114 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [New Tom.
- ~~~~ ~ ~
Cockburn, the former spoke thus affectionately
.of the High School :-
? In this town it was, as was truly observed by
.our worthy chairman, that I first imbibed the noble
grinciples of a liberal Scottish education; and it is
Ifit that I should tell you, as many of you may not
have heard what I have frequently told to others,
:in other places, and in other meetings, that I have
:seen no other plan of education so efficient as that
which is established in this city. With great
experience and opportunity of observation, I
certainly have never yet seen any one system so
well adapted for training up good citizens, as well
as learned and virtuous men, as the old High School
of Edinburgh and the Scottish Universities. Great
improvements may, and no doubt will be made,
even in these seminaries. But what I have to say
of the High School of Edinburgh, and, as the
ground of the preference I give it over others,
and even over another academy, lately established
in this city, on what is said to be a more improved
principle-what I say is this : that such a school is
altogether invaluable in a free State-in a State
having higher objects in view, by the education of
its youth, than a mere knowledge of the Latin and
Greek languages, and the study of prosody. That
in a State like this, higher objects should be kept
in view, there can be no doubt ; though I confess I
have passed much of my time in these studies myself.
?Yet a school like the old High School of
Edinburgh is invaluable, and for what is it so? It
is because men of the highest and lowest rank
of society send their children to be educated
together. The oldest friend I have in the world,
your worthy vice-president (Lord Douglas Gordon
Halyburton of Pitcur, M.P.) and myself were at
the High School of Edinburgh together, and in the
same class along with others, who still possess our
friendship, and some of them in a rank in life still
higher than us. One of them was a nobleman who
is now in the House of Peers ; and some of them
were the sons of shopkeepers in the lowest part of
the Cowgate-shops of the most inferior descnption-
and one or two of them were the sons of
menial servants in the town. They wen siiliug
side by side, giving and taking places from each other,
without the slightest impression on the part of my
noble friends of any superiority on their parts to
the other boys, or any ideas of the inferiority on
the part of the other boys to them ; and this is my
reason for preferring the old High School of Edinburgh
to other and what may be termed more
patrician schools, however well regulated or conducted.?
CHAPTER XVI.
THE NEW TOWN.
?The Site before the Streets-The Lang Dykes-Wood?s Farm-Drumsheugh House-Bearford?s Parks-The Houses of Easter and Wester
Coates-Gabriel?s Road-Craig?s Plan of the New Town-John Young builds the First House Therein-Extension of the Town Westward.
LOOKING at the site of the New Town now, it
requires an effort to think that there were thatched
cottages there once, and farms, where corn was
sown and reaped, where pigs grunted in styes or
roamed in the yard; where fowls laid eggs and
clucked over them, and ducks drove their broods
into the .North Loch, where the trap caught eels
.and the otter and water-rat lurked amid the sedges,
and where cattle browsed on the upland slopes
that were crested by the line of the Lang Dykes ;
and where the gudeman and his sons left the
ploiigh in the furrow, and betook them to steel
bonnets and plate sleeves, to jack and Scottish
spear, when the bale-fire, flaming out on the Castle
towers, announced that ?our ancient enemies of
England had crossed the Tweed.?
Such, little more than one hundred years ago,
was the site of the Modern Athens.?
?
.
Along the line now occupied by Princes Street
lay a straight country road, the Lang Dykes-called
the Lang Gait in the ?Memorie of the Somervilles,?
in 1640-the way by which Claverhouse and
his troopers rode westward on that eventful day in
1689, and where in 1763, we read in theEdinburgh
Museum for January of two gentlemen on horse-.
back bei,ng stopped by a robber, armed with a
pistol, whom they struck down by the butt end of
a whip,. but failed to secure, ?? as they heard somebody
whistle several times behind the dykes,? and
were apprehensive that he might have confederates.
The district was intersected by other lonelyroads,
such as the Kirk Loan, which led north from St.
Cuthbert?s Church to the wooden, or Stokebridge,
and the ford on the Leith at the back of the
present Malta Terrace, where it joined Gabriel?s
Road, a path that came from the east, end of the
