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.
