Edinburgh, August 24, 1890.—A bright blue sky, across which many masses of thin white cloud are borne swiftly on the cool western wind, bends over the stately city, and all her miles of gray mansions and spacious, cleanly streets sparkle beneath it in a flood of summer sunshine. It is the Lord's Day, and most of the highways are deserted and quiet. From the top of the Calton Hill you look down upon hundreds of blue smoke-wreaths curling upward from the chimneys of the resting and restful town, and in every direction the prospect is one of opulence and peace. A thousand years of history are here crystallised within the circuit of a single glance, and while you gaze upon one of the grandest emblems that the world contains of a storied and romantic past, you behold likewise a living and resplendent pageant of the beauty of to-day. Nowhere else are the Past and the Present so lovingly blended. There, in the centre, towers the great crown of St. Giles. Hard by are the quaint slopes of the Canongate,—teeming with illustrious, or picturesque, or terrible figures of Long Ago. Yonder the glorious Castle Crag looks steadfastly westward,—its manifold, wonderful colours continuously changing in the changeful daylight. Down in the valley Holyrood, haunted by a myriad of memories and by one resplendent face and entrancing presence, nestles at the foot of the giant Salisbury Crag; while the dark, rivened peak of Arthur's Seat rears itself supremely over the whole stupendous scene. Southward and westward, in the distance, extends the bleak range of the Pentland Hills; eastward the cone of Berwick Law and the desolate Bass Rock seem to cleave the sea; and northward, beyond the glistening crystal of the Forth,—with the white lines of embattled Inchkeith like a diamond on its bosom,—the lovely Lomonds, the virginal mountain breasts of Fife, are bared to the kiss of heaven. It is such a picture as words can but faintly suggest; but when you look upon it you readily comprehend the pride and the passion with which a Scotsman loves his native land.
The Crown of St. Giles's.
Dr. Johnson named Edinburgh as "a city too well known to admit description." That judgment was proclaimed more than a hundred years ago,—before yet Caledonia had bewitched the world's heart as the haunted land of Robert Burns and Walter Scott,—and if it were true then it is all the more true now. But while the reverent pilgrim along the ancient highways of history may not wisely attempt description, which would be superfluous, he perhaps may usefully indulge in brief chronicle and impression,—for these sometimes prove suggestive to minds that are kindred with his own. Hundreds of travellers visit Edinburgh, but it is one thing to visit and another thing to see; and every suggestion, surely, is of value that helps to clarify our vision. This capital is not learned by driving about in a cab; for Edinburgh to be truly seen and comprehended must be seen and comprehended as an exponent of the colossal individuality of the Scottish character; and therefore it must be observed with thought. Here is no echo and no imitation. Many another provincial city of Britain is a miniature copy of London; but the quality of Edinburgh is her own. Portions of her architecture do indeed denote a reverence for ancient Italian models, while certain other portions reveal the influence of the semi-classical taste that prevailed in the time of the Regent, afterwards George the Fourth. The democratic tendency of this period,—expressing itself here precisely as it does everywhere else, in button-making pettiness and vulgar commonplace,—is likewise sufficiently obvious. Nevertheless, in every important detail of Edinburgh and of its life, the reticent, resolute, formidable, impetuous, passionate character of the Scottish race is conspicuous and predominant. Much has been said against the Scottish spirit,—the tide of cavil purling on from Dr. Johnson to Sydney Smith. Dignity has been denied to it, and so has magnanimity, and so has humour; but there is no audience more quick than the Scottish audience to respond either to pathos or to mirth; there is no literature in the world so musically, tenderly, and weirdly poetical as the Scottish literature; there is no place on earth where the imaginative instinct of the national mind has resisted, as it has resisted in Scotland, the encroachment of utility upon the domain of romance; there is no people whose history has excelled that of Scotland in the display of heroic, intellectual, and moral purpose, combined with passionate sensibility; and no city could surpass the physical fact of Edinburgh as a manifestation of broad ideas, unstinted opulence, and grim and rugged grandeur. Whichever way you turn, and whatever object you behold, that consciousness is always present to your thought,—the consciousness of a race of beings intensely original, individual, passionate, authoritative, and magnificent.
Scott's House in Edinburgh.
The capital of Scotland is not only beautiful but eloquent. The present writer does not assume to describe it, or to instruct the reader concerning it, but only to declare that at every step the sensitive mind is impressed with the splendid intellect, the individual force, and the romantic charm of the Scottish character, as it[252] is commemorated and displayed in this delightful place. What a wealth of significance it possesses may be indicated by even the most meagre record and the most superficial commentary upon the passing events of a traveller's ordinary day. The greatest name in the literature of Scotland is Walter Scott. He lived and laboured for twenty-four years in the modest three-story, gray stone house which is No. 39 Castle street. It has been my privilege to enter that house, and to stand in the room in which Scott began the novel of Waverley. Many years roll backward under the spell of such an experience, and the gray-haired man is a boy again, with all the delights of the Waverley Novels before him, health shining in his eyes, and joy beating in his heart, as he looks onward through vistas of golden light into a paradise of fadeless flowers and of happy dreams. The room that was Scott's study is a small one, on the first floor, at the back, and is lighted by one large window, opening eastward, through which you look upon the rear walls of sombre, gray buildings, and upon a small slope of green lawn, in which is the unmarked grave of one of Sir Walter's dogs. "The misery of keeping a dog," he once wrote, "is his dying so soon; but, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?" My attention was called to a peculiar fastening on the window of the study,—invented and placed there by Scott himself,—so arranged that the sash can be safely kept locked when raised a few inches from the sill. On the south side of the room is the fireplace, facing which he would sit as he wrote, and into which, of an evening, he has often gazed, hearing meanwhile the moan of the winter wind, and conjuring up, in the blazing brands, those figures of brave knights and gentle ladies that were to live forever in the amber of his magical art. Next to the study, on the same floor, is the larger apartment that was his dining-room, where his portrait of Claverhouse, now at Abbotsford, once hung above the mantel, and where so many of the famous people of the past enjoyed his hospitality and his talk. On the south wall of this room now hang two priceless autograph letters, one of them in the handwriting of Scott, the other in that of Burns. Both rooms are used for business offices now,—the house being tenanted by the agency of the New Zealand Mortgage Company,—and both are furnished with large presses, for the custody of deeds and family archives. Nevertheless these rooms remain much as they were when Scott lived in them, and his spirit seems to haunt the place. I was brought very near to him that day, for in the same hour was placed in my hands the original manuscript of his Journal, and I saw, in his handwriting, the last words that ever fell from his pen. That Journal is in two quarto volumes. One of them is filled with writing; the other half filled; and the lines in both are of a fine, small character, crowded closely together. Toward the last the writing manifests only too well the growing infirmity of the broken Minstrel,—the forecast of the hallowed deathbed of Abbotsford and the venerable and glorious tomb of Dryburgh. These are his last words: "We slept reasonably, but on the next morning"—and so the Journal abruptly ends. I can in no way express the emotion with which I looked upon those feebly scrawled syllables,—the last effort of the nerveless hand that once had been strong enough to thrill the heart of all the world. The Journal has been lovingly and carefully edited by David Douglas, whose fine taste and great gentleness of nature, together with his ample knowledge of Scottish literature and society, eminently qualify him for the performance of this sacred duty; and the world will possess this treasure and feel the charm of its beauty and pathos,—which is the charm of a great nature expressed in its perfect simplicity; but the spell that is cast upon the heart and the imagination by a prospect of the actual handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, in the last words that he wrote, cannot be conveyed in print.
The Maiden.
From the house in Castle street I went to the rooms of the Royal Society, where there is a portrait of Scott, by John Graham Gilbert, more lifelike,—being representative of his soul as well as his face and person,—than any other that is known. It hangs there, in company with other paintings of former presidents of this institution,—notably one of Sir David Brewster and one of James Watt,—in the hall in which Sir Walter often sat, presiding over the deliberations and literary exercises of his comrades in scholarship and art. In another hall I saw a pulpit in which John Knox used to preach, in the old days of what Dr. Johnson expressively called "The ruffians of Reformation," and hard by was "The Maiden," the terrible Scottish guillotine, with its great square knife, set in a thick weight of lead, by which the grim Regent Morton was slain, in 1581, the Marquis of Argyle, in 1661, and the gallant, magnanimous, devoted Earl of Argyle, in 1685,—one more sacrifice to the insatiate House of Stuart. This monster has drunk the blood of many a noble gentleman, and there is a weird, sinister suggestion of gratified ferocity and furtive malignity in its rude, grisly, uncanny fabric of blackened timbers. You may see, in the quaint little panelled chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, in the Cowgate, not distant from the present abode of the sanguinary Maiden,—brooding over her hideous consummation of slaughter and misery,—the place[257] where the mangled body of the heroic Argyle was laid, in secret sanctuary, for several nights after that scene of piteous sacrifice at the old Market Cross; and when you walk in the solemn enclosure of the Grayfriars church,—so fitly styled, by Sir Walter, The Westminster Abbey of Scotland,—your glance will fall upon a sunken pillar, low down upon the northern slope of that haunted, lamentable ground, which bears the letters "I. M.," and which marks the grave of the baleful Morton, whom the Maiden decapitated, for his share in the murder of Rizzio. In these old cities there is no keeping away from sepulchres. "The paths of glory," in every sense, "lead but to the grave." George Buchanan and Allan Ramsay, poets whom no literary pilgrim will neglect, rest in this churchyard, though the exact places of their interment are not positively denoted, and here, likewise, rest the elegant historian Robertson, and "the Addison of Scotland," Henry Mackenzie. The building in the High street in which Allan Ramsay once had his abode and his bookshop, and in which he wrote his pastoral of The Gentle Shepherd, is occupied now by a barber; but, since he is one that scorns not to proclaim over his door, in mighty letters, the poetic lineage of his dwelling, it seems not amiss that this haunt of the Muses should have fallen into such lowly hands. Of such a character, hallowed with associations that pique the fancy and touch the heart, are the places and the names that an itinerant continually encounters in his rambles in Edinburgh.