The Queens first remark on the Scotch coast, though it happened to be the comparatively tame east coast, was "very beautiful—so dark, rocky, bold, and wild—totally unlike our coast." All her observations had the naive freshness and sympathetic willingness to be pleased, of an unexhausted, unvitiated mind. She noticed everything, and was gratified by details which would have signified nothing to a sated, jaded nature, or, if they had made an impression, would only have called forth more weariness, varied by contemptuous criticism. The longer light in the north, that dear summer gloaming which is neither night nor day, but borrows something from both—from the silence and solemn mystery of the latter, and from the clear serenity of the former—a leisure time which is associated from youth to age with a host of happy, tender associations; the pipes playing in one of the fishing-boats; the reel danced on board an attendant steamer; the bonfires on the coast—nothing was too trivial to escape the interested watcher, or was lost upon her, Queen though she was.
The anchor of the royal yacht was let down in Leith Roads at midnight. At seven o'clock on the morning of the 1st of September the Queen saw before her the good town of Leith, where Queen Mary had landed from France; and in the background, Edinburgh half veiled in an autumn fog, lying at the foot of its semicircle of hills—the grim couchant lion of Arthur's seat; Salisbury Crags, grey and beetling; the heatherly slopes of the Pentlands in the distance. A little after eight her Majesty landed at Granton Pier, amidst the cheers of her Scotch subjects. The Duke of Buccleugh, whose public-spirited work the pier was, stood there to receive his sovereign, when she put her foot on shore, as he had already been on board the yacht to greet her arrival in what was once called Scotland Water.
When Queen Mary landed at Leith, it took her more than one day, if we remember rightly, to make a slow progress to her capital. Things are done faster in the nineteenth century; a few minutes by railway now separate Granton from Edinburgh. But the Edinburgh and Granton railway did not exist in 1842. Her Majesty and the Prince drove in a barouche, followed by the ladies and gentlemen of her suite in other carriages, and escorted by the Duke of Buccleugh and several gentlemen on horseback, to the ancient city of her Stewart ancestry. An unfortunate misconception robbed the occasion of the dignified ceremony and the exhibition of fervent personal attachment which had awaited it. All the previous day the authorities and the crowd had been on the look-out for the great event, and in the delay had passed the time quite happily in watching the preparations, and the decorations and devices for the coming illumination. The Lord Provost, Sir James Forrest, had taken the precaution to send a carriageful of bailies over night, or by dawn of day, to catch the first sign of the Queen's landing, and drive with it, post-haste, to the chief magistrate, who with his fellows was to be stationed at the barrier erected in the High Street, to present the keys of the city to the sovereign claiming admittance. But whether the bailies blundered over their instructions or slept at their post, or lost their way, no warning of the Queen's approach reached the Provost and his satellites in time. They were calm in the confident persuasion that the Queen would not arrive till noon—at the soonest—a persuasion which was based on the conviction that the event was too great to be hurried over, and which left out of sight the consideration of the disagreeable sea-voyage, and the natural desire to be on solid ground, and at rest, on the part of the travel-tossed voyagers. "We both felt dreadfully tired and giddy," her Majesty wrote of herself and the Prince when they reached Dalkeith.
The result was that these gentlemen in office were seated at breakfast as usual, or were engaged in getting rid betimes of some of the numerous engagements which beset busy men on a busy day, when the cry arose that the Queen was there, in the midst of them, with nobody to meet her, no silver keys on a velvet cushion to be respectfully offered and graciously returned. The ancient institution of the Royal Archer Guard, one of the chief glories of the situation, was only straggling by twos and threes to its muster-ground. The Celtic Society was in a similar plight, headed in default of the Duke of Argyle by the Marquis of Lorn, a golden-haired stripling in a satin kilt of the Campbell set, who looked all the slighter and more youthful, with more dainty calves in his silken hose, because of the big burly chieftains—Islay conspicuous among them—whom he led. The stands, the windows, the very grand old streets were half empty as yet, in the raw September morning. No King or Queen had visited Edinburgh for a score of years, and when at last the Queen of Hearts did come, the citizens were found napping—a sore mortification with which her Majesty deals very gently in her Journal, scarcely alluding to the inopportune accident. In truth only a moiety of early risers—those mostly country folks who had trooped into the town—restless youthful spirits, ardent holiday-makers, who could not find any holiday too long—or gallant devoted innocent Queen-worshippers, sleepless with the thought that the Queen was so near and might already be stirring—were abroad and intent on what was passing, looking at the vacant places, speculating on how they would be choke full in a couple of hours, amusing themselves easily with the idlest trifles, by way of whetting the appetite for the great sight, which they were to remember all their lives. These spectators were startled by seeing a gentleman, said afterwards to have been Lord John Scott, the popular but somewhat madcap brother of the Duke of. Buccleugh, gallop up the street bareheaded, waving his hat above his head and shouting "The Queen, the Queen!" The listeners looked at each other and laughed. How well the hoax was gone about; but who would presume to play such a trick, it was too much even from Lord John—did not somebody say it was Lord John? On the line of route too! What were the police thinking of?
Then swift corroboration followed, in the train of carriages rolling up, the first attended by a few of the Royal Archers, in their picturesque costumes of green and gold, each with his bow in one hand and his arrows in his belt. But the calmest had his equanimity disturbed by the consciousness that the main body of his comrades, all noblemen and gentlemen of Scotland, were running pell-mell behind, in a desperate effort to form into rank and march in due order. One eager confused glance, one long-drawn breath, one vehement heart-throb for her who was the centre of all, and the disordered pageant had swept past.
The Queen wrote in her Journal that the Duke of Roxburgh and Lord Elcho were the members of the Body Guard on her side of the carriage, and that Lord Elcho, whom she did not know at the time, pointed out the various monuments and places of interest.
Both the Queen and Prince Albert were much struck by the beautiful town, the massive stone houses, the steep High Street, the tall buildings, "and the Castle on the grand rock in the middle of the town, and Arthur's Seat in the background, a splendid spectacle."
On the country road to Dalkeith, the cottages built of stone, the walls ("dry stane dykes") instead of fences, the old women in their close caps ("sou-backed mutches"), the girls and children of the working classes, with flowing hair, often red, and bare feet, all the little individual traits, which impress us on our first visit to a foreign country, were carefully noted down. The Duke and Duchess of Buccleugh proved a noble host and hostess, but they could provide no such cicerone for the Queen as was furnished for George IV., when Sir Walter Scott showed him Edinburgh, and for the Governor of the Netherlands, when Rubens introduced him to Antwerp. Neither did any peer or chief appear on the occasion of the Queen's visit, with such a telling accompaniment as that ruinous "tail" of wild Highlanders, attached to Glengarry, when he waited on the King.
On the "rest day," which succeeded that of her Majesty's arrival at Dalkeith, she had three fresh experiences, chronicled in her Journal. She tasted oatmeal porridge, which she thought "very good," and "Finnan haddies," of which she gave no opinion, and she was stopped and turned back in her drive by "a Scotch mist." Indeed, not all the Queen's proverbial good luck in the matter could now or at any future time greatly modify the bane of open-air enjoyment amidst the beautiful scenery of Scotland—the exceedingly variable, even inclement, weather which may be met with at all seasons.
Saturday, the 3rd of September, afforded abundant compensation for all that had been missed on the Queen's entrance into Edinburgh. She paid an announced and formal visit from Dalkeith Palace to the town, in order to accomplish the balked ceremony of the presentation of the keys and to see the Castle on its historic rock. By Holyrood Chapel and Holyrood Palace, which the Queen called "a royal-looking old place," but where she did not tarry now, because there was fever in the neighbourhood; up the old world Cannon-gate, and the High Street, where the Setouns and the Leslies had their brawl, and the Jacobites went with white cockades in their cocked hats and white roses at their breasts, braving the fire of the Castle, to pay homage to Prince Charlie; on to the barrier. Edinburgh was wide awake this time. The streets were densely crowded, every window, high and low, in the tall grey houses framed a galaxy of faces, stands had been erected, and platforms thrown out wherever stand and platform could find space. The very "leads" of the public buildings bore their burden of sightseers. The Lord Provost and his bailies stood ready, and the Queen came wearing the royal Stewart tartan, "A' fine colours but nane o' them blue," to show that she was akin to the surroundings. She heard and replied to the speech made to her by the representative of the old burghers, and gave him back the token of his rule. She reached the Castle, after having passed the houses of Knox and the Earl of Moray. She saw the Scotch regalia, and heard anew how it had once been saved by a minister's brave wife, who carried it hidden in a bundle of yarn in her lap, out of the northern castle, which was in the hands of the enemy; and how it had been concealed again—only too well, forgotten in the course of a generation or two, and actually lost sight of for a hundred years. She entered the room, "such a very, very small room," she wrote, in her wonder at the rude and scanty accommodation of those days, in which James VI. was born. No doubt "Mons Meg," the old Flemish cannon and grim darling of the fortress, was presented to her. But what seems to have moved her most was the magnificent view, which included the rich Lothians and the silver shield of the Frith, and stretched, but only, when the weather was fine enough, in the direction of Stirlingshire, to the round-backed Ochils and the blue giants, the Grampians, while at her feet lay the green gardens of Princes Street and the handsome street itself—once the Nor' Loch and the Burgh Muir—Allan Ramsay's house and Heriot's Hospital, or "Wark," the princely gift of the worthy jeweller to his native town.