Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
CHAPTER III.
THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.
TIME has wrought its changes most notably around the
precincts of St. Giles's Church. The church itself, if
it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the
KRAMES are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its
buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it
poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's
must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance
now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling,
sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was
most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted
out, and not only a free fair-way left along the High
Street with an open space on either side of the church,
but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the
LANDS, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.
There is a silly story of a subterranean passage
between the Castle and Holyrood, and a bold Highland
piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made
his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey; the
curious footed it after him down the street, following
his descent by the sound of the chanter from below; until
all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles's, the
music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the
street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he
was choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was
removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt;
but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from
that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land
of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least
expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper
world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on
the stance besides St. Giles's, when they hear the drone
of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth
below their horses' feet.
But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a
solid bulk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the
air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into
the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the
Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather
to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust;
there is no more SQUALOR CARCERIS for merry debtors, no
more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but
the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of
the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-
ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles's Church,
running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of
the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those
ignorant of its history, I know only one token that
remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily
underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the
resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in
his own image, the indefatigable, undissuadable John
Knox. He sleeps within call of the church that so often
echoed to his preaching.
Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded
Charles Second, made of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied
charger. The King has his backed turned, and, as you
look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these
two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of the
way of all but legal traffic. On one side the south wall
of the church, on the other the arcades of the Parliament
House, enclose this irregular bight of causeway and
describe their shadows on it in the sun. At either end,
from round St. Giles's buttresses, you command a look
into the High Street with its motley passengers; but the
stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the Parliament
Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a
while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all
day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper; and to
judge by their quiet demeanour, you would think they were
waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The fact is
far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is
upon trial for his life, and these are some of the
curious for whom the gallery was found too narrow.
Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there
will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. Once
in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon
mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the
arcade listening to an agent; and at certain regular
hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.
The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking
incidents in Scottish history. Thus, when the Bishops
were ejected from the Convention in 1688, 'all fourteen
of them gathered together with pale faces and stood in a
cloud in the Parliament Close:' poor episcopal personages
who were done with fair weather for life! Some of the
west-country Societarians standing by, who would have
'rejoiced more than in great sums' to be at their
hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their
heads together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to
dethroned enemies; but one, at least, of the Societarians
had groaned in the BOOTS, and they had all seen their
dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the 'woeful
Union,' it was here that people crowded to escort their
favourite from the last of Scottish parliaments: people
flushed with nationality, as Boswell would have said,
ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at
the author of 'Robinson Crusoe' as he looked out of
window.
One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going
to pass his TRIALS (examinations as we now say) for the
Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a
vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small wonder, was
the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision
unsuitable to the locality; for after an hospital, what
uglier piece is there in civilisation than a court of
law? Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness
to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim,
gravitate to this low building with the arcade. To how
many has not St. Giles's bell told the first hour after
ruin? I think I see them pause to count the strokes, and
wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
sick at heart.
A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall
with a carved roof, hung with legal portraits, adorned
with legal statuary, lighted by windows of painted glass,
and warmed by three vast fires. This is the SALLE DES
PAS PERDUS of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious
custom, idle youths must promenade from ten till two.
From end to end, singly or in pairs or trios, the gowns
and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum of talk and
footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh
cause and call upon the names of those concerned.
Intelligent men have been walking here daily for ten or
twenty years without a rag of business or a shilling of
reward. In process of time, they may perhaps be made the
Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but
a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air.
To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on
cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink
a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and
devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and
to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so
small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have
made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
and count it the most arduous form of idleness.
More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges
of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience
where the supreme Lords sit by three or four. Here, you
may see Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote many
a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness,
and, as their Lordships do not altogether disdain
pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. The broadest
of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but the
courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have
a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat
law as a fine art, and relish and digest a good
distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must
be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
judge must utter forth his OBITER DICTA to delighted
brethren.
Besides the courts, there are installed under the
same roof no less than three libraries: two of no mean
order; confused and semi-subterranean, full of stairs and
galleries; where you may see the most studious-looking
wigs fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the very
place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters.
As the Parliament House is built upon a slope, although
it presents only one story to the north, it measures
half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after
range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places
are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You
descend one stone stair after another, and wander, by the
flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars.
Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead,
brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal
feet. Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on
the other side are the cells of the police office and the
trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the
Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there
lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many
a man's life has been argued away from him during long
hours in the court above. But just now that tragic stage
is empty and silent like a church on a week-day, with the
bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams
on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon a
room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with
PRODUCTIONS from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber:
lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a
shot-hole through the panel, behind which a man fell
dead. I cannot fancy why they should preserve them
unless it were against the Judgment Day. At length, as
you continue to descend, you see a peep of yellow
gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead;
next moment you turn a corner, and there, in a
whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt industriously
turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had
grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and
would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from end
to end with its mysterious labours. In truth, it is only
some gear of the steam ventilator; and you will find the
engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into
the sunlight. For all this while, you have not been
descending towards the earth's centre, but only to the
bottom of the hill and the foundations of the Parliament
House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open
heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines
garishly on the back windows of the Irish quarter; on
broken shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the
brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human
pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty
washing or a face at a window: the dwellers are abroad,
but they will return at night and stagger to their
pallets.
CHAPTER IV.
LEGENDS.
THE character of a place is often most perfectly
expressed in its associations. An event strikes root and
grows into a legend, when it has happened amongst
congenial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly
places, have the true romantic quality, and become an
undying property of their scene. To a man like Scott,
the different appearances of nature seemed each to
contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to
call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such
events ought with propriety to happen; and in this spirit
he made the LADY OF THE LAKE for Ben Venue, the HEART OF
MIDLOTHIAN for Edinburgh, and the PIRATE, so
indifferently written but so romantically conceived, for
the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North.
The common run of mankind have, from generation to
generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of
Scott; but where he created new things, they only forget
what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the
fittest, a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So,
in the low dens and high-flying garrets of Edinburgh,
people may go back upon dark passages in the town's
adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales
about the fire: tales that are singularly apposite and
characteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very
constitution of built nature in that part, and singularly
well qualified to add horror to horror, when the wind
pipes around the tall LANDS, and hoots adown arched
passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps
keeps quavering and flaring in the gusts.
Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter,
stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his blood
within a step or two of the crowded High Street. There,
people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering
their victims with their knees. Here, again, the fame of
Deacon Brodie is kept piously fresh. A great man in his
day was the Deacon; well seen in good society, crafty
with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing
a song with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome
the Deacon to supper, and dismissed him with regret at a
timeous hour, who would have been vastly disconcerted had
he known how soon, and in what guise, his visitor
returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable
Edinburgh burglar, but the one I have in my mind most
vividly gives the key of all the rest. A friend of
Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of these
great LANDS, had told him of a projected visit to the
country, and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it
off and stayed the night in town. The good man had lain
some time awake; it was far on in the small hours by the
Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a
faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a
false window which looked upon another room, and there,
by the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, was his good friend
the Deacon in a mask. It is characteristic of the town
and the town's manners that this little episode should
have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street
runner, a cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in
Amsterdam, and a last step into the air off his own
greatly-improved gallows drop, brought the career of
Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the
mind's eye, he may be seen, a man harassed below a
mountain of duplicity, slinking from a magistrate's
supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among the
closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.
Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some
memory lingers of the great plagues, and of fatal houses
still unsafe to enter within the memory of man. For in
time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp and
sudden, and what we now call 'stamping out contagion' was
carried on with deadly rigour. The officials, in their
gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's cross on back
and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a
staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they
buried on the Borough Muir; the living who had concealed
the sickness were drowned, if they were women, in the
Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged and
gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had
passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And
the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses.
Two generations back they still stood dark and empty;
people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off;
for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like
a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and
pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door
neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering
within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart.
Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by
our uncleanly forefathers to their own neglect.
And then we have Major Weir; for although even his
house is now demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear
herself of his unholy memory. He and his sister lived
together in an odour of sour piety. She was a marvellous
spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was
known among devout admirers by the name of Angelical
Thomas. 'He was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked
down to the ground; a grim countenance, and a big nose.
His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he
never went without his staff.' How it came about that
Angelical Thomas was burned in company with his staff,
and his sister in gentler manner hanged, and whether
these two were simply religious maniacs of the more
furious order, or had real as well as imaginary sins upon
their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the
reach of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough
that out of this superstitious city some such example
should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower
of dark and vehement religion. And at least the facts
struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable
family of myths. It would appear that the Major's staff
went upon his errands, and even ran before him with a
lantern on dark nights. Gigantic females, 'stentoriously
laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter' at
unseasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the
purlieus of his abode. His house fell under such a load
of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until
municipal improvement levelled the structure to the
ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery
how the devil's coach, drawn by six coal-black horses
with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the West Bow,
and belated people might see the dead Major through the
glasses.
Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A
legend I am afraid it may be, in the most discreditable
meaning of the term; or perhaps something worse - a mere
yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some vitality,
and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This
pair inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must
have been double-bedded; and it may have been of some
dimensions: but when all is said, it was a single room.
Here our two spinsters fell out - on some point of
controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly
that there was never a word spoken between them, black or
white, from that day forward. You would have thought
they would separate: but no; whether from lack of means,
or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep
house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon
the floor separated their two domains; it bisected the
doorway and the fireplace, so that each could go out and
in, and do her cooking, without violating the territory
of the other. So, for years, they coexisted in a hateful
silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly
visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at
night, in the dark watches, each could hear the breathing
of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
uglier spectacle than these sisters rivalling in
unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have
turned into a cabinet picture - he had a Puritanic vein,
which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
horror; he could have shown them to us in their
sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing
a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each other's
penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted
petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some
tempestuous evening; now sitting each at her window,
looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far below
them towards the firth, and the field-paths where they
had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew
upon them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands
began to tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily,
growing only the more steeled in enmity with years; until
one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach
of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary
be overstepped for ever.
Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history
of the race - the most perverse and melancholy in man's
annals - this will seem only a figure of much that is
typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
Forth - a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass
with strangers for a caricature. We are wonderful
patient haters for conscience sake up here in the North.
I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments
of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can
hear each other singing psalms across the street. There
is but a street between them in space, but a shadow
between them in principle; and yet there they sit,
enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other's
growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more
than two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family
of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and
run through the midst of many private homes. Edinburgh
is a city of churches, as though it were a place of
pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the
head of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors;
some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find
new ones in the building. Hence that surprising clamour
of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath
morning from Trinity and the sea-skirts to Morningside on
the borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of
Oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning,
and beautiful it was to hear. But in Edinburgh all
manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one
swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes
another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all
strike on the pained tympanum at the same punctual
instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of
discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired
to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars
in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells
in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry
of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate
conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own
synagogue, against 'right-hand extremes and left-hand
defections.' And surely there are few worse extremes
than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable
defections than this disloyalty to Christian love.
Shakespeare wrote a comedy of 'Much Ado about Nothing.'
The Scottish nation made a fantastic tragedy on the same
subject. And it is for the success of this remarkable
piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning
on the hills above the Forth. How many of them might
rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly
churches might be demolished and turned once more into
useful building material, if people who think almost
exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend
to worship God under the same roof! But there are the
chalk lines. And which is to pocket pride, and speak the
foremost word?
CHAPTER V.
GREYFRIARS.
IT was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the
Grey Friars: a new and semi-rural cemetery in those days,
although it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been
superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must have
had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their gardens
were situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the
tallest of the castle crags in front. Even now, it is
one of our famous Edinburgh points of view; and strangers
are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how
strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New
Greyfriars stands on the level at the top; a few thorns
are dotted here and there, and the ground falls by
terrace and steep slope towards the north. The open
shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the
margin, the place is girt by an array of aristocratic
mausoleums appallingly adorned.
Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong
to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to
my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly
illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake
the emblems of time and the great change; and even around
country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets
pealing for the Judgment Day. Every mason was a
pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death,
and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon
mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a
text. The classical examples of this art are in
Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by
contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so
apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look
with a smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes - some
crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing
on a scroll from angels' trumpets - on the emblematic
horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and
all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our
fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their
sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort
of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the
merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet;
but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect
of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious to
the point of melancholy.