It was late in the afternoon when we first arrived in the most beautiful city in Scotland, and the sun’s rays lay nearly level. Between the old town on the hill—inhabited and garrisoned, perhaps, from prehistoric times and sloping down from the castle-crowned rock—and the new modern fashionable quarter, with sunny spaces and broad avenues, runs a deep ravine. In old times this depression contained a lake called the “Nor’ Loch,” which, having been drained long ago, is used by the railways. Thus entering Edinburgh, by the cellar, as it were, we must ascend several pairs of stairs from the Waverly Station, to reach the ordinary street level.
Seeing far above us the hotel to which we wished to go we walked up skyward toward it. At the top of the stairs, turning to look, we were at once “carried to Paradise on the stairways of surprise.” One of those moments in life, never to be forgotten, as when one beholds for the first time Niagara, or has his initial view of the ocean, or stands in presence of a monarch, was ours, as we gazed over toward the old city and the cloud-lands of history. We had known that Edinburgh was handsome, historic, and renowned, but had not dreamed that it was so imposing, so magnificent, so unique in all Europe.
Beneath us lay the long, deep ravine, now threaded with the glittering metal bands of the railway and planted with parks and gardens brilliant with flowers. High on the opposite bank, and sweeping up toward the summit, lay the old city. Its lofty irregular masses of stone buildings and towers, with the castle crowning all, seemed like a mirage, so weird and unearthly was this unexpected appearance of “the city set upon a hill.”
We gazed long at the enchanting sight and then turned to visit the chief avenue of the new city, Princes Street—a perfect glory of attractive homes, with broad spaces rich in gardens and statuary, the whole effect suggesting taste and refinement. This we believe, despite Ruskin’s fiery anathema of modern taste.
A splendid monument to Sir Walter Scott, three hundred feet high and costing $90,000, stands in the centre of the space opposite our hotel. Though in richest Gothic style and a gem of art, it was built by a self-taught architect. Not far away, Professor Wilson, Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, and other sons of Scotland repose in bronze or marble dignity. Indeed, the new city is particularly rich in monuments of every description and quality. Edinburgh’s parks and open spaces are unusually numerous. Even the cemeteries are full of beauty and charm, for it is a pleasure to read the names of old friends, unseen, indeed, but whom we learned to love so long ago through their books.
To-day the American greets in bronze his country’s second father, whose ancestors once dwelt on the coin, or colony on the Lind; whence Father Abraham’s family name, Lincoln. How we boys, in the Union army in 1863, used to sing, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong”! How in 1916, the men of the four nations of the United Kingdom, who have formed Kitchener’s army, sang their merry response to duty’s call, in the same music and spirit, and in much the same words!
Edinburgh is really the heart of the old shire of Midlothian, for it is the central town of the metropolitan county, with a long and glorious history. After James I, the ablest man of the Stuart family, was murdered, on Christmas night, A.D. 1437, Edinburgh became the recognized capital of the kingdom, for neither Perth, nor Scone, nor Stirling, nor Dunfermline was able to offer proper security to royalty against the designs of the turbulent nobles. From this date Edinburgh, with its castle, was selected as the one sure place of safety for the royal household, the Parliament, the mint, and the government offices. Thereupon in “Edwin’s Burgh” began a growth of population that soon pressed most inconveniently upon the available space, which was very restricted, since the people must keep within the walls for the sake of protection. The building of very high houses became a necessity. The town then consisted only of the original main way, called “High Street,” reaching to the Canon Gate, and a parallel way on the south, long, narrow, and confined, called the “Cow Gate.” It was in the days when the sole fuel made use of was wood that Edinburgh received its name of “Auld Reekie,” or “Old Smoky.”
In other words, feudal and royal Edinburgh was a walled space, consisting of two long streets, sloping from hilltop to flats, with houses of stone that rose high in the air. Somehow, such an architectural formation, which might remind a Swiss of his native Mer de Glace and its aiguilles, recalls to the imaginative but irreverent American the two long parallel series of rocks, which he may see on the way to California, called “The Devil’s Slide.” These avenues of old Edinburgh, so long and not very wide, had communication each with the other by means of about one hundred dark, narrow cross-alleys or “closes,” between the dense clusters of houses. Sometimes they were called “wynds,” and in their shadowy recesses many a murder, assassination, or passage-at-arms took place, when swords and dirks, as in old Japan, formed part of a gentleman’s daily costume. In proportions, but not in character or quality of the wayfarers, these two Scottish streets are wonderfully like the road to heaven.
These houses were not homes, each occupied by but one family. They were rather like the modern apartment houses, consisting of a succession of floors or flats, each forming a separate suite of living-rooms, so that every structure harbored many households. Of such floors there were seldom fewer than six, and sometimes ten or twelve, the edifices towering to an immense height; and, because built upon an eminence, rendered still more imposing. It was toward the middle of the eighteenth century before the well-to-do citizens left these narrow quarters for more extensive and level areas beyond the ravine. There is now no suggestion of aristocracy here, for these are now real tenement houses. The hygienic situation, however, even though the tenants are humble folk, reveals a vast improvement upon the days when elegant lords and ladies inhabited these lofty rookeries, which remind one of the Cliff Dwellings of Arizona—or those modern “cliff dwellings,” the homes of the luxurious literary club men on the lake-front of Chicago.
In old days it was a common practice to throw the slops and garbage out of the upper windows into the street below. The ordinary word of warning, supposed to be good Scotch and still in use, is “Gardeloo,” which is only a corruption of the French “Gardez de l’eau” (Look out for the water). It is but one of a thousand linguistic or historic links with Scotland’s old friend and ally, France.
In fact, until near the nineteenth century, Edinburgh’s reputation for dirt, though it was shared with many other European cities in which our ancestors dwelt, was proverbial, especially when refuse of all sorts was flung from every story of the lofty houses. From the middle of the street to the houses on both sides lay a vast collection of garbage ripening for transportation to the farms when spring opened. In this the pigs wallowed when driven in, at the close of the day, from the beech or oak woods by the hog-reeve. The prominent features of the prehistoric kitchen middens, which modern professors so love to dig into, were, in this High Street, in full bloom and the likeness was close.
How different, in our time, when municipal hygiene has become, in some places at least, a fine art! There is a reason why “the plague” no longer visits the British Isles. Nor, as of old, is “Providence” so often charged with visiting “mysterious” punishment upon humanity. Science has helped man to see himself a fool and to learn that cleanliness is next to godliness. The modern Scot, for the most part, believes that laziness and dirt are the worst forms of original sin. Yet it took a long course in the discipline of cause and effect to make “Sandy” fond of soap, water, and fumigation. In this, however, he differed, in no whit, from our other ancestors in the same age.
After seeing Switzerland, and studying the behavior of glaciers, with their broad expanse at the mountain-top, their solidity in the wide valleys, and then, farther down, their constriction in a narrow space between immovable rocks, which, resisting the pressure of the ice-mass, force it upward into pinnacles and tower-like productions, I thought ever afterwards of the old city of Edinburgh as a river, yet not of ice but of stone. Flowing from the lofty summit whereon the castle lay, the area of human habitation was squeezed into the narrower ridge, between ancient but now valueless walls, which seemed to force the human dwellings skyward. Yet it was not through the pressure of nature, but because of the murderous instincts of man, with his passions of selfishness and love of destruction, that old Edinburgh took its shape.
On our first visit, to cross from our hotel in the new city and over into the ancient precincts, we walked above the ravine, over a high arched stone bridge, and turning to the right climbed up High Street to the castle, and rambled on the Esplanade. This is the picture—it is Saturday afternoon and a regiment of soldiers in Highland costume have been parading. Yet, besides the warriors, you can see plenty of other men in this pavonine costume, with their gay plaids, bare legs, and showy kilts. We hear a strange cry in the streets and then see, for the first time, the Edinburgh fishwoman in her curious striped dress of short skirts and sleeves, queer-looking fringed neck-cover, and striped apron. Her little daughter dresses like her, for the costume is hereditary. On her shoulders is a huge basket of fish bound by a strap over her head. These fish peddlers are said to be a strange race of people living, most of them, at Leith, and rarely intermarrying outside of their own community.
At the castle we see that the moat, portcullis, and sally port are still there. We pass through the outer defences, which have so often echoed with battle-cries and the clang of claymores, for this old castle has been taken and retaken many times. Reaching what are now the soldiers’ barracks, we see a little room in which Mary Queen of Scots gave birth to James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, in whom the two thrones of the island were united. It seems a rough room for a queen to live in.
The ascent of High Street is much like climbing a staircase, resting on landings at the second, third, or fourth floor. When, however, one reaches the top and scans the glorious panorama, he feels like asking, especially, as he sees that the highest and oldest building is Queen Margaret’s Chapel,—a house of worship,—“Does God live here?”
Of all the places of interest which we saw within or near the great citadel, there was one little corner of earth, with rocky environment but without deep soil, set apart as a cemetery for soldiers’ pets and mascots. The sight touched us most deeply. Here were buried, with appropriate memorials and inscriptions, probably twenty of the faithful dumb servants of man, mostly dogs, from which their masters had not loved to part.
It compels thought to recall the fact that, in large measure, man is what he is because of his dumb friends. What would he be without the horse, the dog, the cow, the domesticated beasts of burden, and our dumb friends generally? Without the white man, the Iroquois of America and the Maoris of New Zealand would undoubtedly have arisen into a higher civilization, had they been possessed of beasts of draught or burden, or which gave food, protection, or manifold service. Could they have made early use of the wonderful gifts of the finer breeds of the dog and the horse, what steps of advancement might they not have taken? How far would the Aztecs, Incas, and Algonquins have advanced without domestic fowls and cattle? What would the Japanese islanders have been, without the numerous domestic animals imported from China in historic times? What would Europe and America be, bereft of the gifts they have both received from Asia?
How striking are the narratives of the early colonists in America, that reveal to us the fact that the aboriginal Indian had only a wolf-dog of diminutive size and slight powers, while the canine breeds of Europe not only showed more varied and higher qualities, but were larger in size. Of these strange creatures, the red men were usually more afraid than of their white owners. How surprising was the experience of the Mexicans, who, on beholding the Spanish cavaliers, cased in steel, thought the horse and the rider were one animal! What would South America and her early savages have been, if left without the friends of man imported from the Asian continent?
As at The Hague and at Delft, one notes with the statue of William the Silent the little dog that saved his life; so at Edinburgh we see at the feet of the effigy of Sir Walter, the poet and romancer, his favorite dog Maida. Few episodes are more touching than that of the dog Lufra, in Canto V of the “Lady of the Lake.”
After such a picture of mutual devotion between man and brute, it seems little wonder that in Scotland has been bred what is perhaps the noblest type of canine life. In the physical characteristics of speed, alertness, fleetness, the Scotch collie is second to none in the kingdom of dogs, while in the almost human traits of loyalty to his master and devotion to his interests, this friend of man crowns an age-long evolution from the wild. Happily in art, which is the praise of life, Scotland’s collie and hound have found the immortality of man’s appreciation. This is shown, not only in the word paintings of her poets and romancers, but on the canvas of Landseer, the Shakespeare of dogs. In the Highlands this English painter found some of his noblest inspirations.
Edinburgh, besides being a brain-stimulant, because it is the focus of Scottish history, is also a heart-warmer. Holyrood Palace, Arthur’s Seat, Grey Friar’s Churchyard, St. Giles’s Church, the University, Calton Hill—what memories do they conjure up, what thought compel? A Scottish Sabbath—how impressive! One can no more write the history of Scotland or pen a description of the country and people, and leave out religion, than tell of Greece or Japan and make no mention of art.