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;
