We know the speed and ease, in truth Shakespearean, with which he threw off the best of them, yet to the outsider he seemed hard at work. In June 1814 a party of young bloods were dining in a house in George Street, at right angles with North Castle Street. A shade overspread the face of the host. “Why?” said the narrator. “There is a confounded hand in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will. Since we sat down I have been watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops; page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that; it is the same every night.” It was the hand of Walter Scott, and in the evenings of three weeks in summer it wrote the last two volumes of Waverley (there were three in all). Whatever impression the novels make upon us has been discounted before we have read them, but when they were appearing, when to the attraction of the volumes themselves was added the romance of mystery, when the Wizard of the North was still “The Great Unknown,” then was the time to enjoy a Waverley. James Ballantyne lived in St. John Street, then a good class place off the Canongate. He was wont to give a gorgeous feast whenever a new Waverley was about to appear. Scott was there, but he and the staider members of the company left in good time, and then there were broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and James Ballantyne was persuaded to produce the proof-sheets, and, with a word of preface, give the company the liver wing of the forthcoming literary banquet. Long before the end the secret was an open secret, but it was only formally divulged, as we all know, at the Theatrical Fund dinner, on Friday the 23rd February 1827. Among the company was jovial Patrick Robertson, “a mighty incarnate joke.” When Peveril of the Peak appeared he applied the name to Scott from the shape of his head as he stood chatting in the Parliament House, “better that than Peter o’ the Painch,” was the not particularly elegant but very palpable retort at Peter’s rotundity. At the banquet Scott sent him a note urging him to confess something too. “Why not the murder of Begbie?” (the porter of the British Linen Company Bank, murdered under mysterious circumstances in November 1806, in Tweeddale Close, in the High Street). Immediately after, the farce of High Life Below Stairs was played in the theatre. A lady’s lady asked who wrote Shakespeare? One says Ben Jonson, another Finis. “No,” said an actor, with a most ingenious “gag,” “it is Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting the other day.”

Most of the literary men of the time were in two camps. Either they wrote for the Edinburgh Review, or for Blackwood’s Magazine, occasionally for both. The opponents knew each other, and were more or less excellent friends, though they used the most violent language. Jeffrey was the great light on the Edinburgh; he was described by Professor Wilson’s wife as “a horrid little man, but held in as high estimation here as the Bible.” Her husband, with Lockhart and Hogg, were the chief writers for the Magazine. The first number of that last, as we now know it, contained the famous Chaldean Manuscript, in which uproarious fun was made of friends and foes, under the guise of a scriptural parable. They began with their own publisher and real editor. “And his name was as it had been the colour of ebony, and his number was the number of a maiden when the days of the year of her virginity have expired.” In other words, Mr. Blackwood of 17 Princes Street. Constable, the publisher, was the “crafty in council,” and he had a notable horn in his forehead that “cast down the truth to the ground.” This was the Review. Professor Wilson was “the beautiful leopard from the valley of the plane trees,” referring to the Isle of Palms, the poem of which Christopher North was the author. Lockhart was the “scorpion which delighteth to sting the faces of men.” Hogg was “the great wild boar from the forests of Lebanon whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle.” It was the composition of these last three spirits, and is described by Aytoun as “a mirror in which we behold literary Edinburgh of 1817, translated into mythology.” It was chiefly put together one night at 53 Queen Street, amidst uproarious laughter that shook the walls of the house, and made the ladies in the room above send to inquire in wonder what the gentlemen below were about. Even the grave Sir William Hamilton was of the party; he contributed a verse, and was so amused at his own performance that he tumbled off his chair in a fit of laughter. Perhaps the personalities by which it gained part of its success were not in the best taste, but never was squib so successful. It shook the town with rage and mirth. After well-nigh a century, though some sort of a key is essential, you read it with a grin; it has a permanent, if small, place in the history of letters. Yet Wilson contributed to the Edinburgh! “John,” said his mother when she heard it, “if you turn Whig, this house is no longer big enough for us both.” There was no fear of that, however.

The most engaging stories of Christopher North tell of his feats of endurance. After he was a grave professor he would throw off his coat and tackle successfully with his fists an obstreperous bully. He would walk seventy miles in the waking part of twenty-four hours. Once, in the braes of Glenorchy, he called at a farmhouse at eleven at night for refreshment. They brought him a bottle of whisky and a can of milk, which he mixed and consumed in two draughts from a huge bowl. He was called to the Scots bar in 1815, and from influence, or favour, agents at first sent him cases. He afterwards confessed that when he saw the papers on his table, he did not know what to do with them. But he speedily drifted into literature, wherein he made a permanent mark. We have all dipped into that huge mine of wit and wisdom, the Noctes Ambrosianæ. You would say of him, and you would of Scott, they were splendid men, their very faults and excesses lovable. What a strange power both had over animals! As in the case of Queen Mary, their servants were ever their faithful and devoted friends. Wilson kept a great number of dogs. Rover was a special favourite. As the animal was dying, Wilson bent over it, “Rover, my poor fellow, give me your paw,” as if he had been taking leave of a man. When Camp died, Scott reverently buried him in the back garden of his Castle Street house; his daughter noted the deep cloud of sorrow on her father’s face. Maida is with him on his monument as in life. Wilson kept sixty-two gamebirds all at once; they made a fearful noise. “Did they never fight?” queried his doctor. “No,” was the answer; “but put a hen amongst them, and I will not answer for the peace being long observed. And so it hath been since the beginning of the world.” These gifted men played each other tricks of the most impish nature. Lockhart once made a formal announcement of Christopher North’s sudden death, with a panegyric upon his character in the Weekly Journal; true, he confined it to a few copies, but it was rather a desperate method of jesting. Patrick Robertson, as Lord Robertson, a Senator of the College of Justice, published a volume of poems. This was duly reviewed in the Quarterly, which Lockhart edited, and a copy sent to the author; it finished off with this mad couplet:

The feelings of “Peter,” as his friends always called Robertson, may be imagined. True, it was the only copy of the Review that contained the couplet: it must have been some time before the disturbed poet found out. Yet “Peter” was a “jokist” of a scarcely less desperate character. At a dinner-party an Oxford don was parading his Greek erudition, to the boredom of the whole company. Robertson gravely replied to some proposition, “I rather think, sir, Dionysius of Halicarnassus is against you there.” “I beg your pardon,” said the don quickly, “Dionysius did not flourish for ninety years after that period.” “Oh,” rejoined Patrick, with an expression of face that must be imagined, “I made a mistake; I meant Thaddeus of Warsaw.” There was no more Greek erudition that night. This fondness for a jest followed those men into every concern of life. One of Wilson’s daughters came to her father in his study and asked, with appropriate blushes, his consent to her engagement to Professor Aytoun. He pinned a sheet of paper to her back, and packed her off to the next room, where her lover was. They were both a little mystified till he read the inscription: “With the author’s compliments.”

De Quincey spent the last thirty years of his life mainly in Edinburgh. His grave is in St. Cuthbert’s Churchyard. He seems a strange, exotic figure, for his literary interests, at any rate, were not at all Scots. Once he paid a casual visit to Gloucester Place, where Wilson lived. It was a stormy night, and he stayed on—for about a year. His hours and dietary were peculiar, but he was allowed to do exactly as he liked. “Thomas de Sawdust,” as W. E. Henley rather cruelly nicknamed him, excited the astonishment of the Scots cook by the magnificent way in which he ordered a simple meal. “Weel, I never heard the like o’ that in a’ my days; the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words. If it had been my ain maister that was wanting his denner he would ha’ ordered a hale tablefu’ in little mair than a waff o’ his han’, and here’s a’ this claver aboot a bit mutton no bigger than a preen. Mr. De Quinshay would mak’ a gran’ preacher, though I’m thinking a hantle o’ the folk wouldna ken what he was driving at.” During most of the day De Quincey lay in a stupor; the early hours of the next morning were his time for talk. The Edinburgh of that time was still a town of strong individualities, brilliant wits, and clever talkers, but when that weird voice began, the listeners, though they were the very flower of the intellect of the place, were content to hold their peace: all tradition lies, or this strange figure was here the first of them all.

In some ways it was a curious and primitive time, certainly none of these men was a drunkard, but they all wrote as if they quaffed liquor like the gods of the Norse mythology, and with some of them practice conformed to theory, whilst fists and sticks were quite orthodox modes of settling disputes. Even the grave Ebony was not immune. A writer in Glasgow, one Douglas, was aggrieved at some real or fancied reference in the Magazine. He hied him to Edinburgh, and as Mr. Blackwood was entering his shop, he laid a horsewhip in rather a half-hearted fashion, it would seem, about his shoulders. Then he made off. The editor publisher forthwith procured a cudgel, and luckily discovered his aggressor on the point of entering the Glasgow coach; he gave him a sound beating. As nothing more is heard of the incident, probably both sides considered honour as satisfied. How difficult to imagine people of position in incidents like this in Edinburgh of to-day; but I will not dwell longer on them and their likes, but move on to another era.

“Virgilium viditantum,” very happily quoted Scott, the only time he ever saw (save for a casual street view) and spoke with Burns. One wishes that there was more to be said of Scott and Carlyle. Carlyle was a student at Edinburgh, and passed the early years of his literary working life there. He saw Scott on the street many a time and earnestly desired a more intimate knowledge. This meeting would have been as interesting as that, but it was not to be. Never was fate more ironical, nay, perverse. Goethe was the friend and correspondent of both, and it seemed to him at Weimar an odd thing that these men, both students of German literature, both citizens of Edinburgh, should not be personal friends. He did everything he could. Through Carlyle he sent messages and gifts to Scott, and these Carlyle transmitted in a modest and courteous note (13th April 1828). Alas! it was after the deluge. Scott, with the bravest of hearts, yet with lessening physical and mental power, was fighting that desperate and heroic battle we know so well. The letter went unanswered, and they never met. Less important people were kinder. Jeffrey told Carlyle he must give him a lift, and they were great friends afterwards. In 1815 for the first time he met Edward Irving in a room off Rose Street. The latter asked a number of local questions about Annan, which subject did not interest the youthful sage at all; finally, he professed total ignorance and indifference as to the history and condition of some one’s baby. “You seem to know nothing,” said Irving very crossly. The answer was characteristic. “Sir, by what right do you try my knowledge in this way? I have no interest to inform myself about the births in Annan, and care not if the process of birth and generation there should cease and determine altogether.” Carlyle studied for the Scots kirk, but he was soon very doubtful as to his vocation. In 1817 he came from Kirkcaldy to put down his name for the theological hall. “Old Dr. Ritchie was ‘not at home’ when I called to enter myself. ‘Good,’ said I, ‘let the omen be fulfilled,’ ” and he shook the dust of the hall from his feet for evermore. Possibly he muttered something about, “Hebrew old Clo”, if he did, his genius for cutting nicknames carried him away. Through it all no one had greater reverence for the written Word. Carlyle, for good or for ill, was a Calvinist at heart. In the winter of 1823 he was sore beset with the “fiend dyspepsia.” He rode from his father’s house all the way to Edinburgh to consult a specialist. The oracle was not dubious. “It was all tobacco, sir; give up tobacco.” But could he give it up? “Give it up, sir?” he testily replied. “I can cut off my hand with an axe if that should be necessary.” Carlyle let it alone for months, but was not a whit the better; at length, swearing he would endure the “diabolical farce and delusion” no longer, he laid almost violent hands on a long clay and tobacco pouch and was as happy as it was possible for him to be. Perhaps the doctor was right after all.

Up to the middle of the last century a strange personage called Peter Nimmo, or more often Sir Peter Nimmo, moved about the classes of Edinburgh University, and had done so for years. Professor Masson in Edinburgh Sketches and Memories has told with his wonted care and accuracy what it is possible to know of the subject. He was most probably a “stickit minister” who hung about the classes year after year, half-witted no doubt, but with a method in his madness. He pretended or believed or not unwillingly was hoaxed into the belief that he was continually being asked to the houses of professors and others, where not seldom he was received and got some sort of entertainment. Using Professor Wilson’s name as a passport he achieved an interview with Wordsworth, who described him as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.” It was shrewdly suspected that he simply held his tongue, and allowed Wordsworth to do all the talking; a good listener is usually found a highly agreeable person. He tickled Carlyle’s sense of humour, and was made the subject of a poem by the latter in Fraser’s Magazine. It was one of the earliest and one of the very worst things that Carlyle ever did.

I note in passing that Peter Nimmo had a predecessor or contemporary, John Sheriff by name, who died in August 1844 in his seventieth year. He was widely known as Doctor Syntax, from some fancied resemblance to the stock portrait of that celebrity. He devoted all his time to University class-rooms and City churches, through which he roamed at will as by prescriptive right. He boasted that he had attended more than a hundred courses of lectures; but his great joy was when any chance enabled him to occupy the seat of the Lord High Commissioner in St. Giles’.

One of Carlyle’s best passages is the account in Sartor Resartus of his perambulation of the Rue St. Thomas de L’Enfer, the spiritual conflict that he waged then with himself, the victory that he won in which the everlasting “Yes” answered the everlasting “No.” Under the somewhat melodramatic French name Leith Walk is signified, the most commonplace thoroughfare in a town where the ways are rarely commonplace. Perhaps the name was suggested by a quaint incident that befell him there. He was walking along it when a drunken sailor coming from Leith and “tacking” freely as he walked ran into a countryman going the other way. “Go to hell,” said the sailor, wildly and unreasonably enraged. “Od, man, I’m going to Leith,” said the other, “as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and proceeded calmly on his way.”

I have said the fates were kind in linking together though but for a moment the lives of Burns and Scott, and they were unkind in refusing this to the lives of Scott and Carlyle. You wish that in some way or other they had allowed Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson to meet, if but for a moment, so that the last great writer whom Edinburgh has produced might have had the kindly touch of personal intercourse with his predecessors; but it was not to be, nor are there many R.L.S. Edinburgh anecdotes worth the telling. This which he narrates of his grandfather, Robert of Bell Rock fame, is better than any about himself. The elder Stevenson’s wife was a pious lady with a circle of pious if humble friends. One of those, “an unwieldy old woman,” had fallen down one of those steep outside stairs abundant in old Edinburgh, but she crashed on a passing baker and escaped unhurt by what seemed to Mrs. Stevenson a special interposition of Providence. “I would like to know what kind of Providence the baker thought it,” exclaimed her husband.

R.L.S. had certain flirtations with the Edinburgh underworld of his time, for the dreary respectability and precise formalism which has settled like a cloud on the once jovial Auld Reekie was abhorrent to the soul of the bright youth. No doubt he had his adventures, but if they are still known they are not recorded. There is some tradition of a novel, Maggie Arnot, I think it was called, wherein he told strange tales of dark Edinburgh closes, but pious hands consigned it, no doubt wisely and properly, to the flames; and though certain Corinthians were scornful and wrathful, yet you feel his true function was that of the wise and kindly, sympathetic and humane essayist and moralist that we have learned to love and admire, the almost Covenanting writer whom of a surety the men of the Covenant would have thrust out and perhaps violently ended in holy indignation. I gather a few scraps. Of the stories of his childhood this seems admirably characteristic. He was busy once with pencil and paper, and then addressed his mother: “Mamma, I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?” The makers of the New Town when they planned those wide, long, exposed streets, forgot one thing, and that was the Edinburgh weather, against which, if you think of it, the sheltered ways of the ancient city were an admirable protection. In many a passage R.L.S. has told us how the east wind, and the easterly “haar,” and the lack of sun assailed him like cruel and implacable foes. He would lean over the great bridge that spans what was once the Nor’ Loch, and watch the trains as they sped southward on their way, as it seemed, to lands of sunshine and romance.

It was but the pathetic inconsistency of human nature that in the lands of perpetual sunshine made him think no stars were so splendid as the Edinburgh street lamps, and so the whole romance of his life was bound up with “the huddle of cold grey hills from which we came,” and most of all with that city of the hills, and the winds and the tempest where he had his origin. He was called to the Scots bar; his family were powerful in Edinburgh and so he got a little work—four briefs in all we are told. Even when he was far distant the brass plate on the door of 17 Heriot Row bore the legend “Mr. R. L. Stevenson, Advocate” for many a long day. Probably the time of the practical joker is passed in Edinburgh, or an agent might have been tempted to shove some papers in at the letter-box; but what about the cheque with which it used to be, and still is in theory at any rate, the laudable habit in the north of enclosing as companion to all such documents? Ah! that would indeed have been carrying the joke to an unreasonable length. I will not tell here of the memorable occasion when plain Leslie Stephen, as he then was, took him to the old Infirmary to introduce him to W. E. Henley, then a patient within those grimy walls. It was the beginning of a long story of literary and personal friendship, with strange ups and downs. Writing about Edinburgh as I do, I would fain brighten my page and conclude my chapter with one of his most striking notes on his birthplace. “I was born likewise within the bounds of an earthly city illustrious for her beauty, her tragic and picturesque associations, and for the credit of some of her brave sons. Writing as I do in a strange quarter of the world, and a late day of my age, I can still behold the profile of her towers and chimneys, and the long trail of her smoke against the sunset; I can still hear those strains of martial music that she goes to bed with, ending each day like an act of an opera to the notes of bugles; still recall with a grateful effort of memory, any one of a thousand beautiful and spacious circumstances that pleased me and that must have pleased any one in my half-remembered past. It is the beautiful that I thus actively recall, the august airs of the castle on its rock, nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendours of the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was received into a sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and upwards by fresh grades and rises, city beyond city, a New Jerusalem bodily scaling heaven.”

St. Margaret, Queen of Malcolm Canmore, has been ingeniously if fancifully claimed as the earliest of Scots artists. At the end of her life she prophesied that Edinburgh Castle would be taken by the English. On the wall of her chapel she pictured a castle with a ladder against the rampart, and on the ladder a man in the act of climbing. In this fashion she intimated the castle would fall; Gardez vous de Français, she wrote underneath. Probably by the French she meant the Normans from whom she herself had fled. They had taken England and would try, she thought, to take Scotland. Thus you read the riddle, if it be worth your while. The years after are blank; the art was ecclesiastical and not properly native. In the century before the Reformation there is reason to believe that Edinburgh was crowded with fair shrines and churches beautifully adorned, but the Reformers speedily changed all that. The first important native name is that of George Jamesone (1586-1644), the Scots Van Dyck, as he is often called, who, though he was born in Aberdeen, finally settled in Edinburgh, and, like everybody else, you might say, was buried in Greyfriars.

In 1729 a fine art association, called the Edinburgh Academy of St. Luke, was formed, but it speedily went to pieces. This is not the place to trace the art history of that or of the Edinburgh Select Society. In 1760 classes were opened at what was called the Trustees Academy; it was supported by an annual grant of £2000, which was part compensation for the increased burdens imposed on Scotland by the union with England. This was successively under the charge of Alexander Runciman, David Allan, called the “Scots Hogarth,” John Graham, and Andrew Wilson. It still exists as a department of the great government art institution at South Kensington. In 1808 a Society of Incorporated Artists was formed, and it began an annual exhibition of pictures which at first were very successful. Then came the institution for the encouragement of fine arts in Scotland, formed in 1819. In 1826 the foundations, so to speak, of the Scottish Academy were laid. In 1837 it received its charter, and was henceforth known as the Royal Scottish Academy; its annual exhibition was the chief art event of the year in Scotland, and since 1855 this exhibition has been held in the Grecian temple on the Mound, which is one of the most prominent architectural effects in Edinburgh. It is a mere commonplace to say there is no art without wealth, and, as far as Edinburgh is concerned, it is only after a new town began that she had painters worth the naming. It is a period of (roughly) 150 years. It is possible that in the future Glasgow maybe more important than Edinburgh, but with this I have nothing to do. I have only to tell a few anecdotes of the chief figures, and first of all there is Jamesone.

Whatever be his merits, we ought to be grateful to this artist because he has preserved for us so many contemporary figures. Pictures in those days were often made to tell a story. After the battle of Langside Lord Seton escaped to Flanders, where he was forced to drive a waggon for his daily bread. He returned in happier times for his party, and entered again into possession of his estates. He had himself painted by Jamesone, represented or dressed as a waggoner driving a wain with four horses attached, and the picture was hung at Seton Palace. When Charles I. came to Scotland in 1633 he dined with my Lord. He was much struck with the painting, could not, in fact, keep his eyes off it. The admiration of an art critic of such rank was fatal. What could a loyal courtier do but beg His Majesty’s acceptance thereof? “Oh,” said the King, “he could not rob the family of so inestimable a jewel.” Royally spoken, and, you may be sure, gratefully heard. It is said the magistrates of Edinburgh employed Jamesone to trick up the Netherbow Port with portraits of the century of ancient Kings of the line of Fergus. Hence possibly the legend that he limned those same mythical royalties we see to-day at Holyrood Palace, though it is certain enough they are not his, but Flemish De Witt’s. Jamesone was in favour with Charles, assuredly a discriminating patron of art and artists. The King stopped his horse at the Bow and gazed long at the grim phantoms in whose reality he, like everybody else, devoutly believed. He gave Jamesone a diamond ring from his own finger, and he afterwards sat for his portrait. He allowed the painter to work with his hat on to protect him from the cold, which so puffed up our artist that he would hardly ever take it off again, no matter what company he frequented. We don’t know his reward, but it seems his ordinary fee was £1 sterling for a portrait. No doubt it was described as £20 Scots, which made it look better but not go farther. You do not wonder that there was a lack of eminent painters when the leader of them all was thus rewarded.

Artists work from various motives. Witness Sir Robert Strange the engraver. He fell ardently in love with Isabella Lumsden, whose brother acted as secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The lady was an extreme Jacobite, and insisted that Strange should throw in his lot with the old stock. He was present in the great battles of the ’45, and at Inverness engraved a plate for bank-notes for the Stuart Government. He had soon other things to think of. When the cause collapsed at Culloden, he was in hiding in Edinburgh for some time, and existed by selling portraits of the exiled family at small cost. Once when visiting his Isabella the Government soldiers nearly caught him; probably they had a shrewd suspicion he was like to be in the house, which they unexpectedly entered. The lady was equal to this or any other occasion. She wore one of the enormous hoops of the period, and under this her lover lay hid, she the while defiantly carolling a Jacobite air whilst the soldiers were looking up the chimney, and under the table, and searching all other orthodox places of refuge. The pair were shortly afterwards married. Strange had various and, finally, prosperous fortunes, and in 1787 was knighted. “If,” as George III. said with a grin, for he knew his history, “he would accept that honour from an Elector of Hanover.” But the King’s great favourite among Scots artists was Allan Ramsay, the son of the poet and possibly of like Jacobite proclivities, although about that we hear nothing. He had studied “at the seat of the Beast,” as his father said, in jest you may be sure, for our old friend was no highflyer.

Young Ramsay became an accomplished man of the world, and had more than a double share, like his father before him, of the pawkiness attributed, though not always truthfully, to his countrymen. He was soon in London and painting Lord Bute most diligently. He did it so well that he made Reynolds, in emulation, carefully elaborate a full-length that he was doing at the time. “I wish to show legs with Ramsay’s Lord Bute,” quoth he. The King preferred Ramsay; he talked German, an accomplishment rare with Englishmen at the period, and he fell in, so to say, with the King’s homely ways. When His Majesty had dined plentifully on his favourite boiled mutton and turnips he would say: “Now, Ramsay, sit down in my place and take your dinner.” He was a curled darling of great folk and was appointed Court painter in 1767. A universal favourite, even Johnson had a good word for him. All this has nothing to do with art, and nobody puts him beside Reynolds, but he was highly prosperous. The King was wont to present the portrait of himself and his consort to all sorts of great people, so Ramsay and his assistants were kept busy. Once he went on a long visit to Rome, partly on account of his health. He left directions with his most able assistant, Philip Reinagle, to get ready fifty pairs of Kings and Queens at ten guineas apiece. Now Reinagle had learned to paint so like Ramsay that no mortal man could tell the difference, but as he painted over and over again the commonplace features of their Majesties, he got heartily sick of the business. He struck for more pay and got thirty instead of ten guineas, so after the end of six years he managed to get through with it, somehow or other, but ever afterwards he looked back upon the period as a horrid nightmare. Ramsay was a scholar, a wit, and a gentleman. In a coarse age he was delicate and choice. He was fond of tea, but wine was too much for his queasy stomach. Art was certainly not the all in all for him, and his pictures are feeble. Possibly he did not much care; he had his reward. Some critics have thought that he might have been a great painter if his heart had been entirely in his work.

It has been said of a greater than he, of the incomparable Sir Henry Raeburn, that the one thing wanting to raise his genius into the highest possible sphere was the chastening of a great sorrow or the excitement of a great passion. I cannot myself conceive anything better than his Braxfield among men or his Mrs. James Campbell among women, but I have no right to speak. At least his prosperity enabled him to paint a whole generation, though from that generation as we have it on his canvas, a strange malice of fate makes the figure of Robert Burns, the greatest of them all, most conspicuous by its absence. His prosperity and contentment were the result of the simple life and plain living of old Edinburgh. He was a great friend of John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin. In very early days Clerk asked him to dinner. The landlady uncovered two dishes, one held three herrings and the other three potatoes. “Did I not tell you, wuman,” said John with that accent which was to make “a’ the Fifteen” tremble, “that a gentleman was to dine wi’ me, and that ye were to get sax herrings and sax potatoes?”

These were his salad days, and ere they were fled a wealthy young widow saw and loved Raeburn. She was not personally known to him, but her wit easily devised a method. She asked to have her portrait painted, and the rest was plain sailing. It was then the fixed tradition of all the northern painters that you must study at Rome if you would be an artist. Raeburn set off for Italy. The story is that he had an introduction to Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he visited as he passed through London. Reynolds was much impressed with the youth from the north, and at the end took him aside, and in the most delicate manner suggested that if money was necessary for his studies abroad he was prepared to advance it. Raeburn gratefully declined. When he returned from Rome he settled in Edinburgh, from which he scarcely stirred. His old master, Martin, jealously declared that the lad in George Street painted better before he went to Rome, but the rest of Scotland did not agree. It became a matter of course that everybody who was anybody should get himself painted by Raeburn. He seemed to see at once into the character of the face he had before him, and so his pictures have that remarkable characteristic of great artists, they tell us more of the man than the actual sight of the man himself does; but again I go beyond my province.

The early life of many Scots artists (and doctors) is connected with Edinburgh, but the most important part is given to London. Thus Sir David Wilkie belongs first of all to Fife, for he was born at Cults, where his father was parish minister. His mother saw him drawing something with chalk on the floor. The child said he was making “bonnie Lady Gonie,” referring to Lady Balgonie, who lived near. Obviously this same story might have been told of many people, not afterwards eminent. In fact, Wilkie’s development was not rapid. In 1799, when he was fourteen, he went to the Trustees Academy at Edinburgh. George Thomson, the Secretary, after examining his drawings declared that they had not sufficient merit to procure his admission. The Earl of Leven, however, insisted he must be admitted, and admitted he was. He proceeded to draw from the antique, not at first triumphantly. His father showed one of his studies to one of his elders. “What was it?” queried the douce man. “A foot,” was the answer. “A fute! a fute! it’s mair like a fluke than a fute.” In 1804 he returned to Cults where he employed himself painting Pitlessie Fair. At church he saw an ideal character study nodding in one of the pews. He soon had it transferred to the flyleaf of the Bible. He had not escaped attention, and was promptly taken to task. He stoutly asserted that in the sketch the eye and the hand alone were engaged, he could hear the sermon all the time. The ingenuity or matchless impudence of this assertion fairly astounded his accusers, and the matter dropped. I do not tell here how he went to London and became famous. How famous let this anecdote show. In 1817 he was at Abbotsford making a group of the Scott family: he went with William Laidlaw to Altrive to see Hogg. “Laidlaw,” said the shepherd, “this is not the great Mr. Wilkie?” “It’s just the great Mr. Wilkie, Hogg.” The poet turned to the painter: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you in my house and how glad I am to see you are so young a man.”

This curious greeting is explained thus: Hogg had taken Wilkie for a horse-couper. What Wilkie would have taken Hogg for we are not told, possibly for something of the same.

Wilkie, as everybody knows, painted subjects of ordinary life in Scotland and England, such as The Village Festival, Rent Day, The Penny Wedding, and so forth. In the prime of life he went to Spain, and was much impressed with the genius of Velasquez, then little known in this country. He noticed a similarity to Raeburn, perhaps that peculiar directness in going straight to the heart of the subject, that putting on the canvas the very soul of the man, common to both painters. The story goes that when in Madrid he went daily to the Museo del Prado, set himself down before the picture Los Borrachos, spent three hours gazing at it in a sort of ecstasy, and then, when fatigue and admiration had worn him out, he would take up his hat and with a deep sigh leave the place for the time.

Another son of the manse is more connected with Edinburgh than ever Wilkie was, and this is the Rev. John Thomson, known as Thomson of Duddingston, from the fact that he was parish minister there from 1801 till his death in 1840. His father was incumbent of Dailly in Ayrshire, and here he spent his early years. He received the elements of art from the village carpenter—at least, so that worthy averred. He was wont to introduce the subject to a stranger. “Ye’ll ken ane John Thomson, a minister?” “Why, Thomson of Duddingston, the celebrated painter? Do you know him?” “Me ken him? It was me that first taught him to pent.” As in the case of Wilkie, his art leanings got him into difficulty. At a half-yearly communion he noted a picturesque old hillman, and needs must forthwith transfer him to paper. The fathers and brethren were not unnaturally annoyed and disgusted, and they deputed one of their number to deal faithfully with the offender. Thomson listened in solemn silence, nay, took what appeared to be some pencil notes of the grave words of censure, at length he suddenly showed the other a hastily drawn sketch of himself. “What auld cankered carl do ye think this is?” The censor could not choose but laugh, and the incident ended. Thomson was twice married. His second wife was Miss Dalrymple of Fordel. She saw his picture of The Falls of Foyers, and conceived a passion to know the artist, and the moment he saw her he determined “that woman must be my wife.” As he afterwards said, “We just drew together.” The manse at Duddingston became for a time a very muses’ bower; the choicest of Edinburgh wits, chief among them Scott himself, were constant visitors. Of illustrious strangers perhaps the greatest was Turner, though his remarks were not altogether amiable. “Ah, Thomson, you beat me hollow—in frames!” He was more eulogistic of certain pictures. “The man who did that could paint.” When he took his leave he said, as he got into the carriage, “By God, though, Thomson, I envy you that loch.” To-day the prospect is a little spoilt by encroaching houses and too many people, but Scotland has few choicer views than that placid water, the old church at the edge, the quaint village, and the mighty Lion Hill that broods over all. Thomson is said to have diligently attended to his clerical duties, but he was hard put to it sometimes, for you believe he was more artist than theologian. He built himself a studio in the manse garden down by the loch. This he called Edinburgh, so that too importunate callers might be warded off with the remark that he was at Edinburgh. “Gone to Edinburgh,” you must know, is the traditional excuse of everybody in Duddingston who shuts his door. One Sunday John, the minister’s man, “jowed” the bell long and earnestly in vain—the well-known figure would not emerge from the manse. John rushed off to the studio by the loch and found, as he expected, the minister hard at work with a canvas before him. He admonished him that it was past the time, that the people were assembled, and the bells “rung in.” “Oh, John,” said his master, in perplexed entreaty, “just go and ring the bell for another five minutes till I get in this bonnie wee bit o’ sky.” An old woman of his congregation was in sore trouble, and went to the minister and asked for a bit prayer. Thomson gave her two half-crowns. “Take that, Betty, my good woman, it’s likely to do you more good than any prayer I’m likely to make,” a kindly but amusingly cynical remark, in the true vein of the moderates of the eighteenth century. “Here, J. F.,” he said to an eminent friend who visited him on a Sunday afternoon, “you don’t care about breaking the Sabbath, gie these pictures a touch of varnish.” These were the days before the Disruption and the evangelical revival. You may set off against him the name of Sir George Harvey, who was made president of the northern Academy in 1864. He was much in sympathy with Scots religious tradition, witness his Quitting the Manse, his Covenanting Preaching, and other deservedly famous pictures. As Mr. W. D. M‘Kay points out, the Disruption produced in a milder form a recrudescence of the strain of thought and sentiment of Covenanting times, and this influenced the choice of subjects. In his early days when Harvey talked of painting, a friend advised him to look at Wilkie; he looked and seemed to see nothing that was worth the looking, but he examined again and again, even as Wilkie himself had gazed on Velasquez, and so saw in him “the very finest of the wheat.” In painting the picture The Wise and Foolish Builders, he made a child construct a house on the sand, so that he might see exactly how the thing was done, not, however, that he fell into the stupid error of believing that work and care were everything. He would neither persuade a man nor dissuade him from an artistic career. “If it is in him,” he was wont to say, “it is sure to come out, whether I advise him or not.”

Of the truth of this saying the life of David Roberts is an example. He was the son of a shoemaker and was born at Stockbridge, Edinburgh, at the end of the eighteenth century. Like most town boys of the period he haunted the Mound, then a favourite stand for wild beast caravans. This was before the era of Grecian temples and statues and trim-kept gardens, and “Geordie Boyd’s mud brig” (to recall a long-vanished popular name) was an unkempt wilderness. He drew pictures of the shows on the wall of the white-washed kitchen with the end of a burnt stick and a bit of keel, in order that his mother might see what they were like. When she had satisfied her curiosity, why—a dash of white-wash and the wall was as good as ever! His more ambitious after-attempts were exhibited by the honest cobbler to his customers. “Hoo has the callant learnt it?” was the perplexed inquiry. With some friends of like inclination he turned a disused cellar into a life academy: they tried their prentice hands on a donkey, and then they sat for one another; but this is not the place to follow his upward struggles. In 1858 he received the freedom of the city of Edinburgh.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, but ways are manifold and some of them are negative. Horatio Maculloch, the landscape-painter, in his Edinburgh from Dalmeny Park, had introduced into the foreground the figure of a woodman lopping the branches of a fallen tree. This figure gave him much trouble, so he told his friend, Alexander Smith, the poet. One day he said cheerfully, “Well, Smith, I have done that figure at last.” “Indeed, and how?” “I have painted it out!” Even genius and hard work do not always ensure success. If ever there was a painter of genius that man was David Scott, most pathetic figure among Edinburgh artists. You scarce know why his fame was not greater, or his work not more sought after. His life was a short one (1806-1849) and his genius did not appeal to the mass, for he did not and perhaps could not produce a great body of highly impressive work. Yet, take the best of his illustrations to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. You read the poem with deeper meaning, with far deeper insight, after you have looked on them; to me at least they seem greater than William Blake’s illustrations to Blair’s Grave, a work of like nature. Still more wonderful is the amazing Puck Fleeing Before the Dawn. The artist rises to the height of his great argument; his genius is for the moment equal to Shakespeare’s; the spirit of unearthly drollery and mischief and impish humour takes bodily form before your astonished gaze. “His soul was like a star and dwelt apart;” the few anecdotes of him have a strange, weird touch. When a boy, he was handed over to a gardener to be taken to the country. He took a fancy he would never be brought back; the gardener swore he would bring him back himself; the child, only half convinced, treated the astonished rustic to a discourse on the commandments, and warned him if he broke his word he would be guilty of a lie. The gardener, more irritated than amused, wished to have nothing whatever to do with him. Going into a room once where there was company, he was much struck with the appearance of a young lady there; he went up to her, laid his hand on her knees, “You are very beautiful,” he said. As a childish prank he thought he would make a ghost and frighten some other children. With a bolster and a sheet he succeeded only too well; he became frantic with terror, and fairly yelled the house down in his calls for help.

A different man altogether was Sir Daniel Macnee, who was R.S.A. in 1876. He was born the same year as David Scott, and lived long after him. The famous portrait painter, kindly, polished, accomplished, was a man of the world, widely known and universally popular, except that his universal suavity of itself now and again excited enmity. “I dinna like Macnee a bit,” said a sour-grained old Scots dame; “he’s aye everybody’s freend!” The old lady might have found Sam Bough more to her taste. Though born in Carlisle he settled in Edinburgh in 1855, and belongs to the northern capital. In dress and much else he delighted to run tilt at conventions, and was rather an enfant terrible at decorous functions. At some dinner or other he noted a superbly got up picture-dealer, whom he pretended to mistake for a waiter. “John—John, I say, John, bring me a pint of wine, and let it be of the choicest vintage.” His pranks at last provoked Professor Blackie, who was present, to declare roundly and audibly, “I am astonished that a man who can paint like an angel should come here and conduct himself like a fool.” He delighted in the Lothian and Fife coasts. The Bass he considered in some sort his own property, so he jocularly told its owner, Sir Hew Dalrymple, “You get £20 a year or so out of it; I make two or three hundred.” Bough was the very picture of a genial Bohemian, perhaps he was rather fitted to shine, a light of the Savage Club than of the northern capital, where, if tradition was followed, there was always something grim and fell even about the merry-making. One or two of his genial maxims are worth quoting. There had been some row about a disputed succession. “It’s an awful warning,” he philosophised, “to all who try to save money in this world. You had far better spend your tin on a little sound liquor, wherewith to comfort your perishable corps, than have such cursed rows about it after you have gone.” And again his golden rule of the Ars Bibendi, “I like as much as I can get honestly and carry decently,” on which profound maxim let us make an end of our chapter.