Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Edinburgh Picturesque Notes
Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low
class present their backs to the churchyard. Only a few
inches separate the living from the dead. Here, a window
is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb; there,
where the street falls far below the level of the graves,
a chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and
a red pot looks vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell
of the graveyard finds its way into houses where workmen
sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes forward
visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness
of the enclosure, which lies apart from the town's
traffic, serves to accentuate the contrast. As you walk
upon the graves, you see children scattering crumbs to
feed the sparrows; you hear people singing or washing
dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen
on a clothes-pole flaps against funereal sculpture; or
perhaps the cat slips over the lintel and descends on a
memorial urn. And as there is nothing else astir, these
incongruous sights and noises take hold on the attention
and exaggerate the sadness of the place.
Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have
seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen of them seated on
the grass beside old Milne, the Master Builder, all sleek
and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed
upon strange meats. Old Milne was chaunting with the
saints, as we may hope, and cared little for the company
about his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly
side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my
eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town,
and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed
against the sky with the colourless precision of
engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from a
churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the
world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey,
dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and
the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts
and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-
digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country,
accompanied me into one after another of the cells and
little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of
old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human
effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of
his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket
with the date of his demise. He looked most pitiful and
ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic
precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten
deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew
familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round
him; and the world maintained the most entire
indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone. In
another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible
inside with damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of
black earth and an uncovered thigh bone. This was the
place of interment, it appeared, of a family with whom
the gardener had been long in service. He was among old
acquaintances. 'This'll be Miss Marg'et's,' said he,
giving the bone a friendly kick. 'The auld - !' I have
always an uncomfortable feeling in a graveyard, at sight
of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best forgotten;
but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.
People had been at some expense in both these cases: to
provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and
an insulting epithet in the other. The proper
inscription for the most part of mankind, I began to
think, is the cynical jeer, CRAS TIBI. That, if
anything, will stop the mouth of a carper; since it both
admits the worst and carries the war triumphantly into
the enemy's camp.
Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There
was one window in a house at the lower end, now
demolished, which was pointed out to me by the
gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
resurrection man, infamous for so many murders at five
shillings a-head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and
nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green.
In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly
finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had
taken refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the
church is the haunted mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie:
Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in the Covenanting
troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's
Hospital boy once harboured from the pursuit of the
police. The Hospital is next door to Greyfriars - a
courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day,
you may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-
Ring and Round the Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the
fugitive had managed to conceal himself in the tomb, his
old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to
smuggle him abroad. But his must have been indeed a
heart of brass, to lie all day and night alone with the
dead persecutor; and other lads were far from emulating
him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell,
his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly;
some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate
come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave. It was
thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord
Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear.
'Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye dar'!' sang the fool-
hardy urchins. But Sir George had other affairs on hand;
and the author of an essay on toleration continues to
sleep peacefully among the many whom he so intolerantly
helped to slay.
For this INFELIX CAMPUS, as it is dubbed in one of
its own inscriptions - an inscription over which Dr.
Johnson passed a critical eye - is in many ways sacred to
the memory of the men whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was
here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the
church-yard that extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from
Bothwell Bridge - fed on bread and water and guarded,
life for life, by vigilant marksmen - lay five months
looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while
the good work was going forward in the Grassmarket,
idlers in Greyfriars might have heard the throb of the
military drums that drowned the voices of the martyrs.
Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
George, there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth
Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in that
contention. There is no moorsman shot in a snow shower
beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is not one of the two
hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much as
a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American
plantations; but can lay claim to a share in that
memorial, and, if such things interest just men among the
shades, can boast he has a monument on earth as well as
Julius Caesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I
know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the
reader cares to learn how some of them - or some part of
some of them - found their way at length to such
honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one
who was their comrade in life and their apologist when
they were dead. Some of the insane controversial matter
I omit, as well as some digressions, but leave the rest
in Patrick Walker's language and orthography:-
'The never to be forgotten Mr. JAMES RENWICK TOLD
me, that he was Witness to their Public Murder at the
GALLOWLEE, between LEITH and EDINBURGH, when he saw the
Hangman hash and hagg off all their Five Heads, with
PATRICK FOREMAN'S Right Hand: Their Bodies were all
buried at the Gallows Foot; their Heads, with PATRICK'S
Hand, were brought and put upon five Pikes on the
PLEASAUNCE-PORT. . . . Mr. RENWICK told me also that it
was the first public Action that his Hand was at, to
conveen Friends, and lift their murthered Bodies, and
carried them to the West Churchyard of EDINBURGH,' - not
Greyfriars, this time, - 'and buried them there. Then
they came about the City . . . . and took down these Five
Heads and that Hand; and Day being come, they went
quickly up the PLEASAUNCE; and when they came to
LAURISTOUN Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they
durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their
Heads with their Bodies, which they designed; it being
present Death, if any of them had been found. ALEXANDER
TWEEDIE, a Friend, being with them, who at that Time was
Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them in his
Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay
45 Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the 10th of
OCTOBER 1681, and found the 7th Day of OCTOBER 1726.
That Piece of Ground lay for some Years unlaboured; and
trenching it, the Gardner found them, which affrighted
him the Box was consumed. Mr. SCHAW, the Owner of these
Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his
Summer-house: Mr. SCHAW'S mother was so kind, as to cut
out a Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days
there, where all had Access to see them. ALEXANDER
TWEEDIE, the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, There
was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor
Silver. DANIEL TWEEDIE, his Son, came along with me to
that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white
Rose-bush above them, and farther down the Yard a red
Rose-bush, which were more fruitful than any other Bush
in the Yard. . . . Many came' - to see the heads - 'out
of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many concerned
grave Men and Women favouring the Dust of our Martyrs.
There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the
Nineteenth Day of OCTOBER 1726, and every One of us to
acquaint Friends of the Day and Hour, being WEDNESDAY,
the Day of the Week on which most of them were executed,
and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the Hour that most
of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make a
compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of
fine Linen, the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed.
. . . Accordingly we kept the aforesaid Day and Hour, and
doubled the Linen, and laid the Half of it below them,
their nether jaws being parted from their Heads; but
being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness
to the Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman
broke with his Hammer; and according to the Bigness of
their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and drew the
other Half of the Linen above them, and stufft the Coffin
with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the chief
Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution; but this
we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy,
to make such Show of them, and inconsistent with the
solid serious Observing of such an affecting, surprizing
unheard-of Dispensation: But took the ordinary Way of
other Burials from that Place, to wit, we went east the
Back of the Wall, and in at BRISTO-PORT, and down the Way
to the Head of the COWGATE, and turned up to the Church-
yard, where they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb,
with the greatest Multitude of People Old and Young, Men
and Women, Ministers and others, that ever I saw
together.'
And so there they were at last, in 'their resting
graves.' So long as men do their duty, even if it be
greatly in a misapprehension, they will be leading
pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside
a martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe
haven somewhere in the providence of God. It is not well
to think of death, unless we temper the thought with that
of heroes who despised it. Upon what ground, is of small
account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for his
faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and
makes us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the
martyrs' monument is a wholesome, heartsome spot in the
field of the dead; and as we look upon it, a brave
influence comes to us from the land of those who have won
their discharge and, in another phrase of Patrick
Walker's, got 'cleanly off the stage.'
CHAPTER VI.
NEW TOWN - TOWN AND COUNTRY.
IT is as much a matter of course to decry the New
Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated
authorities have picked out this quarter as the very
emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may
be said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to
the unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it
only pleases them, the New Town of Edinburgh seems, in
itself, not only gay and airy, but highly picturesque.
An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of
the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most
radiant notion for Paradise: 'The new town of Edinburgh,
with the wind a matter of a point free.' He has now gone
to that sphere where all good tars are promised pleasant
weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly
somewhat higher. But there are bright and temperate days
- with soft air coming from the inland hills, military
music sounding bravely from the hollow of the gardens,
the flags all waving on the palaces of Princes Street -
when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and
shaken hands in sentiment with the old sailor. And
indeed, for a man who has been much tumbled round
Orcadian skerries, what scene could be more agreeable to
witness? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising
air of festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put
my meaning) as if it were a trifle too good to be true.
It is what Paris ought to be. It has the scenic quality
that would best set off a life of unthinking, open-air
diversion. It was meant by nature for the realisation of
the society of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the
climate were but towardly, how all the world and his wife
would flock into these gardens in the cool of the
evening, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant drinks,
to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine
upon the spires and monuments and the green tree-tops in
the valley. Alas! and the next morning the rain is
splashing on the windows, and the passengers flee along
Princes Street before the galloping squalls.
It cannot be denied that the original design was
faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the
capabilities of the situation. The architect was
essentially a town bird, and he laid out the modern city
with a view to street scenery, and to street scenery
alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had
never lifted his eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen,
every street upon the northern slope might have been a
noble terrace and commanded an extensive and beautiful
view. But the space has been too closely built; many of
the houses front the wrong way, intent, like the Man with
the Muck-Rake, on what is not worth observation, and
standing discourteously back-foremost in the ranks; and,
in a word, it is too often only from attic-windows, or
here and there at a crossing, that you can get a look
beyond the city upon its diversified surroundings. But
perhaps it is all the more surprising, to come suddenly
on a corner, and see a perspective of a mile or more of
falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a
blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the farther side.
Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model, once
saw a butterfly at the Town Cross; and the sight inspired
him with a worthless little ode. This painted country
man, the dandy of the rose garden, looked far abroad in
such a humming neighbourhood; and you can fancy what
moral considerations a youthful poet would supply. But
the incident, in a fanciful sort of way, is
characteristic of the place. Into no other city does the
sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a
butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-
away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of
theatre tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an
arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land
you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy
tenement in a lane:- and behold! you are face-to-face
with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner,
and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.
You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the
Baltic.
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-
tops, is one thing; it is another for the citizen, from
the thick of his affairs, to overlook the country. It
should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life; it
should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots
officeward, how the Spring green brightens in the wood or
the field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I have
been tempted, in this connexion, to deplore the slender
faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a
voice, its dull cars, and its narrow range of sight. If
you could see as people are to see in heaven, if you had
eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, if you
could take clear note of the objects of vision, not only
a few yards, but a few miles from where you stand:- think
how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you
walked the Edinburgh streets! For you might pause, in
some business perplexity, in the midst of the city
traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he
sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the
Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in a
country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his
flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing seawards,
with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in
the wind, would fling you a salutation from between
Anst'er and the May.
To be old is not the same thing as to be
picturesque; nor because the Old Town bears a strange
physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town
shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique
houses, it is curious how much description would apply
commonly to either. The same sudden accidents of ground,
a similar dominating site above the plain, and the same
superposition of one rank of society over another, are to
be observed in both. Thus, the broad and comely approach
to Princes Street from the east, lined with hotels and
public offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the Low
Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet, you look
direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of
Leith Street; and the same tall houses open upon both
thoroughfares. This is only the New Town passing
overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to speak,
over its own children, as is the way of cities and the
human race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a
spectacle of a more novel order. The river runs at the
bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between gardens;
the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most
commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and
a handsome bridge unites the two summits. Over this,
every afternoon, private carriages go spinning by, and
ladies with card-cases pass to and fro about the duties
of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with
its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of
Dean. Modern improvement has gone overhead on its high-
level viaduct; and the extended city has cleanly
overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces
hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a
good few; but it is strange to see one still surviving -
and to see it some hundreds of feet below your path. Is
it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun
still shines upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still
rises thriftily from its chimneys; the dusty miller comes
to his door, looks at the gurgling water, hearkens to the
turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps
whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony - for
all the world as if Edinburgh were still the old
Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the
quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the green
country.
It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume
lent the authority of his example to the exodus from the
Old Town, and took up his new abode in a street which is
still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) known as
Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a
holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a
mile of his own door. There are places that still smell
of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard
a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, another was taken on
summer evenings to eat strawberries and cream; and you
have seen a waving wheatfield on the site of your present
residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but
partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on
many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among
lilacs full of piping birds; many an exploration in
obscure quarters that were neither town nor country; and
I think that both for my companions and myself, there was
a special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment
as of foreign travel, when we hit in our excursions on
the butt-end of some former hamlet, and found a few
rustic cottages embedded among streets and squares. The
tunnel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the
trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards
upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many
ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were
certainly things of paramount impressiveness to a young
mind. It was a subterranean passage, although of a
larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ainsworth's
novels; and these two words, 'subterreanean passage,'
were in themselves an irresistible attraction, and seemed
to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and
the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. To
scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens,
and lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was
to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And there
are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my
mind under a very strong illumination of remembered
pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will
compare with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old
Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with
which I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water
Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton Market.
They were more rural than the open country, and gave a
greater impression of antiquity than the oldest LAND upon
the High Street. They too, like Fergusson's butterfly,
had a quaint air of having wandered far from their own
place; they looked abashed and homely, with their gables
and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and
running mill-streams; there were corners that smelt like
the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils;
and the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they
might have done in Colinton or Cramond.
In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate this
haunting flavour of the country. The last elm is dead in
Elm Row; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread
apace on all the borders of the city. We can cut down
the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-
stones; we can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy
quarters; and we may forget the stories and the
playgrounds of our boyhood. But we have some possessions
that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly
abolish and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hills,
unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall subvert
Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her florid structures
in the dust. And as long as we have the hills and the
Firth, we have a famous heritage to leave our children.
Our windows, at no expense to us, are most artfully
stained to represent a landscape. And when the Spring
comes round, and the hawthorns begin to flower, and the
meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of
our streets, the country hilltops find out a young man's
eyes, and set his heart beating for travel and pure air.
CHAPTER VII.
THE VILLA QUARTERS.
MR. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the New Town of
Edinburgh includes, as I have heard it repeated, nearly
all the stone and lime we have to show. Many however
find a grand air and something settled and imposing in
the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the
confusion of styles induces an agreeable stimulation of
the mind. But upon the subject of our recent villa
architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with
Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious
of his large declamatory and controversial eloquence.