CHAPTER VII
THE BUILDING OF THE NEW TOWN: A STAMPEDE FOR FRESH AIR
Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee,
And either with their might of Babel old,
Or the rich Roman pomp of empery,
Might stand compare, highest in arts enrolled,
Highest in arms, brave tenement for the free
Who never crouch to thrones, nor sin for gold.
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills that curve her very streets,
As if to vindicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty;
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.
Arthur Hallam, Sonnet to Edinburgh.
TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,” however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea—a perfect El Dorado for the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood, with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock.
“Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “was on a homely and narrow scale. The College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes or dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the Poker Club in a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and
