chapter ii

old town — the lands

the old town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of edinburgh. it is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits as a whole. the old town depends for much of its effect on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back it up. if you were to set it somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like stirling in a bolder and loftier edition. the point is to see this embellished stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern city; for there the two re-act in a picturesque sense, and the one is the making of the other.

the old town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the castle cliffs which fortify it to the west. on the one side of it and the other the new towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and more gentle hill-tops. thus, the quarter of the castle over-tops the whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. it dominates for miles on every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet country places over in fife, can see the banner on the castle battlements, and the smoke of the old town blowing abroad over the subjacent country. a city that is set upon a hill. it was, i suppose, from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of auld reekie. perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day after day, from their various rustic pisgahs, they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words.

indeed, even on a nearer view, the old town is properly smoked; and though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. it grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but in height and density. public buildings were forced, wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thorough — fares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour’s shoulder, as in some black hole of calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction. the tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over waverley bridge would still put many natural precipices to shame. the cellars are already high above the gazer’s head, planted on the steep hill-side; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the highland hills. the poor man may roost up there in the centre of edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea or of flowering lilacs in the spring.

it is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary improvements of mr. chambers and his following. it is easy to be a conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good qualities we find it irksome to conserve. assuredly, in driving streets through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept away, and some associations turned out of house and home. but what slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! and what a picturesque world remains untouched! you go under dark arches, and down dark stairs and alleys. the way is so narrow that you can lay a hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. washing dangles above washing from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. here, you come into a court where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs. here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still erect, with some insignia of its former state — some scutcheon, some holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. the local antiquary points out where famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess’s window. the bedouins camp within pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats. we are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. even in the chief thoroughfares irish washings flutter at the windows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers.

these loiterers are a true character of the scene. some shrewd scotch workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating church affairs and politics with their tools upon their arm. but the most part are of a different order — skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot children; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl; among these, a few surpervising constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a brand. in a place no larger than edinburgh, and where the traffic is mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often under the notice of an idle stroller. in fact, from this point of view, edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. it is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and i never yet heard of any one who tried. it has been my fortune, in this anonymous accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for some stages on the road to ruin. one man must have been upwards of sixty before i first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in broad-cloth of the best. for three years he kept falling — grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever i saw of him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud. i fancy that i still can hear him laugh. there was something heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.

one of the earliest marks of these degringolades is, that the victim begins to disappear from the new town thoroughfares, and takes to the high street, like a wounded animal to the woods. and such an one is the type of the quarter. it also has fallen socially. a scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window. the old man, when i saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.

it is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-days some customs which made edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. but an aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the reverse. nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past — perhaps the more the merrier. the glasses clink around the china punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks’ feathers on the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. that is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon repetition. all the better if the like were going on in every second room; the land would only look the more inviting. times are changed. in one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together; and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. the great hotel is given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttishness and dirt. in the first room there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the bible-reader cross upon the stairs. high words are audible from dwelling to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without hurt. and even if god tempers his dispensations to the young, and all the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily circumstanced. social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at edinburgh. i have mentioned already how, to the stroller along princes street, the high street callously exhibits its back garrets. it is true, there is a garden between. and although nothing could be more glaring by way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of grass between the rich and poor. to look over the south bridge and see the cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of an eye.

one night i went along the cowgate after every one was a-bed but the policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall land. the moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as i stood there it seemed to me that i could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on their backs. and thus, as i fancied, the dense life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its timepieces, like a great disordered heart. perhaps it was little more than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that separated and contained it.

there was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the land in the high street. the building had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger’s barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. the physical shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. the church-bells never sounded more dismally over edinburgh than that grey forenoon. death had made a brave harvest, and, like samson, by pulling down one roof, destroyed many a home. none who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the queen was pasted over the chimney. so, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. the land had fallen; and with the land how much! far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. and all over the world, in london, in canada, in new zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth: ‘the house that i was born in fell last night!’