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Edinburgh Past and Present

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I8 EDINBURGH PAST AND PRESENT. ~ building, strange projectings, receding, and windings, roofs, stairs, and windows all luxuriating in the endless variety of carved work, kding and mouldering coats of arms, helmets, crests, coronets, supporters, mantles, and pavilions, all these testimonials of forgotten pride, mingled so profuseIy with the placards of old-clothesmen and every ensign of plebeian wretchedness,- most striking emblems of the decay of a once royal city and appropriate avenue to a deserted palace.' Passing Queen Mary's Bath-house, and in fine emerging on Holyrood Palace, which, sunk in a hollow overhung by mountains, seems an apt emblem of Scotland and the Scottish kingdom, in its combination of that outward meanness and aspiring majesty, humble position and hot pride, courage and self-assertion, which mingled in the blaze of ' The add Scottish glory.' STAIRCASH. HOLYROOD. One of the engravings shows the narrowdark stair bywhich the assassins reached Rizziot and the other shows the doorway at which the murder was committed. If Holyrood in comparison with the Castle may seem something of an inverted climax,-we question if, to a led and soothfast Caledonian, it be not every whit as inspiring,--if the one be the apex, the other is the foundation of the stately and structum1 whole.
Volume 11 Page 28
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Volume 11 Page 29
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