Edinburgh Bookshelf

Edinburgh Past and Present

Search

Volume 11 Page 36
  Enlarge Enlarge  
THE OLD TOWN. 21 whose residence as the Duke of York in Scotland furnishes the blackest page in all his history, and the chief vestige of whose personal presence in Edinburgh-‘ the Duke’s Walk,’ near Holyrood-became appropriately the haunt of duelIits and suicides ; Charles Edward, his descendant, whose entrance into the city, seeming mock-heroic now from its insignificant or hapless Fesults, was really a grand affair, being the reward of vdour and good fortune, and taking place. amidst picturesque accompaniments and glowing, though hollow, hopes,-superior far surely to the avatar of George IV., at which Scotland now blushes even more than she does at the abortive ‘ NationaI Monument’ and at the statue erected to his memory in her noblest New Town street, of which the poet so justly sang ‘ Let one vast bloodstone be the mighty base,’ although as much inferior to that already commemorated of Victoria riding up from the Palace ‘to the CradIe of her ancestors I KNOX’S S N D Y . We have named incidentally already some of the great names of Queen Mary‘s and still later days. Edinburgh was truly a magnificent place when Mary, the loveliest of women and most accomplished of princesses, was
Volume 11 Page 37
  Enlarge Enlarge     Pictures Pictures