Читать книгу Traditions of Edinburgh - Robert Chambers - Страница 6

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Fortified Gate, Nether Bow Port, from Canongate.

Edinburgh was, at the beginning of George III.’s reign, a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town, of about seventy thousand inhabitants. It had no court, no factories, no commerce; but there was a nest of lawyers in it, attending upon the Court of Session; and a considerable number of the Scotch gentry—one of whom then passed as rich with a thousand a year—gave it the benefit of their presence during the winter. Thus the town had lived for some ages, during which political discontent and division had kept the country poor. A stranger approaching the city, seeing it piled ‘close and massy, deep and high’—a series of towers, rising from a palace on the plain to a castle in the air—would have thought it a truly romantic place; and the impression would not have subsided much on a near inspection, when he would have found himself admitted by a fortified gate through an ancient wall, still kept in repair. Even on entering the one old street of which the city chiefly consisted, he would have seen much to admire—houses of substantial architecture and lofty proportions, mingled with more lowly, but also more arresting wooden fabrics; a huge and irregular, but venerable Gothic church, surmounted by an aërial crown of masonry; finally, an esplanade towards the Castle, from which he could have looked abroad upon half a score of counties, upon firth and fell, yea, even to the blue Grampians. Everywhere he would have seen symptoms of denseness of population; the open street a universal market; a pell-mell of people everywhere. The eye would have been, upon the whole, gratified, whatever might be the effect of the clangor strepitusque upon the ear, or whatever might have been the private meditations of the nose. It would have only been on coming to close quarters, or to quarters at all, that our stranger would have begun to think of serious drawbacks from the first impression. For an inn, he would have had the White Horse, in a close in the Canongate; or the White Hart, a house which now appears like a carrier’s inn, in the Grassmarket. Or, had he betaken himself to a private lodging, which he would have probably done under the conduct of a ragged varlet, speaking more of his native Gaelic than English, he would have had to ascend four or five stories of a common stair, into the narrow chambers of some Mrs Balgray or Luckie Fergusson, where a closet-bed in the sitting-room would have been displayed as the most comfortable place in the world; and he would have had, for amusement, a choice between an extensive view of house-tops from the window and the study of a series of prints of the four seasons, a sampler, and a portrait of the Marquis of Granby, upon the wall.

House-tops.

WHITE HART INN, GRASSMARKET.

Page 2.

On being introduced into society, our stranger might have discovered cause for content with his lodging on finding how poorly off were the first people with respect to domestic accommodations. I can imagine him going to tea at Mr Bruce of Kennet’s, in Forrester’s Wynd—a country gentleman and a lawyer (not long after raised to the bench), yet happy to live with his wife and children in a house of fifteen pounds of rent, in a region of profound darkness and mystery, now no more. Had he got into familiar terms with the worthy lady of the mansion, he might have ascertained that they had just three rooms and a kitchen; one room, ‘my lady’s’—that is, the kind of parlour he was sitting in; another, a consulting-room for the gentleman; the third, a bedroom. The children, with their maid, had beds laid down for them at night in their father’s room; the housemaid slept under the kitchen dresser; and the one man-servant was turned at night out of the house. Had our friend chanced to get amongst tradespeople, he might have found Mr Kerr, the eminent goldsmith in the Parliament Square, stowing his ménage into a couple of small rooms above his booth-like shop, plastered against the wall of St Giles’s Church; the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.

But indeed everything was on a homely and narrow scale. The College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half-filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes and dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the Poker Club in a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close, to which our stranger could scarcely have made his way without a guide. In a similar situation across the way, he would have found, at the proper season, the Assembly; that is, a congregation of ladies met for dancing, and whom the gentlemen usually joined rather late, and rather merry. The only theatre was also a poor and obscure place in some indescribable part of the Canongate.

The town was, nevertheless, a funny, familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and semple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest in each other.[1] Acquaintances might not only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party-walls, but from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip. There was little elegance, but a vast amount of cheap sociality. Provokingly comical clubs, founded each upon one joke, were abundant. The ladies had tea-drinkings at the primitive hour of six, from which they cruised home under the care of a lantern-bearing, patten-shod lass; or perhaps, if a bad night, in Saunders Macalpine’s sedan-chair. Every forenoon, for several hours, the only clear space which the town presented—that around the Cross—was crowded with loungers of all ranks, whom it had been an amusement to the poet Gay to survey from the neighbouring windows of Allan Ramsay’s shop. The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere. Gentlemen and ladies paraded along in the stately attire of the period; tradesmen chatted in groups, often bareheaded, at their shop-doors; caddies whisked about, bearing messages, or attending to the affairs of strangers; children filled the kennel with their noisy sports. Add to all this, corduroyed men from Gilmerton, bawling coals or yellow sand, and spending as much breath in a minute as could have served poor asthmatic Hugo Arnot for a month; fishwomen crying their caller haddies from Newhaven; whimsicals and idiots going along, each with his or her crowd of listeners or tormentors; sootymen with their bags; town-guardsmen with their antique Lochaber axes; water-carriers with their dripping barrels; barbers with their hair-dressing materials; and so forth—and our stranger would have been disposed to acknowledge that, though a coarse and confused, it was a perfectly unique scene, and one which, once contemplated, was not easily to be forgotten.

A change at length began. Our northern country had settled to sober courses in the reign of George II., and the usual results of industry were soon apparent. Edinburgh by-and-by felt much like a lady who, after long being content with a small and inconvenient house, is taught, by the money in her husband’s pockets, that such a place is no longer to be put up with. There was a wish to expatiate over some of the neighbouring grounds, so as to get more space and freer air; only it was difficult to do, considering the physical circumstances of the town, and the character of the existing outlets. Space, space!—air, air! was, however, a strong and a general cry, and the old romantic city did at length burst from its bounds, though not in a very regular way, or for a time to much good purpose.

NEWHAVEN FISHWIFE.

Page 4.

A project for a new street on the site of Halkerston’s Wynd, leading by a bridge to the grounds of Mutrie’s Hill, where a suburb might be erected, was formed before the end of the seventeenth century.[2] It was a subject of speculation to John, Earl of Mar, during his years of exile, as were many other schemes of national improvement which have since been realised—for example, the Forth and Clyde Canal. The grounds to the north lay so invitingly open that the early formation of such a project is not wonderful. Want of spirit and of means alone could delay its execution. After the Rebellion of 1745, when a general spirit of improvement began to be shown in Scotland, the scheme was taken up by a public-spirited provost, Mr George Drummond, but it had to struggle for years with local difficulties. Meanwhile, a sagacious builder, by name James Brown, resolved to take advantage of the growing taste; he purchased a field near the town for £1200, and feued it out for a square. The speculation is said to have ended in something like giving him his own money as an annual return. This place (George Square) became the residence of several of the judges and gentry. I was amused a few years ago hearing an old gentleman in the country begin a story thus: ‘When I was in Edinburgh, in the year ’67, I went to George Square, to call for Mrs Scott of Sinton,’ &c. To this day some relics of gentry cling to its grass-green causeways, charmed, perhaps, by its propinquity to the Meadows and Bruntsfield Links. Another place sprang into being, a smaller quadrangle of neat houses, called Brown’s Square.[3] So much was thought of it at first that a correspondent of the Edinburgh Advertiser, in 1764, seriously counsels his fellow-citizens to erect in it an equestrian statue of the then popular young king, George III.! This place, too, had some distinguished inhabitants; till 1846, one of the houses continued to be nominally the town mansion of a venerable judge, Lord Glenlee. We pass willingly from these traits of grandeur to dwell on the fact of its having been the residence of Miss Jeanie Elliot of Minto, the authoress of the original song, The Flowers of the Forest; and even to bethink ourselves that here Scott placed the ideal abode of Saunders Fairford and the adventure of Green Mantle. Sir Walter has informed us, from his own recollections, that the inhabitants of these southern districts formed for a long time a distinct class of themselves, having even places of polite amusement for their own recreation, independent of the rest of Edinburgh. He tells us that the society was of the first description, including, for one thing, most of the gentlemen who wrote in the Mirror and the Lounger. There was one venerable inhabitant who did not die till half the New Town was finished, yet he had never once seen it!

The exertions of Drummond at length procured an act (1767) for extending the royalty of the city over the northern fields; and a bridge was then erected to connect these with the elder city. The scheme was at first far from popular. The exposure to the north and east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered that a lover told a New-Town mistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that when he visited her, he felt as performing an adventure not much short of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers should forget them if they removed so far from the centre of things as Princes Street and St Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable, and behoved to be made.

It is curious to cast the eye over the beautiful city which now extends over this district, the residence of as refined a mass of people as could be found in any similar space of ground upon earth, and reflect on what the place was a hundred years ago. The bulk of it was a farm, usually called Wood’s Farm, from its tenant (the father of a clever surgeon, well known in Edinburgh in the last age under the familiar appellation of Lang Sandy Wood). Henry Mackenzie, author of the Man of Feeling, who died in 1831, remembered shooting snipes, hares, and partridges about that very spot to which he alludes at the beginning of the paper on Nancy Collins in the Mirror (July 1779): ‘As I walked one evening, about a fortnight ago, through St Andrew Square, I observed a girl meanly dressed,’ &c. Nearly along the line now occupied by Princes Street was a rough enclosed road, called the Lang Gait or Lang Dykes, the way along which Claverhouse went with his troopers in 1689, when he retired in disgust from the Convention, with the resolution of raising a rebellion in the Highlands. On the site of the present Register House was a hamlet or small group of houses called Mutrie’s Hill; and where the Royal Bank now stands was a cottage wherein ambulative citizens regaled themselves with fruit and curds and cream. Broughton, which latterly has been surprised and swamped by the spreading city, was then a village, considered as so far afield that people went to live in it for the summer months, under the pleasing idea that they had got into the country. It is related that Whitefield used to preach to vast multitudes on the spot which by-and-by became appropriated for the Theatre Royal. Coming back one year, and finding a playhouse on the site of his tub, he was extremely incensed. Could it be, as Burns suggests,

‘There was rivalry just in the job!’

James Craig, a nephew of the poet Thomson, was entrusted with the duty of planning the new city. In the engraved plan, he appropriately quotes from his uncle:

‘August, around, what PUBLIC WORKS I see!

Lo, stately streets! lo, squares that court the breeze!

See long canals and deepened rivers join

Each part with each, and with the circling main,

The whole entwined isle.’

The names of the streets and squares were taken from the royal family and the tutelary saints of the island. The honest citizens had originally intended to put their own local saint in the foreground; but when the plan was shown to the king for his approval, he cried: ‘Hey, hey—what, what—St Giles Street!—never do, never do!’ And so, to escape from an unpleasant association of ideas, this street was called Princes Street, in honour of the king’s two sons, afterwards George IV. and the Duke of York. So difficult was it at the very first to induce men to build that a premium of twenty pounds was offered by the magistrates to him who should raise the first house; it was awarded to Mr John Young, on account of a mansion erected by him in Rose Court, George Street. An exemption from burghal taxes was granted to the first house in the line of Princes Street, built by Mr John Neale, haberdasher (afterwards occupied by Archibald Constable, and then as the Crown Hotel), in consequence of a bargain made by Mr Graham, plumber, who sold this and the adjoining ground to the town.[4] Mr Shadrach Moyes, when having a house built for himself in Princes Street, in 1769, took the builder bound to rear another farther along besides his, to shield him from the west wind! Other quaint particulars are remembered; as, for instance: Mr Wight, an eminent lawyer, who had planted himself in St Andrew Square, finding he was in danger of having his view of St Giles’s clock shut up by the advancing line of Princes Street, built the intervening house himself, that he might have it in his power to keep the roof low for the sake of the view in question; important to him, he said, as enabling him to regulate his movements in the morning, when it was necessary that he should be punctual in his attendance at the Parliament House.

ROUPING-WIFE.

Page 9.

The foundation was at length laid of that revolution which has ended in making Edinburgh a kind of double city—first, an ancient and picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes; and second, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect, and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of society. The New Town, keeping pace with the growing prosperity of the country, had, in 1790, been extended to Castle Street; in 1800 the necessity for a second plan of the same extent still farther to the north had been felt, and this was after acted upon. Forty years saw the Old Town thoroughly changed as respects population. One after another, its nobles and gentry, its men of the robe, its ‘writers,’ and even its substantial burghers, had during that time deserted their mansions in the High Street and Canongate, till few were left. Even those modern districts connected with it, as St John Street, New Street, George Square, &c., were beginning to be forsaken for the sake of more elegantly circumstanced habitations beyond the North Loch. Into the remote social consequences of this change it is not my purpose to enter, beyond the bare remark that it was only too accordant with that tendency of our present form of civilisation to separate the high from the low, the intelligent from the ignorant—that dissociation, in short, which would in itself run nigh to be a condemnation of all progress, if we were not allowed to suppose that better forms of civilisation are realisable. Enough that I mention the tangible consequences of the revolution—a flooding in of the humbler trading classes where gentles once had been; the houses of these classes, again, filled with the vile and miserable. Now were to be seen hundreds of instances of such changes as Provost Creech indicates in 1783: ‘The Lord Justice-Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher—Lord President Craigie’s house by a rouping-wife or salewoman of old furniture—and Lord Drummore’s house left by a chairman for want of accommodation.’ ‘The house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now possessed by a wheelwright!’ To one who, like myself, was young in the early part of the present century, it was scarcely possible, as he permeated the streets and closes of ancient Edinburgh, to realise the idea of a time when the great were housed therein. But many a gentleman in middle life, then living perhaps in Queen Street or Charlotte Square, could recollect the close or the common stair where he had been born and spent his earliest years, now altogether given up to a different portion of society. And when the younger perambulator inquired more narrowly, he could discover traces of this former population. Here and there a carved coat-armorial, with supporters, perhaps even a coronet, arrested attention amidst the obscurities of some wynd or court. Did he ascend a stair and enter a floor, now subdivided perhaps into four or five distinct dwellings, he might readily perceive, in the massive wainscot of the lobby, a proof that the refinements of life had once been there. Still more would this idea be impressed upon him when, passing into one of the best rooms of the old house, he would find not only a continuation of such wainscoting, but perhaps a tolerable landscape by Norie on a panel above the fireplace, or a ceiling decorated by De la Cour, a French artist, who flourished in Edinburgh about 1740. Even yet he would discover a very few relics of gentry maintaining their ground in the Old Town, as if faintly to show what it had once been. These were generally old people, who did not think it worth while to make any change till the great one. There is a melancholy pleasure in recalling what I myself found about 1820, when my researches for this work were commenced. In that year I was in the house of Governor Fergusson, an ancient gentleman of the Pitfour family, in a floor, one stair up, in the Luckenbooths. About the same time I attended the book-sale of Dr Arrot, a physician of good figure, newly deceased, in the Mint Close. For several years later, any one ascending a now miserable-looking stair in Blackfriars Wynd would have seen a door-plate inscribed with the name Miss Oliphant, a member of the Gask family. Nay, so late as 1832, I had the pleasure of breakfasting with Sir William Macleod Bannatyne in Whiteford House, Canongate (afterwards a type-foundry), on which occasion the venerable old gentleman talked as familiarly of the levees of the sous-ministre for Lord Bute in the old villa at the Abbey Hill as I could have talked of the affairs of the Canning administration; and even recalled, as a fresh picture of his memory, his father drawing on his boots to go to make interest in London in behalf of some of the men in trouble for the Forty-five, particularly his own brother-in-law, the Clanranald of that day. Such were the connections recently existing between the past system of things and the present. Now, alas! the sun of Old-Town glory has set for ever. Nothing is left but the decaying and rapidly diminishing masses of ancient masonry, and a handful of traditionary recollections, which be it my humble but not unworthy task to transmit to future generations.[5]

Carved Armorial, with Supporters.

THE CASTLE-HILL.

Page 11.