Romantic Edinburgh page 2

Passing up the ancient thoroughfare of Candlemaker Row, we reach Greyfriars Church, the scene of the signature of the Solemn League and Covenant. It is a squat, uninspiring building with a high-pitched roof, recalling the Protestant architecture of the Low Countries, and typical of the Calvinistic age, standing in a "howff" of many graves which contain the dust of some of Scotland's most illustrious dead. Here lie among others Sir Walter Scott's father, the great Marquis of Montrose, "Bluidy" Mackenzie, foe of the Covenant, round whose tomb the urchins of a generation ago were wont to call defiance to his ghost, and George Buchanan, the tutor of James VI and the first "modern" historian of Scotland. Conspicuous are the "Martyrs' Monument," commemorative of the Covenanters, and the grave of Henry Mackenzie "the Man of Feeling."

Greyfriars' near neighbour is the magnificent pile of Heriot's Hospital, the finest example of Jacobean architecture in Scotland, a vast quadrangular structure embellished with corbelled turrets and cupolas, Its front faces the Grassmarket, which has almost completely lost its air of antiquity under the hand of modern development, only a few old houses of little note remaining in the vast stony square.

St. Cuthbert's Church in Lothian Road, near the West End of Princes Street, and dedicated to the great Northumbrian apostle, dates as a sacred site from the eighth century, but only the steeple of the old kirk, pulled down in 1775, remains. Its churchyard contains the grave of Thomas De Quincey, the "opium-eater." In the suburbs of Edinburgh numerous fine old mansions such as Warrender House, Pilrig House, Merchiston Castle and Grange House still retain much of the glories of the Scottish baronial type of architecture. As a site of antiquity, too, Arthur's Seat demands passing notice. This lion-shaped mount, 830 feet above sea-level, dominates the King's Park and the eastern portion of the city, and was formerly a centre of Druidic worship. On its north side are still to be seen the remains of St. Anthony's Chapel and his holy well.

Dunedin's greatest monument to genius is naturally that raised to her own particular hero, Sir Walter Scott, the Gothic spire of which is the proudest ornament to Scotland's most beautiful avenue, Princes Street. In the niches of the monument are placed statuettes of the various characters in the Waverley Novels. Many of the effigies in Princes Street are unworthy of its divine natural beauty, yet Allan Ramsay, the poet of " The Gentle Shepherd," well deserves counterfeit presentment at the foot of the brae where he dwelt.

George Street, once a dignified Georgian thoroughfare, but now sweepingly modernised, swarms with literary memories. In a house now removed, Shelley and his Harriet sheltered for some weeks after then hasty elopement. It was, and still is, the shrine of "Maga," as "Blackwood's Magazine" was known, and of the Edinburgh reviewers abhorred by Byron. At 39 North Castle Street, close by, Scott lived while in Edinburgh, and here he wrote many of the Waverley Novels. Jeffrey, another of Byron's betes noires, dwelt in George Street for a while, and the house in which he founded the "Edinburgh Review" is situated in Buccleuch Street on the south side of the city. Sciennes Hill House, where the solitary meeting of Scott and Burns took place, has a commemorative inscription, but the Scottish laureate has only the pathetic little "temple" to his credit on the windy height of Regent's Road. The memory of Stevenson, Edinburgh's last great literary magician, has recently been honoured by the purchase of his birthplace in Howard Place as a museum of Stevensoniana.

If it cannot vie with the older city in this respect, the New Town has a wealth of Georgian "antiquities" of its own, none of which is older than the middle of the eighteenth century. But in a survey of "Romantic Edinburgh" it would be ungrateful not to render praise to the memory of Robert Adam, the architect of Charlotte Square and that princely pile of Georgian dignity, the University, and the graceful Register House, edifices which called from George IV on his visit to the Scottish capital the encomium that the people of Edinburgh were "a race of gentlemen dwelling in a city of palaces."