Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1879 - Edinburgh

28
VIII.
THE CALTON HILL.
The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great elevation, which
the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side of it ; while the New
Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes the circuit. You mount by stairs in a
cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the
honours of situation and architecture ; Burns is memorialised lower down upon a spur ; Lord
Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the topgallant of the Calton Hill. This latter
erection has been differently and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a
butterchurn ; comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But the
chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, ' the Modern Ruin ' as it has been called, an
imposing object from far and near, and giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air
of a Modern Athens which has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant
to be a National Monument ; and its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
national characteristics. The old Observatory — a quaint brown building on the edge of the
steep — and the new Observatory — a classical edifice with a dome — occupy the central portion
of the summit. All these are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.
The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the dead. You see
Dugald Stewart rather more, handsomely commemorated than Burns. Immediately below, in
the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane
while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously acclaimed,
the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgotten. The votaries of
Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in Scotland and more remarkable for number than
discretion, eagerly suppress all mention of the lad who handed on to him the poetic impulse
and, up to the time when he grew famous, continued to influence him in his manner and
the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged his debt in a fragment of
autobiography, but erected a tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was
worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain ; and although I think I have read nearly all
the biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of nature was not
violated, or where Fergusson was not sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one,
to have a bigger thing to gape at ; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without
disparaging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think to please the great originals ;
and whoever puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better than dedicate his labours to
the memory of Burns, who will be the best delighted of the dead.
Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best ; since you can see the
Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from
Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east wind
which are so common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea,
with a little of the sea freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is
delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse to the majority of
mankind. It brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolourizer, although not thick
enough to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to windward at
the far end of Musselburgh Bay ; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and
the hump of the Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
Immediately underneath upon the south, you command the yards of the High School
and the towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, castellated to the extent of folly,