CHAPTER IV.
THE ATHENS AND THE ATHENIANS IN GENERAL.
“A city set on an hill, which cannot be hid.”
In point of diversity of situation and beauty, and durability of building materials, few cities have the same advantages as the Athens; and I know of no city, of which the general and distant effect, upon what side soever one approaches it, is more picturesque and striking. But, as is the case with most things that look well as wholes, one is miserably disappointed when one comes to examine the details. The ground upon which the Athens is built bears some resemblance to a fort with a ditch and glacis. The Castle and High Street, with the clustered buildings on each side, compose the fort; the Cow-gate on the south, the Grass Market on the west, and the North Loch on the north, form the ditch, which bears some resemblance to a noose thrown round the Castle, and having the ends stretching away eastward by the Holyrood; and beyond this ditch the glacis slopes toward St. Leonard’s, the Loch of Duddingstone, and the Meadows on the south, and toward the water of Leith on the north. The central division, although its situation be very airy, and also very favourable for cleanliness, has nothing to boast of in either of these respects. The houses are so closely huddled together, that, excepting the High Street itself, which is rather spacious, the inhabitants may almost shake hands from the windows of the opposite houses; and they are built to such a height, that scarcely a glimpse of sunshine can find its way within two storeys of the foundations. In all this part of the Athens, there seems to be the greatest dislike to subways and common sewers; and thus, unless when the High Street is washed by a torrent of rain, it is by no means the most pleasant to perambulate. The southern ditch, or Cow-gate, is, throughout its whole extent, as filthy and squalid as can well be imagined; and, with the exception of a few public buildings, and one or two little squares, there is not much to be commended on the glacis beyond. Indeed the whole, southward of the North Loch, which the Athenians style the sublime part of their city, is more remarkable for the sublimation of mephitic effluvia than of any other thing. The new town again, or the portion between the North Loch and the water of Leith, is as dull as the other is dirty. The principal streets consist of long lines of stone building, without any break or ornament except wicket-doors and trap-hole windows, which render the whole very heavy, and induce one to believe that they are constructed with the intention of being as inaccessible and dark as possible. Princes Street, which is a single row, looking across the tasteless and unadorned gulf of the North Loch toward the beetling and shapeless masses of the old town, had originally been intended for private dwelling-houses, at the rate of a whole family per floor. Circumstances have changed, however. The Athenian fashionables (contrary to the natural tendency of the Scotch) have moved northwards; their places have been supplied by drapers from the Lawn Market, barbers from the Parliament Stairs, and booksellers from the Cross; and, as the immense weight of tall stone-houses renders the alteration of the ground-floor dangerous, without taking down and rebuilding the whole, the expense of which would be very great, Princes Street is perhaps the most tasteless and clumsy line of shops in the island of Great Britain; while, so anxious are the people to huddle upon the top of each other, that it is not uncommon to find four or five shops for very opposite kinds of wares, in a pile up and down the same stair-case. George Street is the most gloomy and melancholy that can well be imagined; and a walk along its deserted pavements is sufficient to give any one the blue devils for a week. Queen Street is longer, but not a whit more lively; and, though the view from it be both extensive and varied, it seems no great favourite with the Athenians. Farther to the north the buildings are newer, and there is occasionally an attempt at the recurrence of architectural ornaments at the end of certain lengths of the buildings; but these ornaments want taste in their form, and force in their projections, and thus increase the poverty of the effect. Throughout the whole private dwellings of the Athens, you are impressed with the cold eternity of stone and lime, and you look in vain for that airy elegance, that rich variety of taste, and that repose of comfort, which you find in other places. Villas, self-contained houses, and snug or even decent gardens, seem to be held in the greatest abhorrence. You meet not with one of the delightful little boxes which are scattered round London by thousands, and of which there are always a few in the vicinity of even third-rate towns in England. The ambition of the Athenians appears to be, to make every four stone walls a joint stock company, as dull, as tasteless, and as heavy, as a stack of warehouses in Thames Street.
Of all the objects of Athenian detestation, the greatest, however, seem to be decently laid out pleasure-grounds, and trees. Strangers used to say that the rustic Scotch cut down all sorts of bushes, because ghosts and spirits whistled in them on windy nights; and really, when I looked at the many fine situations in and about the Athens, which the Athenians have taken particular care neither to improve nor to plant, I could not help thinking that this superstition, now banished from every province in Scotland, has taken up its abode in the Scottish metropolis. True, they have a public walk round the Calton-Hill, but that is merely a thing of yesterday; and though they have placed upon the top of it a monument to Lord Nelson, modelled exactly after a Dutch skipper’s spy-glass, or a butter churn; an astronomical observatory, tasteful enough in its design, but not much bigger than a decent rat-trap, or a twelfth-cake at the Mansion-House; and are to build “the National Monument;” yet they have never thought of planting so much as a thistle, but have left the summit of the hill in all its native bleakness, and allowed it to be so much infested by lazy black-guards and bare-footed washerwomen, as to be unsafe for respectable females even at noon-day;—while after dusk this, the most fashionable promenade of the Athens, is habitually the scene of so much and so wanton vice, that instead of an ornament to the city, as it might easily be made, it is a nuisance and a disgrace.
The royal precinct of the Holyrood, which occupies a piece of rich level ground about the palace, and which stretches a considerable way up the romantic heights to the south, is, one would think, a chosen place for taste to display itself upon; and when there are taken into the account the boast of the Athenians that their Holyrood is the finest royal palace in Britain, and that other boast which is so habitual with them that there is no need of repeating it, one would imagine that among all their boasted improvements the royal precinct would not have been overlooked; but all that they appear to have done for it has been to make it as dirty and as desolate as ever they could. The whole filth of the old town (and that is no small commodity) is collected in cesspools within a few yards of the palace; and lest that should not be grateful enough to the Athenian olfactories, a considerable portion of the adjoining ground is set apart for the collection of manure from all places. Upon the other parts of the royal domain, about half a dozen of scraggy and withered trees, and an old thorn-hedge, more than half of which was when I viewed it reposing in the lap of its neighbour ditch, are the only attempts at landscape-gardening; and the grand-children of those by whom they were planted must, by this time, be in their graves or their dotage.
Salisbury Crags, again, are a natural object which the people of a less classical city would not only adore, but adorn by every means in their power. The Athenians act differently; their rulers hew down the picturesque masses of basalt, sell them at so much a cart-load, for paving the streets and Mac-Adamizing the highways, and put the proceeds into that bottomless box called the “common gude.” About midway up that bold front of these cliffs which looks towards the city, there is what may be termed an accidental public walk. It has been formed by the cutting away of the rock above for the purposes of gain, and the tumbling down of the smaller fragments which were not saleable. When the Athenian authorities were alarmed at the Radicals, and bestirred themselves in getting a general subscription for the relief of those whom the changes consequent upon the late war had thrown out of employment, a few labourers were set to work on the middle of this walk; but they had no plan and no superintendant, and the funds were exhausted before it could be made accessible at either end; while the whole face of the Crags, instead of being tufted with brushwood and festooned with creeping plants, as might have been done at very little expense, is as naked as—the shame of those who let it remain in its present condition.