Grayfriars Church.
High Street—Allan Ramsay's Shop.
The pilgrim could muse for many an hour over the little Venetian mirror[50] that hangs in the bedroom of Mary Stuart, in Holyrood Palace. What faces and what scenes it must have reflected! How often her own beautiful countenance and person,—the dazzling eyes, the snowy brow, the red gold hair, the alabaster bosom,—may have blazed in its crystal depths, now tarnished and dim, like the record of her own calamitous and wretched days! Did those lovely eyes look into this mirror, and was their glance scared and tremulous, or fixed and terrible, on that dismal February night, so many years ago, when the fatal explosion in the Kirk o' Field resounded with an echo that has never died away? Who can tell? This glass saw the gaunt and livid face of Ruthven, when he led his comrades of murder into that royal chamber, and it beheld Rizzio, screaming in mortal terror, as he was torn from the skirts of his mistress and savagely slain before her eyes. Perhaps, also, when that hideous episode was over and done with, it saw Queen Mary and her despicable husband the next time they met, and were alone together, in that ghastly room. "It shall be dear blood to some of you," the queen had said, while the murder of Rizzio was doing. Surely, having so injured a woman, any man with eyes to see might have divined his fate, in the perfect calm of her heavenly face and the smooth tones of her gentle voice, at such a moment as that. "At the fireside tragedies are acted,"—and tragic enough must have been the scene of that meeting, apart from human gaze, in the chamber of crime and death. No other relic of Mary Stuart stirs the imagination as that mirror does,—unless, perhaps, it be the little ebony crucifix, once owned and reverenced by Sir Walter Scott and now piously treasured at[260] Abbotsford, which she held in her hands when she went to her death, in the hall of Fotheringay Castle.
The Canongate.
Holyrood Palace, in Mary Stuart's time, was not of its present shape. The tower containing her rooms was standing, and from that tower the building extended eastward to the abbey, and then it veered to the south. Much of the building was destroyed by fire in 1544, and again in Cromwell's time, but both church and palace were rebuilt. The entire south side, with its tower that looks directly towards the crag, was added in the later period of Charles the Second. The furniture in Mary Stuart's room is partly spurious, but the rooms are genuine. Musing thus, and much striving to reconstruct those strange scenes of the past, in which that beautiful, dangerous woman bore so great a part, the pilgrim strolls away into the Canongate,—once clean and elegant, now squalid and noisome,—and still the storied figures of history walk by his side or come to meet him at every close and wynd. John Knox, Robert Burns, Tobias Smollett, David Hume, Dugald Stuart, John Wilson, Hugh Miller, Gay, led onward by the blithe and gracious Duchess of Queensberry, and Dr. Johnson, escorted by the affectionate and faithful James Boswell, the best biographer that ever lived,—these and many more, the lettered worthies of long ago, throng into this haunted street and glorify it with the rekindled splendours of other days. You cannot be lonely here. This it is that makes the place so eloquent and so precious. For what did those men live and labour? To what were their shining talents and wonderful forces devoted? To the dissemination of learning; to the emancipation of the human mind from the bondage of error; to the ministry of the beautiful,—and thus to the advancement of the human race in material comfort, in gentleness of thought, in charity of conduct, in refinement of manners, and in that spiritual exaltation by which, and only by which, the true progress of mankind is at once accomplished and proclaimed.
HOLYROOD CASTLE
AND
ARTHUR'S SEAT