LEITH, AND THE NEW TOWN. 371
hospital for lepers in early times, from an entry in the Council Records of 30th September
1584, where Michael Chisholm and others are commissioned to inquire into ((the estait
and ordour of the awld fundatioun of the Lipper-houa besyde Dyngwall.” A rural mansion
occupied in former days the north-eastern slope of Moutrie’s Hill,-a curious waif
which long survived the radical changes that had transformed the silent fields in which it
stood into long avenues of populous streets and squares. From its elevated position-on
the hill where the Queen’s men hung up their adversaries as a point visible alike to Edinburgh
and Leith-it must have commanded a magnificent prospect of the Lothians and
Fifeshire, with the Forth, the German Ocean, and the Highland Hills. Now it is buried
under lofty tenements, in one of the most populous districts of the New Town, and with
miles of streets and houses on every side interposing between it and the distant country.
This nucleus of the New Town was not, however, the oldest building it contained. A
small fragment of an ancieut thoroughfare on the west side of the Register Office till
lately bore the name of Gabriel’s Road, although it had been closed for many years, and
reduced to a mere passage leading to one or two private dwellings ; a New Town close,
in fact, somewhat worse than many of its defamed precursors of the Old Town. This
mean-looking alley was the remains of a country road, along which some venerable citizens
still remember to have wended their way between green hedges that skirted the pleasant
meadows and corn fields of Wood’s farm, and which was in days of yore a favourite
trysting-place for lovers, where they breathed out their tender tale of passion beneath the
fragrant hawthorn. It led in an oblique direction towards the ancient village of Silvermills,
and its course is still indicated by the irregular slant of the garden walls that
separate the little plots behind Duke Street from the East Queen Street garden.
When James Craig, the architect, a nephew of the poet Thomson, published his
engraved plan of the new city, which had been selected as the best from a host of
competing designs, he appended to it the following lines from his uncle’s poem :-
August, around, what Public Works I Bee !
Lo, stately streets ! 10, squares that court the breeze !
See long canals and deepened rivers join
Each part with each, and with the circling main,
The whole enliveo’d Isle.
The regular array of formal parallelograms thus sketched out for the future city, was
received by the denizens of the Old Town with raptures of applause. Pent up in narrow
and crooked wynds, its broad, straight avenues, seemed the Jeau ideal of perfection, and
the more sanguine of them panted to see the magnificent design realised. Some echo of
their enthusiastic admiration still lingers among us, but it waxes feeble and indistinct.
The most hearty contemners of the dingy, smoky Old Town, now admit that neither the
formal plan nor the architectural designs of the New Town, evince much intellect or inventive
genius in their contriver ; and, perhaps, even a professed antiquary may venture
to hint at the wisdom of our ancestors, who carried their road obliquely down the steep
northern slope, from Moutrie’s Hill to Silvermills, instead of devising the abrupt precipitous
descent from where the statue of George IV. now stands to the foot of Pitt
Street ; a steep which strikes a stranger with awe, not unmingled with fear, on his first
