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
-
'THE OLD TOWN. 13
~
clear April day, and the ethereal blue' of the heavens above its grey rocks, are
exquisite.'
The general view of the Old Town referred to here by Aird is certainly
the most imposing, but in its details and component parts it is scarcely less
interesting. To it belongs the Castle, as itself an object of view. And here
let us quote from PeteJs Utm-the best description we have read, or that
probably exists, now, we fear, little read-of this great old antiquity :-
'From whatever side you approach the city, whether by water or by land,
whether your foreground consist of height or of plain, of heath, of trees, or of
the buildings of the city itself, this gigantic rock lifts itself high above all that
surrounds it, and breaks upon the sky with the same commanding blackness
of mingled cliffs, buttresses, and battlements, These indeed shift a d vary
their outlines at every step, but everywhere there is the same unmoved
effect of general impression, the same lofty and imposing image to which the
eye tuns with the same unquestioning worship. Whether you pass on the
southern side, close under the bare and shattered blocks of granite, where the
crumbling turrets on the summit seem as if they had shot out of the kindred
rock in some fantastic freak of Nature, and where, amidst the overhanging
mass of darkness, you vainly endeavour to descry the track by which Wallace
scaled; or whether you look from the north, where the rugged cliffs find
room for some scanty patches of moss and broom to diversify their barren
grey, and where the whole mass is softened into beauty by the wild green
glen which inteienes between the spectator and the foundations ;-wherever
you are placed, and wherever it is viewed, you feel at once that here is the
eye of the landscape and €he essence of the grandeur.
' Neither is it possible to say under what sky or atmosphere all this appears
to the greatest advantage. The heavens may put on what aspect they choose,
they never fail to adorn it. If the air be cloudless and serene, what canbe
finer than the calm reposing dignity of those old towers, every delicate angle
of the fissured rock, every loophole and every lineament seen clearly and
distinctly in all their minuteness ! Or if the mist be wreathed around the
bases ofthe rock, and frowning fragments of the citadel emerge only here and
there from the racking clouds that envelop them, the mystery and the gloom
only rivet the eye the faster, and half-baffled'imagination does more than
the work of sight. At times the whole detail is lost to the eye,-one murky
tinge of impenetrable brown wraps rock and fortress from the root to the
summit ; all is lost but the outline ; but the outline atones abundantly for all
that is lost. The cold glare of the sun, plunging slowly down into a
