38 EDINBURGH PAST AND PRESENT.
the West Meadow, have been for hundreds of years the favourite resort for golf
players. This forms the north-western portion of the old ‘ Borough Wuir,’
on which the Scottish army encamped on the eve of their fatal march to
Flodden. To the iouth-east there is a walk between deep hedges, long and
familiarly known as the Lover’s Loan.
Apart from its old associations and present uses the Meadows have always
presented peculiar charms for musing and solitary men,-for students, for
clericals, for actors, for strangers, and every soh of accomplished idlers, as
well as every variety of professional men. Here we have overheard the player
rehearsing his part for the evening theatre; the wild-eyed poetic youth reciting
Byron, or reading Shelley or Coleridge himself (as he thought) alone ; ’ the
desperate and suicide-revolving man uttering his broken and frenzied
soliloquies; the student conning his Tacitus, or repeating his sermon for the
Presbytery ; the lover revolving a sonnet to his mistress’s eyebrow or walking
at her side; the wretched waif, with madness and hell contending for the
mastery over his miserable face, emaciated figure, and tattered attire, as he
elbows without scruple or begs without shame from the doctor, the divine, the
master of the New Academy or High School, the professor, or the judge who
have sought recreation but not found solitude in the Meadows. Here, too,
was daily to be viewed a scene, whichin its varied beauty and sublimity,
seemed to suit all and soothe many who frequented it with its fresh green
pastures, where in full spring or summer tide
‘ You scarce could see the grass for flowers ; ’
its trees from under whose shadow your soul
‘ Floated and mingled far away
With the warm winds of the summer day ; ’
its cool walks, where you felt yourself at times entirely alone, and could revel
unseen in Hazlitt’S First Acpzlaiirtance with PO&, and in Shelley’s translations
from Faust, bound together in the one blue cover of the Liberal; and
with constant feeling of thk neighbourhood and occasional flashing out of the
presence of Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags, and the distant Pentlands leaning
like wearied Titans against the south-western sky. (We have in Mr. Paton’s
delightful drawing a glimpse of the-avenue that unites the Meadows and
Bruntsfield Links.)
To the old Borough Muir belonged the ground now laid out so beautifully
as the Grange Cemetery. Here slumbers the fiery dust of Chalrners, and
