Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1879 - Edinburgh

24 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh.
window of a grimy tenement in a lane : — and behold ! you are face-to-face with distant and
bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.
You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one thing ; it is another
for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to overlook the country. It should be a genial
and ameliorating influence in life ; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's
unconcern : that he can watch from day to day, as he trots ofFiceward, how the Spring green
brightens in the wood or the field grows black under a moving ploughshare. I have been
tempted, in this connexion, to deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-
whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people
are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, if you could
take clear note of the objects of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where
you stand : — think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts
would be diversified, as you walked the Edinburgh streets ! For you might pause, in some
business perplexity, in the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd
as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin,
clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed and rustic
visage ; or a fisher racing seawards, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in
the wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May.
To be old is not the same thing as to be picturesque ; nor because the Old Town bears
a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town shall look commonplace. Indeed,
apart from antique houses, it is curious how much description would apply commonly to either
The same sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the
same superposition of one rank of society over another, are to be observed in both. Thus
the broad and comely approach to Prince's Street from the east, lined with hotels and public
offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the Low Calton ; if you cast a glance over the parapet,
you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street ; and the same tall
houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the New Town passing overhead above its
own cellars ; walking, so to speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the
human race. But at the Dean Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel order.
The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between gardens ; the
crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most commodious streets and crescents in
the modern city ; and a handsome bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon,
private carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card-cases pass to and fro about the duties of
society. And yet down below, you may still see, with its mills and foaming weir, the little
rural village of Dean. Modern improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct ;
and the extended city has cleanly overleapt, and left unaltered, what was once the summer
retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its growth ; Edinburgh
herself has embraced a good few ; but it is strange to see one still surviving — and to see it
some hundreds of feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried
Herculaneum ? Herculaneum was dead at least ; but the sun still shines upon the roofs of Dean ;
the smoke still rises thriftily from its chimneys ; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at
the gurgling water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps
whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony — for all the world as if Edinburgh were still
the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile
or so in the green country.
It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of his example to
the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode in a street which is still (so oddly
may a jest become perpetuated) known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large
but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are
places that still smell of the plough in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird