Part 2

The New Town is divided from the Old by a gorge or valley, now occupied by a railway station; and the means of communication are the Mound, Waverley Bridge, and the North Bridge. With the exception of the Canongate, the more filthy and tumble-down portions of the city are well kept out of sight. You stand on the South Bridge, and looking down, instead of a stream, you see the Cowgate, the dirtiest, narrowest, most densely peopled of Edinburgh streets. Admired once by a French ambassador at the court of one of the Jameses, and yet with certain traces of departed splendour, the Cowgate has fallen into the sere and yellow leaf of furniture brokers, second-hand jewellers, and vendors of deleterious alcohol. These second-hand jewellers' shops, the trinkets seen by bleared gaslight, are the most melancholy sights I know. Watches hang there that once ticked comfortably in the fobs of prosperous men, rings that were once placed by happy bridegrooms on the fingers of happy brides, jewels in which lives the sacredness of death-beds. What tragedies, what disruptions of households, what fell pressure of poverty brought them here! Looking in through the foul windows, the trinkets remind one of shipwrecked gold embedded in the ooze of ocean--gold that speaks of unknown, yet certain, storm and disaster, of the yielding of planks, of the cry of drowning men. Who has the heart to buy them, I wonder? The Cowgate is the Irish portion of the city. Edinburgh leaps over it with bridges; its inhabitants are morally and geographically the lower orders. They keep to their own quarters, and seldom come up to the light of day. Many an Edinburgh man has never set his foot in the street; the condition of the inhabitants is as little known to respectable Edinburgh as are the habits of moles, earth-worms, and the mining population. The people of the Cowgate seldom visit the upper streets. You may walk about the New Town for a twelvemonth before one of these Cowgate pariahs comes between the wind and your gentility. Should you wish to see that strange people "at home," you must visit them. The Cowgate will not come to you: you must go to the Cowgate. The Cowgate holds high drunken carnival every Saturday night; and to walk along it then, from the West Port, through the noble open space of the Grassmarket--where the Covenanters and Captain Porteous suffered--on to Holy rood, is one of the world's sights, and one that does not particularly raise your estimate of human nature. For nights after your dreams will pass from brawl to brawl, shoals of hideous faces will oppress you, sodden countenances of brutal men, women with loud voices and frantic gesticulations, children who have never known innocence. It is amazing of what ugliness the human face is capable. The devil marks his children as a shepherd marks his sheep--that he may know them and claim them again. Many a face flits past here bearing the sign-manual of the fiend.

[Sidenote: Intellectual greatness of Edinburgh.]

But Edinburgh keeps all these evil things out of sight, and smiles, with Castle, tower, church-spire, and pyramid rising into sunlight out of garden spaces and belts of foliage. The Cowgate has no power to mar her beauty. There may be a canker at the heart of the peach--there is neither pit nor stain on its dusty velvet. Throned on crags, Edinburgh takes every eye; and, not content with supremacy in beauty, she claims an intellectual supremacy also. She is a patrician amongst British cities, "A penniless lass wi' a lang pedigree." She has wit if she lacks wealth: she counts great men against millionaires. The success of the actor is insecure until thereunto Edinburgh has set her seal. The poet trembles before the Edinburgh critics. The singer respects the delicacy of the Edinburgh ear. Coarse London may roar with applause: fastidious Edinburgh sniffs disdain, and sneers reputations away. London is the stomach of the empire--Edinburgh the quick, subtle, far-darting brain. Some pretension of this kind the visitor hears on all sides of him. It is quite wonderful how Edinburgh purrs over her own literary achievements. Swift, in the dark years that preceded his death, looking one day over some of the productions of his prime, exclaimed, "Good heaven! what a genius I once was!" Edinburgh, looking some fifty years back on herself, is perpetually expressing astonishment and delight. Mouldering Highland families, when they are unable to retain a sufficient following of servants, fill up the gaps with ghosts. Edinburgh maintains her dignity after a similar fashion, and for a similar reason. Lord-Advocate Moncreiff, one of the members for the city, hardly ever addresses his fellow-citizens without recalling the names of Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd, and the other stars that of yore made the welkin bright. On every side we hear of the brilliant society of forty years ago. Edinburgh considers herself supreme in talent--just as it is taken for granted to-day that the present English navy is the most powerful in the world, because Nelson won Trafalgar. The Whigs consider the _Edinburgh Review_ the most wonderful effort of human genius. The Tories would agree with them, if they were not bound to consider _Blackwood's Magazine_ a still greater effort. It may be said that Burns, Scott, and Carlyle are the only men really great in literature--taking _great_ in a European sense--who, during the last eighty years, have been connected with Edinburgh. I do not include Wilson in the list; for although he was as splendid as any of these for the moment, he was evanescent as a Northern light. In the whole man there was something spectacular. A review is superficially very like a battle. In both there is the rattle of musketry, the boom of great guns, the deploying of endless brigades, charges of brazen squadrons that shake the ground--only the battle changes kingdoms, while the review is gone with its own smoke-wreaths. Scott lived in or near Edinburgh during the whole course of his life. Burns lived there but a few months. Carlyle went to London early, where he has written his important works, and made his reputation. Let the city boast of Scott--no one will say she does wrong in that--but it is not so easy to discover the amazing brilliancy of her other literary lights. Their reputations, after all, are to a great extent local. What blazes a sun at Edinburgh, would, if transported to London, not unfrequently become a farthing candle. [Sidenote: Lord Jeffrey.] Lord Jeffrey--when shall we cease to hear his praises? With perfect truthfulness one may admit that his lordship was no common man. His "vision" was sharp and clear enough within its range. He was unable to relish certain literary forms, as some men are unable to relish certain dishes--an inaptitude that might arise from fastidiousness of palate, or from weakness of digestion. His style was perspicuous; he had an icy sparkle of epigram and antithesis, some wit, and no enthusiasm. He wrote many clever papers, made many clever speeches, said many clever things. But the man who could so egregiously blunder as to "Wilhelm Meister," who hooted Wordsworth through his entire career, who had the insolence to pen the sentence that opens the notice of the "Excursion" in the _Edinburgh Review_, and who, when writing tardily, but really well, on Keats, could pass over the "Hyperion" with a slighting remark, might be possessed of distinguished parts, but no claim can be made for him to the character of a great critic. Hazlitt, wilful, passionate, splendidly-gifted, in whose very eccentricities and fierce vagaries there was a generosity which belongs only to fine natures, has sunk away into an almost unknown London grave, and his works into unmerited oblivion; while Lord Jeffrey yet makes radiant with his memory the city of his birth. In point of natural gifts and endowment--in point, too, of literary issue and result--the Englishman far surpassed the Scot. Why have their destinies been so different? One considerable reason is that Hazlitt lived in London--Jeffrey in Edinburgh. Hazlitt was partially lost in an impatient crowd and rush of talent. Jeffrey stood, patent to every eye, in an open space in which there were few competitors. London does not brag about Hazlitt--Edinburgh brags about Jeffrey. The Londoner, when he visits Edinburgh, is astonished to find that it possesses a Valhalla filled with gods--chiefly legal ones--of whose names and deeds he was previously in ignorance. The ground breaks into unexpected flowerage beneath his feet. He may conceive to-day to be a little cloudy--may even suspect east wind to be abroad--but the discomfort is balanced by the reports he hears on every side of the beauty, warmth, and splendour of yesterday. He puts out his hands and warms them, if he can, at that fire of the past. "Ah! that society of forty years ago! Never on this earth did the like exist. Those astonishing men, Horner, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Rutherfurd! What wit was theirs--what eloquence, what genius! What a city this Edinburgh once was!"

[Sidenote: A Scottish Weimar.]

Edinburgh is not only in point of beauty the first of British cities--but, considering its population, the general tone of its society is more intellectual than that of any other. In no other city will you find so general an appreciation of books, art, music, and objects of antiquarian interest. It is peculiarly free from the taint of the ledger and the counting-house. It is a Weimar without a Goethe--Boston without its nasal twang. But it wants variety; it is mainly a city of the professions. London, for instance, contains every class of people; it is the seat of legislature as well as of wealth; it embraces Seven Dials as well as Belgravia. In that vast community class melts imperceptibly into class, from the Sovereign on the throne to the wretch in the condemned cell. In that finely-graduated scale, the professions take their own place. In Edinburgh matters are quite different. It retains the gauds which royalty cast off when it went South, and takes a melancholy pleasure in regarding these--as a lady the love-tokens of a lover who has deserted her to marry into a family of higher rank. A crown and sceptre lie up in the Castle, but no brow wears the diadem, no hand lifts the golden rod. There is a palace at the foot of the Canongate, but it is a hotel for her Majesty, _en route_ for Balmoral--a place where the Commissioner to the Church of Scotland holds his phantom Court. With these exceptions, the old halls echo only the footfalls of the tourist and sight-seer. When royalty went to London, nobility followed; and in Edinburgh the field is left now, and has been so left for a long time back, to Law, Physic, and Divinity. [Sidenote: The professions in Edinburgh.] The professions predominate: than these there is nothing higher. At Edinburgh a Lord of Session is a Prince of the Blood, a Professor a Cabinet Minister, an Advocate an heir to a peerage. The University and the Courts of Justice are to Edinburgh what the Court and the Houses of Lords and Commons are to London. That the Scottish nobility should spend their seasons in London is not to be regretted for the sake of Edinburgh shopkeepers only--their absence affects interests infinitely higher. In the event of a superabundance of princes, and a difficulty as to what should be done with them, it has been frequently suggested that one should be stationed in Dublin, another in Edinburgh, to hold Court in these cities. Gold is everywhere preferred to paper; and in the Irish capital royalty in the person of Prince Patrick would be more satisfactory than its shadow in the person of a Lord-Lieutenant. A Prince of the Blood in Dublin would be gratefully received by the warm-hearted Irish people. His permanent presence amongst them would cancel the remembrance of centuries of misgovernment; it would strike away for ever the badge and collar of conquest. In Edinburgh we have _had_ princes of late years, and seen the uses of them. A prince at Holyrood would effect for the country what Scottish Rights' Associations and University reformers have so long desired. The nobility would again gather--for a portion of the year at least--to their ancient capital; and their sons, as of old, would be found in the University class-rooms. Under the new influence, life would be gayer, airier, brighter. The social tyranny of the professions would to some extent be broken up, the atmosphere would become less legal, and a new standard would be introduced whereby to measure men and their pretensions. For the Prince himself, good results might be expected. He would at the least have some specific public duties to perform; and he would, through intercourse, become attached to the people, as the people in their turn would become attached to him. Edinburgh needs some little gaiety and courtly pomp to break the coldness of gray stony streets; to brighten a somewhat sombre atmosphere; to mollify the east wind that blows half the year, and the "professional sectarianism" that blows the whole year round. You always suspect the east wind, somehow, in the city. You go to dinner: the east wind is blowing chillily from hostess to host. You go to church, a bitter east wind is blowing in the sermon. The text is that divine one, GOD IS LOVE; and the discourse that follows is full of all uncharitableness.

[Sidenote: Spiritual atmosphere of the city.]

Of all British cities, Edinburgh--Weimar-like in its intellectual and æsthetic leanings, Florence-like in its freedom from the stains of trade, and more than Florence-like in its beauty--is the one best suited for the conduct of a lettered life. The city as an entity does not stimulate like London, the present moment is not nearly so intense, life does not roar and chafe--it murmurs only; and this interest of the hour, mingled with something of the quietude of distance and the past--which is the spiritual atmosphere of the city--is the most favourable of all conditions for intellectual work or intellectual enjoyment. You have libraries--you have the society of cultivated men and women--you have the eye constantly fed by beauty--the Old Town, jagged, picturesque, piled up; and the airy, open, coldly-sunny, unhurried, uncrowded streets of the New Town--and, above all, you can "sport your oak," as they say at Cambridge, and be quit of the world, the gossip, and the dun. In Edinburgh, you do not require to create quiet for yourself; you can have it ready-made. Life is leisurely; but it is not the leisure of a village, arising from a deficiency of ideas and motives--it is the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history, which has done its work, which does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, to smelt its own iron. And then, in Edinburgh, above all British cities, you are released from the vulgarising dominion of the hour. The past confronts you at every street corner. The Castle looks down out of history on its gayest thoroughfare. The winds of fable are blowing across Arthur's Seat. Old kings dwelt in Holyrood. Go out of the city where you will, the past attends you like a cicerone. Go down to North Berwick, and the red shell of Tantallon speaks to you of the might of the Douglases. Across the sea, from the gray-green Bass, through a cloud of gannets, comes the sigh of prisoners. From the long sea-board of Fife--which you can see from George Street--starts a remembrance of the Jameses. Queen Mary is at Craigmillar, Napier at Merchiston, Ben Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, Prince Charles in the little inn at Duddingston; and if you go out to Linlithgow, there is the smoke of Bothwellhaugh's fusee, and the Great Regent falling in the crooked street. Thus the past checkmates the present. [Sidenote: Influence of the past.] To an imaginative man, life in or near Edinburgh is like residence in an old castle:--the rooms are furnished in consonance with modern taste and convenience; the people who move about wear modern costume, and talk of current events in current colloquial phrases; there is the last newspaper and book in the library, the air from the last new opera in the drawing-room; but while the hour flies past, a subtle influence enters into it--enriching, dignifying--from oak panelling and carvings on the roof--from the picture of the peaked-bearded ancestor on the wall--from the picture of the fanned and hooped lady--from the old suit of armour and the moth-eaten banner. On the intellectual man, living or working in Edinburgh, the light comes through the stained window of the past. To-day's event is not raw and _brusque_; it comes draped in romantic colour, hued with ancient gules and or. And when he has done his six hours' work, he can take the noblest and most renovating exercise. He can throw down his pen, put aside his papers, and walk round the Queen's Drive, where the wind from the sea is always fresh and keen; and in his hour's walk he has wonderful variety of scenery--the fat Lothians--the craggy hillside--the valley, which seems a bit of the Highlands--the wide sea, with smoky towns on its margin, and islands on its bosom--lakes with swans and rushes--ruins of castle, palace, and chapel--and, finally, homeward by the high towering street through which Scottish history has rushed like a stream. There is no such hour's walk as this for starting ideas, or, having started, captured, and used them, for getting quit of them again.

[Sidenote: Summer in Edinburgh.]

Edinburgh is at this moment in the full blaze of her beauty. The public gardens are in blossom. The trees that clothe the base of the Castle rock are clad in green: the "ridgy back" of the Old Town jags the clear azure. Princes Street is warm and sunny--'tis a very flower-bed of parasols, twinkling, rainbow-coloured. Shop windows are enchantment, the flag streams from the Halfmoon Battery, church-spires sparkle sun-gilt, gay equipages dash past, the military band is heard from afar. The tourist is already here in wonderful Tweed costume. Every week the wanderers increase, and in a short time the city will be theirs. By August the inhabitants have fled. The University lets loose, on unoffending humanity, a horde of juvenile M.D.'s warranted to dispense--with the sixth commandment. Beauty listens to what the wild waves are saying. Valour cruises in the Mediterranean; and Law, up to the knees in heather, stalks his stag on the slopes of Ben-Muich-dhui. Those who, from private and most urgent reasons, are forced to remain behind, put brown paper in their front windows; inform the world by placard that letters and parcels may be left at No. 26 round the corner, and live fashionably in their back-parlours. At twilight only do they adventure forth; and if they meet a friend--who ought like the rest of the world to be miles away--they have only of course come up from the sea-side, or their relation's shooting-box, for a night, to look after some imperative business. Tweed-clad tourists are everywhere: they stand on Arthur's Seat, they speculate on the birthplace of Mons Meg, they admire Roslin, eat haggis, attempt whisky-punch, and crowd to Dr Guthrie's church on Sundays. By October the last tourist has departed, and the first student has arrived. Tailors put forth their gaudiest fabrics to attract the eye of ingenuous youth. Whole streets bristle with "lodgings to let." Edinburgh is again filled. The University class-rooms are crowded; a hundred schools are busy; and Young Briefless,

"Who never is, but always to be, fee'd,"

the sun-brown yet on his face, paces the floor of the Parliament House, four hours a day, in his professional finery of horse-hair and bombazine. During the winter-time are assemblies and dinner-parties. There is a fortnight's opera, with the entire fashionable world in the boxes. The Philosophical Institution is in full session; while a whole army of eloquent lecturers do battle with ignorance on public platforms--each effulging like Phœbus, with his waggon-load of blazing day--at whose coming night perishes, shot through with orient beams. Neither mind nor body is neglected during the Edinburgh season.

[Sidenote: The Scottish Academy.]

In spring time, when the east winds blow, and grey walls of _haar_--clammy, stinging, heaven-high, making disastrous twilight of the brightest noon--come in from the German Ocean, and when coughs and colds do most abound, the Royal Scottish Academy opens her many-pictured walls. From February to May this is the most fashionable lounge in Edinburgh. The rooms are warm, so thickly carpeted that no footfall is heard, and there are seats in abundance. It is quite wonderful how many young ladies and gentlemen get suddenly interested in art. The Exhibition is a charming place for flirtation; and when Romeo is short in the matter of small talk--as Romeo sometimes will be--there is always a picture at hand to suggest a topic. Romeo may say a world of pretty things while he turns up the number of a picture in Juliet's catalogue--for without a catalogue Juliet never appears in the rooms. Before the season closes, she has her catalogue by heart, and could repeat it to you from beginning to end more glibly than she could her Catechism. Cupid never dies; and fingers will tingle as sweetly when they touch over an Exhibition catalogue as over the dangerous pages of "Lancelot of the Lake." If many marriages are not made here, there are gay deceivers in the world, and the picture of deserted Ophelia--the blank smile on her mouth, flowerets stuck in her yellow hair--slowly sinking in the weedy pool, produces no suitable moral effect. To other than young ladies and gentlemen the rooms are interesting, for Scottish art is at this moment more powerful than Scottish literature. Perhaps some half-dozen pictures in each Academy's Exhibition are the most notable intellectual products that Scotland can present for the year. The Scottish brush is stronger than the Scottish pen. It is in landscape and--at all events up till the other day, when Sir John Watson Gordon died--in portraiture that the Scotch school excels. It excels in the one in virtue of the national scenery, and in the other in virtue of the national insight and humour. For the making of a good portrait a great deal more is required than excellent colour and dexterous brush-work--shrewdness, insight, imagination, common sense, and many another mental quality besides, are needed. No man can paint a good portrait unless he knows his sitter thoroughly; and every good portrait is a kind of biography. It is curious, as indicating that the instinct for biography and portrait-painting are alike in essence, that in both walks of art the Scotch have been unusually successful. It would seem that there is something in the national character predisposing to excellence in these departments of effort. Strictly to inquire how far this predisposition arises from the national shrewdness or the national humour, would be needless; thus much is certain, that Scotland has at various times produced the best portrait-painters and the best writers of biography to be found in the compass of the islands. In the past, she can point to Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and Raeburn's portraits: she yet can claim Thomas Carlyle; and but lately she could claim Sir John Watson Gordon. Thomas Carlyle is a portrait-painter, and Sir John Watson Gordon was a biographer.

[Sidenote: Scottish portraiture.]