The Modern Athens / A dissection and demonstration of men and things in the Scotch Capital.

by Robert Mudie

After the Scottish kirk, came, laden with wisdom, the members of the four Scottish universities; and this having been done, the remaining individuals and classes of men who were charged with courtly sayings, disburthened themselves in the closet behind the throne; and the paper thus accumulated, having been deposited for use, this act of the drama closed, leaving less upon the memory than had been anticipated.

The monarch having thus opened a levee for the honour of his Scottish subjects generally, and allowed her official men to drop their honeyed papers and parchments at the court and in the closet,—having devoted two whole days to the hard hands of country lairds, and the greasy lips of parsons and bailies, it was naturally to be concluded, that he would be pretty well saturated of salutation from the men of Scotland, and long for the approach of Scottish women, as the traveller, in the sandy desert, longs for the green spot and the glassy spring. Nor could the desire have been wholly confined to his majesty. The anxiety of the Scottish fair was bent, like the bow of Diana when the arrow is drawn to the barbs; their preparations, positive and negative, for this high honour, had been long, laborious and self-denying; and they were not without feeling that four whole days should not have interposed their twelve-month-looking-lengths between the sight and salutation of their King. It is true, that in Scotland generally, and in the Athens in particular, woman, that grand barometer of civilization, has of late risen many degrees. The time has not long gone by, at which females were mere beasts of burden in rural affairs, and young girls were in many places obliged to ply as ferry-boats. I myself have seen half a score of stout and sinewy Highlanders lying snuffing upon a hillock of manure, while their wives and daughters were bearing heavy baskets of the same to the fields, while all that the lords of the creation condescended to do was to fill the baskets; and I have been—no, I have not been, I was only offered to be—carried across sundry Highland rivers, upon the shoulders of the fairest nymphs which adorned their banks. But the Athens has got the better of all this, and her daughters have not only reduced the tyranny of their husbands to “flytings” and frailties, but have learned to pay them back with interest even in these. Thus the delay which had taken place in consequence of the grand parade of the men, and the small extra drill of the official men, by no means tended to lessen the commodity of curtain-lectures. There were other causes of vexation: the means by which a sufficiency of beauty had been procured were more precious than permanent; the delay of hope not only made the heart sick, but tended to pucker the skin, and, what was more vexatious than all, these careful dames, after they had trimmed themselves for the royal salute, would submit themselves to the salutation of no mere man in the interim. Wherefore, if any casualty had prevented this glorious feast, or even protracted it, the primum mobile of the city might have stood still, and the Athens might have been the Athens no more.

It being the only time during a century and a half, at the least, when the daughters of Scotia have had the flattering opportunity of flaunting their trains, flourishing their plumes, bowing in the presence of Majesty, and, finally, giving their cheeks to the glory and honour of the royal basial salutation,—and certainly the only time when a native royal drawing-room has been held in Scotland, since she had either much wealth or population to display,—it is not to be wondered at, that it produced corresponding anxiety among the fair. A random female here and there may, no doubt, have been in the royal presence, and there may be one or two cheeks which have before been made happy by the royal impress; but the greater, by far the greater part of the roses and lilies of Scotland were, up to this happy 21st of August, 1822, in virgin, but pitiable, ignorance of so much honour. It is not to be wondered at, then, that the preparations of this eventful day had their sources remote in the past, and the hopes of the fair ones groped their way far into the future; and if they had not made themselves gay upon the occasion, it would have been alien alike to the honour of their country and the disposition of the sex. Morning, noon, and night, had accordingly been spent at the mirror, and many a projection has been squeezed, and furrow smoothed, in order that for “Scotland’s glory,” and their own, they might appear as splendid, as gay, and as bewitching as possible, in the presence of their King and his nobles, and their own admirers. All this was most laudable; and as the fair ones, with their eyes, their candles, and their mirrors, literally frightened the reign of “old Night,” they merited forgiveness though they encouraged a little of that of “Chaos.”

So much of the fire of Scotland’s moral electricity, moving in such prime conductors, could not be supposed to confine either itself or its effects to the earth. Ere grey dawn, the sky wept at the eclipse of so many of its moons and stars by the radiance of the Venuses and Lunas of the Athens rising to their culmination; and, as it had not recovered in the morning, there was somewhat of pains-taking and pouting ere the coaches and chairs could receive the whole of their delectable burthens. Still, however, the ceremony was one which could not be put off, and so the ocean-swell of beauty collected, and nathless the drizzling rain, poured its eager tide toward the palace. When they arrived at the entrée-room, some of the colloquies which they held with each other were not a little amusing. If I could judge from the general strain of what I heard of them, the kiss—the downright and bona fide smack at royalty, without any of the leaven even of suspicion in it, was the thing which pleased them the most. Each was making sure too, (for there is a wonderful foresight in the women of Scotland as well as in the men,) that the jealousy which this high honour would excite, would procure a goodly harvest of future salutation. Some female Humes (not in name but in nature,) were propounding “sceptical doubts” upon the subject; and stating, with tears in their eyes, and terror on their brows, their apprehension, that it would be “but a sham after a’.”

One great object with the Caledonian fair seemed to be to prevent, as much as they could, the possibility of the ceremony’s being bungled, through the youth or inexperience of those who were to apply it. It had indeed been rumoured that the King hated all lips but such as had been mellowed by the suns, and mollified by the frosts, of forty seasons, and that young girls, as smelling of bread and butter, were peculiarly offensive to the royal organs; whereupon it was said, that the young maidens of Scotland were enjoined to abstain from the ceremony altogether, and that the full grown ones abstained from bread and butter during the whole period of their drill.

In consequence, while there never was a royal drawing-room so fresh and new in the dresses and ignorance of the fair attendants, there never perhaps was one in which the appearance of those attendants themselves was more sage and matured. Every lonely tower, in a remote glen, around whose grey battlements the hollow wind had whistled, “Nobody coming to marry me,” for more returnings of the falling leaf than it would be seemly to mention, poured forth its tall and time-learned damsels,—erewhile as grey as its walls, but now as green as the lichen with which they are incrusted, and as gorgeous as the sun whose beams find out the old tower the more easily, and gild them the more copiously, in proportion to the leaflessness of all around. With those mingled the dowagers and despairers of George’s Square, upon the thresholds of whose doors, and the graves of whose hopes, the grass had for more than moons waxed green apace. Nor were there wanting a few of somewhat more juvenile an aspect; abundance of manœuvring dames, who had exposed the precious wares of their own manufacture at all the marts and bazaars in the island; with other languishing and loving ladies whose number it were difficult to count.

But, in their zeal to suit the royal taste in the maturity of the greater part of the muster, they had rather overshot the mark. If the tale of that taste says sooth, the word “forty,” which is to be found in every country, and which, in single dignity and desire, is found more abundantly in Scotland, and especially in the Athens, than in any country, is preceded by the words “fat and fair,” which, in that land, and pre-eminently in that city, are among the desiderata. Hence, there perchance was never collected before a pair of royal eyes so many tall, gaunt, and ungainly figures, and never offered to the salutation of a pair of royal lips, so many sunken and sinewy cheeks. In their costumes, they were uncommonly splendid: sweeping trains of white satin, over spangled robes of various fancies, (in nowise emblematical of “white without and spotted within,”) were the predominant costumes; and, in number and in magnitude, the plumes of feathers which waved and nodded above, might have furnished all the beds, bolsters, and pillows, to the court of Og, the giant king of Bashan. In the dresses, too, there were all the advantage of contrast with the wearers: the one were as fresh and as new as the others were furrowed and old. And this did not escape the discriminating eye of the King, who, though he prudently abstained from all commendation on the score of beauty, was copious on that of cleanliness.

In their previous estimate of the royal taste, they had not calculated with their usual wisdom. To the more sage and skinny dames, the appulse was so slight and so brief, that before the agitation was over, the impression was gone; and, of the whole that attended, only one little and lovely girl could boast of a palpable and positive kiss.

I could not help being struck with the extreme solemnity of the whole. There was none of that jaunty lightness of step, and that soft and flexible twining of body, which I have remarked on similar occasions in other places. The whole moved on, solemn and erect, as though it had been the Scotch Greys approaching to a charge, or the Forty-second to a crossing of bayonets. Their features expressed intelligence in many instances, and pride in all, but I saw not such that I could call beauty. Their looks were highly characteristic: they were staid even to demureness, and they sailed toward the state apartment without a single movement of the eyes, or any thing which could be called a smile upon the countenance. Never perhaps did so great and so mingled an assembly of females display so much modesty,—modesty too which was not the modesty of subdued fire, but that of coal which seemed capable of resisting all powers of ignition. In the elder ones, the mouth had a character which no one could overlook: the days of labour which had been spent in giving plumpness to the lip were, in a great measure, rendered unavailing, by the force with which the corners of the mouth were drawn back, and the firmness with which its thread-like furnishings were brought together. It seemed indeed that they had been anxious to bring as much of this commodity to the solemnity, and set it apart as exclusively as possible for the use of their sovereign; for, fearful of deficiency in plumpness and breadth, they had laboured to make up for it in an extension of length; and two deep and decided curves, hedged it in, as though for the time it had been parenthetical,—set apart to the service of the King, and fortified by fosse and rampart against all the rest of the world.