Читать книгу Bonnie Scotland - A. R. Hope Moncrieff - Страница 5

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“Auld Reekie,” as it is fondly called, still raises its smokiest chimneys and most weathered walls along the “hoary ridge of ancient town” that culminates in the Castle Rock, looking across a long central line of gardens to the farther swell of land on which stands the New Town of Scott’s day. But New Town now seems a misnomer, since the cramped site of the old city, itself much sweetened and aerated by innovations, is surrounded by newer towns expanding in other directions. Southwards, of late years, Edinburgh has grown more rapidly up to the foot of the hills that here edge the suburbs of Newington, Grange, and Morningside. Westwards she spreads out towards Corstorphine Hill and Craiglockhart. On the east her progress is barred by the mass of Arthur’s Seat, but round the base of this creep rows of tall houses that will soon connect her with Portobello, that minor Margate of the capital, now comprised within her municipal boundaries. Northwards, she goes on “flinging her white arms to the sea,” which she almost touches at Granton and Trinity; and a long unlovely street leads to the Piræus of this modern Athens, Leith, still stiffly standing aloof in civic independence. Including Leith, which refuses to be included, the Scottish metropolis began the century with a population not far short of 400,000.

On high in the midst of these modern settings, the charms of Old Edinburgh are thrown into becoming relief, as the medley smartness of Princes Street is enhanced by its facing the grim backs of the High Street “lands.” Ruskin and other critics have said hard things of the New Town’s architects; but their strictures do not go without question. What, at all events, must strike strangers is an imposing solidity of the modern buildings, whether tall “stairs”—Anglicé flats—or roomy private houses, nearly all built of a grey stone that seems in keeping with the atmosphere; and this not only in the central streets and squares, but in outer suburbs, innocent of brick and stucco. If a too classical regularity has been aimed at, this is tempered by the unevenness of the ground, breaking up the “draughty parallelograms,” giving vistas into the open country, and at night such long panoramas of glittering lights displayed on slopes and crests. The place, says R. L. Stevenson, who has so well caught the picturesque points of his native city, “is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery.... 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.” And if the city fathers have been ill advised in the past, its municipality may claim the credit of being first in the kingdom to take powers for disinfecting it against the plague of mendacious and hideous advertisements that are too much allowed to pock our highways and byways.

EDINBURGH FROM “REST AND BE THANKFUL”

A peculiar feature of the city is its “Bridges,” by which certain streets span others at different levels, physically and socially. From the unique Dean Bridge, in the heart of the West End, one overlooks what might be taken for a Highland glen but for the lines of mansions that edge it above. When I came to Edinburgh as a homesick little schoolboy, appalled by the “boundless continuity” of street, I devoted my first Saturday freedom to an attempt at discovering the open country. This was happily before the days of schoolboys being driven and drilled to play. Striking the Water of Leith at Stockbridge, I turned along the path leading into this glen that might well satisfy desires for a green solitude. But on reaching the village of Dean, embedded below the bridge, I climbed up to find myself beside the dome of St. George’s Church, lost deeper than ever in that bewildering city. Still, a little trimmed and tamed, an oasis of wooded bank shuts in the rushing stream, now purified and stocked with trout, where we were content to catch loaches and sticklebacks.

What a loss to this city was the classically-minded Gothicism or carelessness through which came to be rooted up so many noble trees that once dotted the parks of Drumsheugh and Bellevue! But Edinburgh has been well endowed afresh with open spaces and shrubberies, those that separate the blocks of the New Town mainly private joint-stock paradises, yet serving for public amenity. The Old Town is enclosed between the noble stretch of the Princes Street Gardens on the north, and on the south the open Meadows, with its “Philosopher’s Walk” of Dugald Stewart’s and Playfair’s days, rising into the Bruntsfield Links. Then the city is almost ringed about by parks, more than one of them including grand features of natural scenery. Philadelphia is the only city I know which has such wild scenes at her very doors, in her case collected together in the Fairmount Park, where miles of hill and river landscape have been left almost untouched among the streets and suburbs, yet boasting no points so noble as the head of Arthur’s Seat, with its girdle of crags, screes, and lakes.

This miniature Ben, imposing as it looks, is under 1000 feet high, and easily climbed. Those almost past their climbing days may seek Blackford Hill on the south side, where Scott tells us that he bird’s-nested as a truant boy, and speaks of it as at a later day brought under cultivation; but it has relapsed again to its native wildness, laid out as a rough park and as site for the squat domes of the new Observatory. From this eminence one gets Marmion’s view of the city, now grown up to its foot, shut in between Arthur’s Seat and the wooded ridge of Corstorphine, and bounded to the north across the Firth by the heights of Fife, above which, in clear weather, stand up the blue bastions of the Highlands. Behind Blackford, one may keep up the wooded hollow of the Hermitage, by a public path following the stream, and thus gain the Braid Hills, overlooking the city a little farther back. Keeping along their edge, at some risk from flying golf balls, one can hold on to the hotel built between the old and the new south roads. Here, at the terminus of suburban trams, looking to the Pentlands up the valley of the Braid Burn, by which runs a field path towards Swanston, the country home of R. L. Stevenson, one might hardly guess oneself so near a great city, but for the lordly poorhouse and fever-hospital buildings to the back of Craiglockhart Hill.

In the very heart of the city are view-points fine enough to content hasty travellers, from the battlements of the Castle, from the spire of Scott’s Monument, from the slopes of the Calton Hill, with its array of ready-made ruins and monuments with which Edinburgh has sought to live up to her classical pretensions. This rises beyond the east end of Princes Street, opposite the battlemented gaol, and a little way past that Charing Cross of Auld Reekie, where its main ways meet between the Post Office, the Register House and the tower of a new North British Hotel looking down upon the glass roofs of the sunken Waverley Station. At the other end of Princes Street, an opening before the Caledonian Station may be called Edinburgh’s Piccadilly Circus, radiating into its Mayfair quarter. This end is dominated by the Castle, suggesting to Algerian travellers a duodecimo edition of that wonderful rock-set city Constantine. It shows little of the modern fortress, rather a pile of ugly barracks which a Japanese cruiser could knock to pieces from the Firth; but one understands how in old days its site made it a Gibraltar citadel, that often could hold out when the town was overrun by foemen taking care to keep themselves beyond range of the Castle guns. Taylor, the Water Poet, who had seen something of war in his youth, judged it “so strongly grounded, bounded, and founded, that by force of man it can never be confounded.” The King himself did not gain admittance on his recent visit without a ceremony of summons by the Lord Lyon King of Arms; but all and sundry, at reasonable hours, may stroll across its drawbridge to lounge on the ramparts, to be conducted over historic relics by veteran ciceroni, or to wait for the stunning report of the gun, which, fired from Greenwich at one o’clock, brings every watch within hearing to the test.

From this “Maiden Castle,” safe refuge for princesses of the good old times, a conscientious tourist makes for Holyrood by the long line of High Street and Canongate, bringing him past most of the historic sites and monuments—the “Heart of Midlothian,” the Parliament House, the swept and garnished Cathedral of St. Giles, beside which John Knox now lies literally buried in a highway, as was Dr. Johnson’s pious wish for him; the restored Market Cross, the Tron Church, Knox’s House, which counts rather among Edinburgh’s Apocrypha, and many another ancient mansion, once alive with Scotland’s proudest names, now degraded to an Alsatia of huge dingy tenements, swarming forth vice and misery at nightfall. The way narrows through an unsavoury slum as it approaches the deserted home of kings, beyond which opens a park such as no king has at his back door.

Holyrood was originally an abbey, founded by David I. “in gratitude,” says the legend, “for his miraculous deliverance from a stag on Holy Rood Day, and prompted thereto by a dream.” Similar stories are told of many another prince less disposed to ecclesiastical benefactions than David, that “sair saint to the crown”; even John of England founded one abbey, at Beaulieu, as an act of grace prompted by nightmare visions. Beside David’s Abbey of the Holy Cross sprang up a palace that, as well the sacred precincts, suffered much in the troubles of the Stuart reigns, being frequently burned or spoiled by

EDINBURGH FROM SALISBURY CRAGS—EVENING

English tourists of their period, on the last occasion “personally conducted” by one Oliver Cromwell, who had small respect either for palaces or abbeys. In Charles II.’s time it was rebuilt somewhat after the style of Hampton Court, while the Abbey, devastated by a Presbyterian mob, came to be refitted with a too heavy roof that crushed it into utter ruin. The present building is thus modern, but for the ruins behind, and the restored portion incorporating Queen Mary’s apartments. The name of the Sanctuary opposite was no vain one up till about half a century ago, when impecunious debtors used to take asylum within its bounds, privileged to issue free on Sundays, else venturing forth to feast or sport only at the risk of thrilling adventures with bailiffs.

Everyone who has been to Edinburgh knows the sights of this show place: the portraits of Scottish kings, more or less mythical, “awful examples” as works of art, the whole gallery, it is said, done by a Dutch painter of the seventeenth century for a lump sum of £250; the tapestried rooms of Darnley; the Queen’s bedchamber; and the dark stain on the flooring where Rizzio is believed to have gasped out his life, after being dragged from the side of his mistress. Every reader must know Scott’s story of the traveller in some patent fluid for removing stains, who pressed the use of his nostrum on the horrified custodian. What every stranger does not know is how this “virtuous palace where no monarch dwells” is still used for functions of state. Annually, in May, the Lord High Commissioner takes up his quarters here as representative of the Crown in the General Assembly of the Church, when green peas ought to come into season to make their first appearance on the quasi-royal table. Ireland, that makes such loud boast of her grievances, basks in the smiles of a Lord-Lieutenant all the year, while poor patient Scotland has a blink of reflected royalty for one scrimp fortnight, during which the old palace wakes to the life of levèes, drawingrooms, and dinners, where black gowns and coats are more in evidence than in most courtly circles. The Commissioner’s procession from the palace to open the Assembly lights up the old Canongate with a martial display; and more or less festivity is held within the walls according to the wealth or liberality of the Commissioner, who, like the Lord Mayor of London, should be a rich man to fill his office with due éclat. But when King Edward VII. recently visited Edinburgh, to the regret of the citizens, he did not take up his quarters in the palace, pronounced unsuitable by the prosaic reason of its drains being somewhat too Georgian, a matter that has now been amended.

A more occasional function fitly transacted here is the election of representative peers for Scotland in a new parliament. As every schoolboy ought to know, our Constitution admits only sixteen Scottish peers to sit in Parliament, most of them indeed having place there in virtue of British peerages—the Duke of Atholl as Lord Strange, for instance, the Duke of Montrose as Lord Graham, and so forth. Of those left out in the cold, sixteen are “elected” by a somewhat cut-and-dried process very free from the heat and excitement of popular voting. As I have seen it, the ceremony seemed to lack impressiveness. Some dozen gentlemen in pot hats and shooting jackets assembled in the Picture Gallery before an audience chiefly consisting of ladies, more than one of these legislators in mien and appearance suggesting what Fielding says about Joseph Andrews, that he might have been taken for a nobleman by one who had not seen many noblemen. Each of the privileged order, in turn, wrote and read out a list of the peers for whom he voted, usually ending “and myself.” Certain practically-minded peers sent in their votes by post. The most moving incident was the expected one of an advocate in wig and gown rising to put in for a client some unrecognised claim to a title or protest as to precedency, duly listened to and noted down. The whole ceremony struck one as rather a waste of time; but perhaps the same might be said of most ceremonies. One thing has to be remembered about these unimposing lords, that they are a highly select body in point of blue blood, all representing old families, as the fount of their honour was dried up at the Union, and the king can make an honest man as soon as a Scottish peer.

The tourist who comes in for any of such functions will realise the truth of what R. L. Stevenson says for his native city:—