Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
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Edinburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson
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EDINBURGH
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
THE ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits
overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of
three hills. No situation could be more commanding for
the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble
prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens
she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns.
To the east you may catch at sunset the spark of the May
lighthouse, where the Firth expands into the German
Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of
Stirling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one
of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be
beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched
with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east,
and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward
from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and
boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and
a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The
delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak
winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to
envy them their fate. For all who love shelter and the
blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual
tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a
more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many
such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the
imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end.
They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town
with the Old - that windiest spot, or high altar, in this
northern temple of the winds - and watch the trains
smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel
on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the passengers who
shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the
last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-
tops! And yet the place establishes an interest in
people's hearts; go where they will, they find no city of
the same distinction; go where they will, they take a
pride in their old home.
Venice, it has been said, differs from another
cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The rest may
have admirers; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers
in her train. And, indeed, even by her kindest friends,
Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These
like her for many reasons, not any one of which is
satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically, if
you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his
cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest
meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so
much beautiful as interesting. She is pre-eminently
Gothic, and all the more so since she has set herself off
with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity.
The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth
of Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a workman's
quarter and among breweries and gas works. It is a house
of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and
queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their
stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been
plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, - murder
has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held
his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all
these things of clay are mingled with the dust, the
king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to the vulgar;
but the stone palace has outlived these charges. For
fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for
tourists and a museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-
first, behold the palace reawakened and mimicking its
past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign,
sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night,
the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the
workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace
music. And in this the palace is typical. There is a
spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano
smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still
wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a
capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a
double existence; it has long trances of the one and
flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles,
it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are
armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see
the troops marshalled on the high parade; and at night
after the early winter even-fall, and in the morning
before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad
over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave
judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of
imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street
perhaps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon;
and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade;
tabard above, heather-mixture trowser below, and the men
themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic by-
standers. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread
the streets with a better presence. And yet these are
the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to
proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two-score
boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every
hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of
the streets, and every hour a double tide of students,
coming and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly,
one night in the springtime - or say one morning rather,
at the peep of day - late folk may hear voices of many
men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side
of the old High Street; and a little after, or perhaps a
little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in
unison from another church on the opposite side of the
way. There will be something in the words above the dew
of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling
together in unity. And the late folk will tell
themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion
of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments - the
parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many
admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in
this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.
Again, meditative people will find a charm in a
certain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its
odd and stirring history. Few places, if any, offer a
more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the
very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in
nature - a Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden
shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements
and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the
liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town.
From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed
look down upon the open squares and gardens of the
wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes
Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged
upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley
set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town
flutter in the breeze at its high windows. And then,
upon all sides, what a clashing of architecture! In this
one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily
forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind
another by the accidents of the ground, buildings in
almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and Greek
temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled
one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above
all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of
Arthur's Seat look down upon these imitations with a
becoming dignity, as the works of Nature may look down
the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more
indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way
frightened of a strong effect. The birds roost as
willingly among the Corinthian capitals as in the
crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight
clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation
portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out
everything into a glorified distinctness - or easterly
mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these
incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to
glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn in the
high windows across the valley - the feeling grows upon
you that this also is a piece of nature in the most
intimate sense; that this profusion of eccentricities,
this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-
scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day
reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all
the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the
familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend church, and
have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By
all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half
deserted and leaning towards decay; birds we might admit
in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few
gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these
citizens with their cabs and tramways, their trains and
posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists,
they make free with historic localities, and rear their
young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human
indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat
clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little
air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the
least striking feature of the place. *
* These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my
native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals
of Glasgow. I confess the news caused me both pain and
merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow-
townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations?
Small blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an
excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not, that ever
I heard, a subject of reproach; decency of linen is a
mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude
one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault
it the city calls for something more specious by way of
inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place
upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a
Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
console themselves - they do as well as anybody else; the
population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as
rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the
Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of
gold; I HAVE NOT YET WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT GLASGOW.
And the story of the town is as eccentric as its
appearance. For centuries it was a capital thatched with
heather, and more than once, in the evil days of English
invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to
ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous
nobles, not only on Greenside, or by the King's Stables,
where set tournaments were fought to the sound of
trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence,
but in every alley where there was room to cross swords,
and in the main street, where popular tumult under the
Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish
clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace John Knox
reproved his queen in the accents of modern democracy.
In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like
so many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old
Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James VI., would
gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly
look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves
around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet
Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day
and night with 'tearful psalmns' to see Edinburgh
consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or
Gomorrah. There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked,
covenanting heroes, offered up the often unnecessary, but
not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade
eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly
friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down
by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty
dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their
horses' tails - a sorry handful thus riding for their
lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a
different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to
the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There
Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish incredulity;
there, a few years afterwards, David Hume ruined
Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed
citizen; and thither, in yet a few years more, Burns came
from the plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief
and artificial letters. There, when the great exodus was
made across the valley, and the New Town began to spread
abroad its draughty parallelograms, and rear its long
frontage on the opposing hill, there was such a flitting,
such a change of domicile and dweller, as was never
excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler succeeded
the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's
chimney; what had been a palace was used as a pauper
refuge; and great mansions were so parcelled out among
the least and lowest in society, that the hearthstone of
the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.
CHAPTER II.
OLD TOWN - THE LANDS.
THE Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief
characteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view,
the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most
common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the
whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since
everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of
art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits
as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
on the new quarters that lie around it, on the
sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back
it up. If you were to set it somewhere else by itself,
it would look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder and
loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and
fantastic modern city; for there the two re-act in a
picturesque sense, and the one is the making of the
other.
The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of
diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the
waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the
west. On the one side of it and the other the new towns
of the south and of the north occupy their lower,
broader, and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of
the Castle over-tops the whole city and keeps an open
view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on every
side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on
the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town
blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A city that
is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this distant
aspect that she got her nickname of AULD REEKIE. Perhaps
it was given her by people who had never crossed her
doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs,
they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and
the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to
them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place,
it could be all expressed in these two words.
Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is
properly smoked; and though it is well washed with rain
all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among
its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious
situations, not in extent, but in height and density.
Public buildings were forced, wherever there was room for
them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thorough - fares
were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as
in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population
slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction.
The tallest of these LANDS, as they are locally termed,
have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the
cliff of building which hangs imminent over Waverley
Bridge would still put many natural precipices to shame.
The cellars are already high above the gazer's head,
planted on the steep hill-side; as for the garret, all
the furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it commands a
famous prospect to the Highland hills. The poor man may
roost up there in the centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a
peep of the green country from his window; he shall see
the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with
their broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing
overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the
city; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic
pureness, and bring a smack of the sea or of flowering
lilacs in the spring.
It is almost the correct literary sentiment to
deplore the revolutionary improvements of Mr. Chambers
and his following. It is easy to be a conservator of the
discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
qualities we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in
driving streets through the black labyrinth, a few
curious old corners have been swept away, and some
associations turned out of house and home. But what
slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been
let in! And what a picturesque world remains untouched!
You go under dark arches, and down dark stairs and
alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a hand on
either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing
dangles above washing from the windows; the houses bulge
outwards upon flimsy brackets; you see a bit of sculpture
in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few
crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a
court where the children are at play and the grown people
sit upon their doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire
shows itself above the roofs. Here, in the narrowest of
the entry, you find a great old mansion still erect, with
some insignia of its former state - some scutcheon, some
holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local
antiquary points out where famous and well-born people
had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head
of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The
Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old
war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far
way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful in
these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath.
Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at
the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with
loiterers.
These loiterers are a true character of the scene.
Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have paused on their way
to a job, debating Church affairs and politics with their
tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
different order - skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot
children; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform
of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl;
among these, a few surpervising constables and a dismal
sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from higher ranks
in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like
a brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where
the traffic is mostly centred in five or six chief
streets, the same face comes often under the notice of an
idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of
small towns. It is scarce possible to avoid observing
your neighbours; and I never yet heard of any one who
tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward
travellers for some stages on the road to ruin. One man
must have been upwards of sixty before I first observed
him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in
broad-cloth of the best. For three years he kept falling
- grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted
coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders
growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his
head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was
standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment
daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear him
laugh. There was something heart-breaking in this
gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have
thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these
calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by
that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass
quietly and honourably into the grave.
One of the earliest marks of these DEGRINGOLADES is,
that the victim begins to disappear from the New Town
thoroughfares, and takes to the High Street, like a
wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the type
of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A
scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in sentiment where
there is a washing at every window. The old man, when I
saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the
gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave
him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
It is true that the over-population was at least as
dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-
days some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore
have been fortunately pretermitted. But an aggregation
of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and
divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these
houses in the past - perhaps the more the merrier. The
glasses clink around the china punch-bowl, some one
touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on
the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the
red firelight. That is not an ugly picture in itself,
nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All the better
if the like were going on in every second room; the LAND
would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
In one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together;
and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach
of want. The great hotel is given over to discomfort
from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere a
pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a
birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-
bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon
the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling to
dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the
first; only a robust soul, you would think, could grow up
in such conditions without hurt. And even if God tempers
His dispensations to the young, and all the ill does not
arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
such a way of living is disquieting to people who are
more happily circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere
more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned
already how, to the stroller along Princes Street, the
High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is
true, there is a garden between. And although nothing
could be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes the
opposition is more immediate; sometimes the thing lies in
a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of grass
between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge
and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to
view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of
an eye.
One night I went along the Cowgate after every one
was a-bed but the policeman, and stopped by hazard before
a tall LAND. The moon touched upon its chimneys, and
shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no light
anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood
there it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of
quiet sounds from the interior; doubtless there were many
clocks ticking, and people snoring on their backs. And
thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself
faintly audible in my ears, family after family
contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole
pile beating in tune to its timepieces, like a great
disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a
fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the
time, and gave me an imaginative measure of the
disproportion between the quantity of living flesh and
the trifling walls that separated and contained it.
There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every
circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the
LAND in the High Street. The building had grown rotten
to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up
so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and
reverberations sounded through the house at night; the
inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed
their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had
even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and
returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-
respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning,
the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar
and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical
shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock
travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs.
The church-bells never sounded more dismally over
Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a
brave harvest, and, like Samson, by pulling down one
roof, destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have
forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered,
there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle
still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap
picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney. So, by
this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty
families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years.
The LAND had fallen; and with the LAND how much! Far in
the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the
sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted
place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in
New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could
exclaim with truth: 'The house that I was born in fell
last night!'