Essays of travel and in the art of writing
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
*^ 9?.*-o" ^^0^ ^^ ^/'o. ■ft ri^ V ' 4T^\iMWh/lfB * ^Ss -C 0, °^ Q. ' 0 , X /A ° ^^^,<^ "<>.V v^ % V -^<^^^ ^^^ ':;i*0' 0^ v' /\ THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF THE WORKS OF |ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE ART OF WRITING THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF STEVENSON'S WORKS NOVELS AND ROMANCES TREASURE ISLAND PRINCE OTTO KIDNAPPED THE BLACK ARROW THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE THE WRONG BOX THE WRECKER DAVID BALFOUR THE EBB-TIDE WEIR OF HERMISTON ST. IVES SHORTER STORIES NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS THE DYNAMITER THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS ESSArS, TRAf^ELS, AND SKETCHES AN INLAND VOYAGE TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY VIRGINIBUS PUERISQ^UE FAMILIAR STUDIES THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, fonra/nin^ THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS IN THE SOUTH SEAS ACROSS THE PLAINS ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE ART OF WRITING POEMS COMPLETE POEMS Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets Per vol.. Cloth, $1.00; Lim/> Leather, $I.3S "'*■ Charles Scribner's Sons, New York BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN FHE ART OF WRITING »l BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1905 ytJRARY of ■'sosiKrafjssS: r«o Sopies rstwawyj OCT. a? »yu5 / -i ? ^ i^^ OOPY 8. g I iiwrTfTirii [^"m ' "~rrz ? A°l Capyrighl, igo; Bv Charles Scribner's Sons \) ,^# (\b THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. <?'" / ^'(i^ - PUBLISHERS? NOTE It has been thought best to include in the Biographical Edition of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson various literary papers and essays of travel which are not to be found in the regular trade edition of this writer's works. Of the essays, those on literary topics supply a full exposition of the author's philosophy of the art of writing; while the travel papers will be found to throw many illuminating and freshly suggestive lights not only upon the scenes described, but as well upon the richly imaginative mind of Stevenson himself. The bibliographical data in the list of contents explain the circumstances under which each of the essays was published. CONTENTS ESSAYS OF TRAVEL Page I. Edinburgh : Picturesque Notes .... 3 (First published in The Portfolio, June-December, 1878.) II. Cockermouth and Keswick 84 (First published in the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's Worlcs, December, 1896.) III. Roads 98 (First published in The Portfolio, November, 1873.) IV. On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places io8 (First published in The Portfolio, November, 1874.) V. An Autumn Effect 120 (First pubUshed in The Portfolio, April-May, 1875.) VI. A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Gallo- way 148 (First published in the Summer Number, 1896, of The Illus-' t rated Lotidon News.) VII. Forest Notes 162 (First published in Tfte Cornhill IMagazine , May, 1876.) VIII. A Mountain Town in France 196 (A Fragment, 1879; originally intended to serve as the open- ing chapter of " Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.") IX. Random Memories: "Rosa Quo Locorum" 211 (Drafted in 1893 or 1894 towards a new series of Essays for Scribner''s Magazine ; first pubUshed in the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's Works, December, 1896.) X. The Ideal House 222 (First published from the note-book of the author in the Edin- burgh Edition of Stevenson's Works, June, 1898.) viii CONTENTS Page XI. Health and Mountains 230 (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1881,) XII. Davos in Winter 236 (First pubHshed in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 21, 1881.) XIII. Alpine Diversions 241 (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, February 26, 1881.) XIV. The Stimulation of the Alps 246 (First pubUshed in the Pall Mall Gazette, March 5, 1881.) ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING I. On some Technical Elements of Style in Literature 253 (First pubUshed in The Contemporary Review, April, 1885.) II. A Note on Realism 278 (First published in The Magazine of Art, 1883.) III. The Morality of the Profession of Let- ters 287 (First published in The Fortnightly Review, April, 1881.) IV. The Day after To-morrow 302 (First published in The Cofite^nporary Reviejv, April, 1887.) V. Books which have influenced me. 317 (First published in The British Weekly, May 13, 1887.) VI. 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. 4 EDINBURGH shifty and iingenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The deli- cate 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 imagina- tion, 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 all other 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 consid- ered 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. EDINBURGH 5 Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest mean- ing of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre- eminently Gothic, and all 'die 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 work- man'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 am- bassadors, 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 changes. 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 re-awakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers ; a coach and six and clat- tering 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; 6 EDINBURGH from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edin- burgh 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 evenfall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburg'h the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial delibera- tions. 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 mas- querade; tabard above, heather-mixture trouser below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this sing- ing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesi- astical 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 warlike 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 8 EDINBURGH 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 for- ward, 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 be- coming dignity, as the works of Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness than we im- agine, 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 eter- nal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out every- thing 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 ma- sonry 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 EDINBURGH 9 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 picturescjue 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.^ 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 1 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 : 't is 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 if 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 Glasgozu. lo EDINBURGH 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 trum- pets and under the authority of the royal pres- ence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where popu- lar 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 psalms " to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomor- rah. There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, cove- nanting 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 EDINBURGH ii 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 Aiken- head 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 low^est in society, that the hearthstone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be partitioned off into a bedroom by the new. II OLD TOWN — THE LANDS The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief char- acteristic, 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 12 EDINBURGH 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 em- bellished Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern city; for there the two react 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 oc- cupy their lower, broader, and more gentle hill- tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops 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 Aiild 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 hilltop, and the EDINBURGH 13 long plume of smoke over the plain ; so it ap- peared 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 ; thoroughfares were diminished into lanes ; houses sprang up storey after storey, 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 clif¥ 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 hillside; 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 14 EDINBURGH underneath, with their broad squares and gar- dens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and per- haps the wind may reach him with a rustic pure- ness, 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 treacher- ous 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, EDINBURGH 15 some holy or courageous motto, on the Hntel. 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 o\'er to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads w^ere plenti- ful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the windows, and the pave- ments 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, barefoot children ; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl : among these, a few supervising 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 neigh- bours ; and I never yet heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous acci- i6 EDINBURGH dental 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 l^roadcloth of the best. For three years he kept falling — grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face pufting 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 heartbreaking 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 wash- ing 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. EDINBURGH 17 It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made Edin- burgh 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, twoscore fam- ilies 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 founda- tion to the chimney-tops; everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttish- ness 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 dis- pensations to the young, and all the ill does not i8 EDINBU RGH 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 cal- lously 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 Cow- gate 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 abed 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 EDINBURGH 19 gave me an imaginative measure of the dispro- portion between the quantity of living flesh and the trifling wafls 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 inhab- itants 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 econ- omy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran to- gether with a hideous uproar and tumbled storey upon storey to the ground. The physical shock w-as felt far and near ; and the moral shock trav- elled 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 Sam- son, by pulling down one roof destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have forgotten tlie 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; 20 EDINBURGH 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 un- wonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with trutli : " The house that I was born in fell last nig^ht ! " III THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St. Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable ; the Krauics 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, sun- less, and romantic. It was here that the town was most overbuilt ; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fairway 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 High- land piper who volunteered to explore its windings. EDINBURGH 21 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 ag"ain 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 be- sides 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 name-father to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust ; there is no more squalor carccris 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 be- hind St. Giles's Church, running down-hill to the 22 EDINBURGH Cowgate and covering the site of the present Par- hament 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 Scot- land 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. Plard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and gar- landed Charles Second, made of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back 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 de- scribe their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's buttresses, you com- mand 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 c|uiet 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 EDINBURGH 23 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 awhile, 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 scaf- fold. 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 24 EDINBURGH say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parhament 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 dcs pas pcrdus 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 SherifT- Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would EDINBURGH 25 say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackHng 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 26 EDINBURGH of stairs and galleries ; where yon 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 Par- liament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one storey to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. 