Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

NOTES ON EDINBURGH
only the bishop who was burned for his faith in the
antipodes, his memory hghtens the heart and makes
us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the
martyrs' monument is a wholesome heartsome spot
in the field of the dead ; and as we look upon it, a
brave influence comes to us from the land of those
who have won their discharge, and, in another phrase
of Patrick Walker's, got 'cleanly off the stage.'
VI
NEW TOWN : TOWN AND COUNTRY
It is as much a matter of course to decry the New
Town as to exalt the Old ; and the most celebrated
authorities have picked out this quarter as the very
emblem of what is condemnable in architecture.
Much may be said, much indeed has been said, upon
the text; but to the unsophisticated, who call any-
thing pleasing if it only pleases them, the New Town
of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy,
but highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly
ignorant of all theories of the sublime and beautiful,
once propounded as his most radiant notion for Para-
dise : ' The New Town of Edinburgh, with the wind
the matter of a point free.' He has now gone to that
sphere where all good tars are promised pleasant
weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fl.y
somewhat higher. But there are bright and tem-
perate days — with soft air coming from the inland
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