another Edinburgh rose at the feet of the first, a sober, respectable, modern, and square-toed town, with wide streets and buildings solid and strong, not without pretensions to a certain stateliness of size and design, but in strong contrast with the architecture and fashion native to the soil—the high gables and turreted stairs of the past. The old town had to throw a drawbridge, permanent and massive, over the hollow at her feet before she could even reach the terraced valley on which the first lines of habitation were drawn, and which, rounding over its steep slope, descended towards another and yet another terrace before it stood complete, a new-born partner and companion in life of the former capital, lavish in space as the other was confined, leisurely and serious as the other was animated—a new town of great houses, of big churches—dull, as only the eighteenth century was capable of making them—of comfort and sober wealth and intellectual progress. The architects who adorned the Modern Athens with Roman domes and Greek temples, and placid fictitious ruins on the breezy hill which possessed a fatal likeness to the Acropolis, would have scoffed at the idea of finding models in the erections of the fourteenth century—that so-called dark age—or recognising a superior harmony and fitness in native principles of construction.
Yet though the public taste has now returned more or less intelligently to the earlier canons, it would be foolish not to recognise that there is a certain advantage even in the difference of the new town from the old. It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous, mediæval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers, the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing by the old. Those who built it considered it an extraordinary improvement upon all that Gothic antiquity had framed. They were far more proud of these broad streets and massive houses than of anything their fathers had left to them, and flung down without remorse a great deal of the antiquated building after which it is now the fashion to inquire with so much regret. Notwithstanding the change of taste since that time, the New Town of Edinburgh still regards the old with a little condescension and patronage; but there is no opposition between the two. They stand by each other in a curious peacefulness of union, each with a certain independence yet mutual reliance. London and Paris have rubbed off all their old angles and made themselves, notwithstanding the existence of Gothic corners here and there, all modern, to the extinction of most of the characteristic features of their former living. But happy peculiarities of situation have saved our northern capital from any such self-obliteration. Edinburgh has been fortunate enough to preserve both sides—the ancient picturesque grace, the modern comfort and ease. And though Mr. Ruskin has spoken very severely of the new town, we will not throw a stone at a place so well adapted to the necessities of modern life. Those bland fronts of polished stone would have been more kindly and more congenial to the soil had they cut the air with high-stepped gables and encased their stairs in the rounded turrets which give a simple distinctive character to so many Scottish houses; and a little colour, whether of the brick which Scotch builders despise or the delightful washes[6] which their forefathers loved, would be a godsend even now. But still, for a sober domestic partner, the new town is no ill companion to the ancient city on the hill.
This adjunct to the elder Edinburgh had come into being between the time when Allan Ramsay's career ended in the octagon house on the Castle Hill, and another poet, very different from Ramsay, appeared in the Scotch capital. In the meantime many persons of note had left the old town and migrated towards the new. The old gentry of whom so many stories have been told, especially those old ladies who held a little court, like Mrs. Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's lively pages—continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch metropolis was now rapidly tending across the lately erected bridge towards the new great houses which contemplated old Edinburgh across the little valley, where the Nor' Loch glimmered no longer and where fields lay green where marsh and water had been. The North Bridge was a noble structure, and the newly-built Register House at the other end one of the finest buildings of modern times to the admiring chroniclers of Edinburgh. And the historians and philosophers, the great doctors, the great lawyers, the elegant critics, for whom it was more and more necessary that the ways of access between the old town and the new might be made more easy, presided over and criticised all those wonderful new buildings of classic style and unbroken regularity, and watched the progress of the Earthen Mound, a bold and picturesque expedient which filled up the hollow and made a winding walk between, with interest as warm as that which they took in the lectures and students, the books and researches, which were making their city one of the intellectual centres of the world.
This is a position to which Scotland has always aspired, and the pride of the ambitious city and country was never more fully satisfied than in the end of last and the beginning of the present century. Edinburgh had never been so rich in the literary element, and the band of young men full of genius and high spirit who were to advance her still one step farther to the climax of fame in that particular, were growing up to take the places of their fathers. A place in which Walter Scott was just emerging from his delightful childhood, in which Jeffrey was a mischievous boy and Henry Brougham a child, could not but be overflowing with hope, especially when we remember all the good company there already—Dugald Stewart, bringing so many fine young gentlemen from England to wonder at the little Scotch capital, and a crowd of Erskines, Hunters, Gregories, Monroes, and Dr. Blair and Dr. Blacklock, and the Man of Feeling—not to speak of those wild and witty old ladies in the Canongate, and the duchesses who still recognised the claims of Edinburgh in its season. To all this excellent company, whose fame and whose talk hung about both the old Edinburgh and the new like the smoke over their roofs, there arrived one spring day a wonderful visitor, in appearance like nothing so much as an honest hill farmer, travelling on foot, his robust shoulders a little bowed with the habit of the plough, his eyes shining, as no other eyes in Scotland shone, with youth and genius and hope. He knew nobody in Edinburgh save an Ayrshire lad like himself, like what everybody up to this time had supposed Robert Burns to be. The difference was that the stranger a little while before had put forth by the aid of a country printer at Kilmarnock a little volume of rustic poetry upon the most unambitious subjects, in Westland Scotch, the record of a ploughman's loves and frolics and thoughts. It is something to know that these credentials were enough to rouse the whole of that witty, learned, clever, and all-discerning community, and that this visitor from the hills and fields in a moment found every door opened to him, and Modern Athens, never unconscious of its own superiority and at this moment more deeply aware than usual that it was one of the lights of the earth, at his feet.
LADY STAIR'S CLOSE