natural death-all the rest having lost their lives
in defence of their country.
If we turn to Holyrood, what visions and memories
must arise of Knoq standing grim and stem
before his queen, in his black Geneva cloak, with
his hands planted on the horn handle of his long
walking-cane, daringly rebuking her love of music
and dancing-unbending, unyieldmg, and unmelted,
by her exalted rank, her beauty, or her bitter
tears j and of that terrible night in the Tower of
James V., when sickly Ruthven, looking pale as
a spectre under the open visor of his helmet, drew
back with gauntleted hand the ancient arras as
the assassins stole up the secret stair,-and then
Rizzio, clinging wildly to the queen?s skirt, and
dying beneath her eyes of many a mortal wound,
with Darnley?s dagger planted in his body; of
Charles Edward, in the prime of his youth and
comeliness, already seeing the crown of the Stuarts
upon his exiled father?s head, surrounded by exultant
Jacobite ladies, with white cockades on their
bosoms, and dancing in the long gallery of the
kings to the sound of the same pipes that blew
the onset at Falkirk and Culloden !
A very few years later, and Boswell, ?and Dr.
Johnson in his brown suit with steel buttons,
might have been seen coming arm-in-arm from
the White Horse Hostel in Boyd?s Close-the
burly lexicographer, as his obsequious follower
tells us, grumbling and stumbling in the dark, as
they proceeded on their way to the abode of the
latter in James?s Court; but his visit to Scotland
compelled the pedant, who trembled at the Cock
Lane ghost and yet laughed at the idea of an
earthquake in Lisbon, to have, as Macaulay says,
a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies, which
skems on that occasion to have crossed his mind
for the first time.?
In yonder house, in Dunbar?s Close, the Ironsides
of Cromwell had their guard-house ; and on
the adjacent bartizan, that commanded a view of
all the fields and farms to the north, in the autumn
evenings of 1650~ the Protector often sat with
Mathew Tiomlinson, Monk, and Ireton, each
smoking their yards of clay and drinking Scottish
. ale, or claret, and expounding, it might be, texts of
Scripture, while their batteries at the Lang-gate
? and Heriot?s Hospital threw shot and shell at the
Castle, then feebly defended by the treacherous
Dundas, from whom the Protector?s gold won what,
he himself admitted, steel and shot might never
have done, the fortress never before being so strong
as it was then, with all its stores and garrison. And
in, that wynd, to which, in perishing, he gave his
name, we shall see the sturdy craftsman Halkerston
fighting to the death, with his two-handed sword,
against the English invaders. Turn which way we
hay in Edinburgh, that stirring past attends us,
and every old stone is a record of the days, the
years, and the people, who have passed away.
In a cellar not far distant the Treaty of Union
was partly signed, in haste and fear and trembling,
while the street without rang with the yells and
opprobrious cries of the infuriated mob ; and after
that event, by the general desertion of the nobility,
came what has been emphatically called the Dark
Age of Edinburgh-that dull and heartless period
when grass was seen to grow around the market-,
cross, when a strange and unnatural stillness-the
stillness of village life-seemed to settle over every
one and everything, when the author of ? Douglas ?
was put under ban for daring to write that tragedy,
and when men made their last will and testament
before setting out by the stage for London, and
when such advertisements appeared as that which
we find in the EdinbuTh Coirranf for 7th March,
1761 -?A young lady who is about to set out fqr
London in a postchaise will be glad of a companion.
Enquire at the publisher of this paper ; ?
-when Edinburgh was so secluded and had such
little intercourse with London, that on one occasion
the mail brought but a single letter (for the British
Linen Company), and the dullness of local life
received a fillip only when Admiral de Fourbin
was off the coast of Fife, or the presence of Thurot
the corsair, or of Paul Jones, brought back some
of the old Scottish spirit of the past.
The stately oaks of the Burghmuir, under which
Guy of Namuis Flemish lances fled in ruin and
defeat before the Scots of Douglas and Dalhousie,
have long since passed away, and handsome
modem villas cover all the land to the base of
the bordering hills; but the old battle stone, in
which our kings planted their standards, and which
marked the Campus Martius of the Scottish hosts,
still lingers there on the south; and the once
lonely Figgatemuir on the east, where the monks
of Holyrood grazed their flocks and herds, and
where Wallace mustered his warriors prior to the
storming of Dunbar, is now a pleasant little watering
place, which somewhat vainly boasts itself
?? the Scottish Brighton.?
The remarkable appearance and construction of
old Edinburgh-towering skyward, storey upon
storey, with all its black and bulky chimneys, crowstepped
gables, and outside stairs-arise from the
circumstance of its having been twice walled, and
the necessity for residing within these barriers, for
protection in times of foreign or domestic war.
Thus, what Victor Hug0 says of the Paris of Philip
?
Augustus seems peculiarly applicable to the Edinburgh
of Jsmes V., and still more to that of
James 11.
?He imprisoned Paris in a Circular chain of
great towers, high and solid,? says the author of
(? Notre Dame j ? ?for more than a century after
this the houses went on pressing upon each other,
accumulating and rising higher and higher. They
.got deeper and deeper; they piled storeys on
storeys j they mounted one upon another j they
shot up monstrously tall, for they had not room to
grow breadthwise; each sought to raise its head
above its neighbour to have a little air ; every open
space became filled up, and disappeared. The
houses at length leaped over the wall of Philip
Augustus, and scattered themselves joyously over
the plain. Then they did what they liked, and
cut themselves gardens out of the fields.?
And of the old walled city the welI-known lines
of Scott are most apposite :-
? Such dusky grandeur clothed the height,
When the huge castle holds its state,
Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky,
Piled deep and massy, close and high,
And all the steep slope down,
Mine own romantic town ! ?
New Edinburgh appeals to us in a different
sense. It tells peculiarly in all its phases 01
modern splendour, wealth, luxury, and all the arts
of peace, while ?in no other city,? it has been
said, ?? will you find so general an appreciation oi
books, arts, music, and objects of antiquarian
interest. It is peculiarly free from the taint of the
ledger and counting-house. It is a Weimar with.
out a Goethe-Boston without its twang.?
This is the Edinburgh through the noble street:
of which Scott limped in his old age, white-haired
and slow, leaning often on the arm of Lockhari
.or the greyplaided Ettrick Shepherd; the Edin.
burgh where the erect and stalwart form of thr
athletic ?? Christopher North,? with his long lock:
of grizzled yellow-his ?tawny mane,? as hr
called them-floating on the breeze, his keen blur
eyes seemingly fixed on vacancy, his left hanc
planted behind his back, and his white neck
cloth oft awry, strode daily from Gloucester Plaa
to the University, or to ?Ebony?s,? to meet Jefiey
Rutherford, Cockbum, Delta, Aytoun, Edwarc
Forbes, and Carlyle ; the Edinburgh where Simpson
the good, the wise, and the gentle, made his dis
covery concerning chloroform, and made his mark
too, as ?the grand old Scottish doctor,? whosi
house in Queen Street was a focus for all thi
learned and all the Ziterati of Europe and Americi
-the Edinburgh of the Georgian and Victorian age
We propose to trace the annals of its glorious
University, from the infant establishment, founded
by the legacy of Robert Bishop of Orkney, in
1581, and which was grafted on the ancient edifice
n the Kuk-of-Field, and the power of which, as
years went on, spread fast wherever law, theology,
medicine, and art, were known. The youngest
znd yet the noblest of all Scottish universities,
:nrolliug yearly the greatest number of students, it
ias been the dma mater of many men, who,
n every department of learning and literature,
iave proved themselves second to none; and
?kom the early days when Rollock taught, to those
when it rose into repute as a great school of
medicine under the three Munroes, who held with
honour the chair of anatomy for 150 years, and
when, in other branches of knowledge, its fame
yew under Maclaurin, Black, Ferguson, Stewart,
Hamilton, Forbes, Syme, and Brewster, we shan
;race its history down to the present day, when
its privileges *cl efficiency were so signally aukmented
by the Scottish University Act of 1858.
Nor shall we omit to trace the origin and development
of the stage in Edinburgh, from the
time when the masks or plays of Sir David Lindsay
of the Mount were performed in the open
air in the days of James V., ?when weather
served,? at the Greensidelwell beneath the Calton
Hill, and the theatre at the Watergate, when ?his
Majesty?s servants from London ? were patronised
by the Duke of Albany and York, then resident
in Holyrood, down to the larger establishments in
the Canongate, under the litigious Tony Astdn,
and those of later years, which saw the performances
of Kean, Kemble, and Mrs. Siddons, and
the production of the Waverley dramas, under the
auspices of Terry, who, as Scott said, laughingly,
had ?? temfied ? his romances into plays.
Arthur?s Seat and the stupendous craigs, the
name of which is so absurdly and grotesquely
corrupted into Salisbury,? alone are unchanged
since those pre-historic days, when, towering amid
the wilderness, they overlooked the vast forest of
oaks that stretched from :he pastoral hills of Braid
to the sea-the wood of Drumsheugh, wherein
roamed the snow-white Caledonian bull, those
ferocious Caledonian boars, which, as Martial tells
us, were used to heighten the torments of unhappy
sufferers on the cross; the elk, the stag, and the
wolf; and amid which rose the long ridgy slopethe
&?in-that formed the site of the future old
city, terminating in the abrupt bluff of the Castle
rock. There, too, rose the bare round mass of
the Calton, the abode of the fox and hare, and
where the bustard had its nest amid the gorse;
