I2 EDINBURGH PAST AND PRESENT.
intricacies and associations of the other. Even now, although many
changes have occurred since his day, and more are rapidly occurring, it is still
possible to throw yourself back into the ‘Foreworld,’ and to dream your
delightful way through the old courts and streets which, though dim and
dusky with years, are burnished and gilded, as it were, with memories, and
illuminated by
‘ The light which never was on sea or shore.’
In our early days, at all events, a thousand histories were round us as we
walked or rather loitered on through regions where to loiter was still possible
to all and inevitable to some; and where %e were waylaid at every step by
the ghosts of Knox and Murray and Mary, and James IV. and George
Buchanan, and Rizzio and Darnley, and Andrew Melville and Henderson
of Leuchars, and Argyll and Montrose, and Jenny Geddes and Samuel
Rutherfurd, and Fletcher of Saltoun, and Principal Robertson and Hugh
Blair, and Robert Bums and William Smellie, and David Hume, and a
hundred more of actual historical characters, as well as by the ‘shadows of
shades ’-the simuZmnz of fictitious creatures, of Waverley and Fergus Mac-
Ivor and the Baron of Bradwardine, and Jeanie Deans and David Deans,
and Sir George Staunton and Madge Wildfire, and Dandie Dinmont and
Colonel Mannering and Councillor Pleydell, and Peter Peebles and Saunders
Fairford, and the others with which Scott has replenished the Old Town, till, ‘
between life-like dreams and dream-like realities, it is the most crowded city
in the world !
Apart from the Old Town as a ‘ populous solitude’ of beings and characters,
fictitious or real, it has many elements of interest, internal and external,
peculiar to itself. To it belongs that feature alluded to in our former paper,
and which Thomas Aird thus beautifully, and in his own best descriptive
manner, characterises. ‘The New Town,’ he says, ‘is surpassingly fair, but
there is far too much regularity, division, and dissipation of effect about it for
commanding greatness. The only vast and overawing feature of the city is
the backbone of the Old Town from the Castle to Holyrood, seen from the
Calton, with all its evening lights, or in the smokeless air of the clear morning.
Such a far grasping of the most irregular and daring piles in every form of
jags in the enormous spine is absolutely tremendous.’ How finely he adds,
too, in reference to Arthur‘s Seat :-‘ I have seen no hill so perfect of beauty.
It is like a vase: look at it from all points and you have the same unique
symmetry of form. The suffusion of sunny air on its lofty shoulders on a
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