chapter iii

the parliament close

time has wrought its changes most notably around the precincts of st. giles’s church. the church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the krames are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. as st. giles’s must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, sunless, and romantic. it was here that the town was most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fair-way left along the high street with an open space on either side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the lands, gives an outlook to the north and the new town.

there is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the castle and holyrood, and a bold highland piper who volunteered to explore its windings. he made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey; the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the level of st. giles’s, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. whether he was choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the evil one, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from that day to this. perhaps he wandered down into the land of thomas the rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. that will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance besides st. giles’s, when they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth below their horses’ feet.

but it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into the causeway. this was the site of the tolbooth, the heart of midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book. the walls are now down in the dust; there is no more squalor carceris for merry debtors, no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. nor is this the only memorial that the pavement keeps of former days. the ancient burying-ground of edinburgh lay behind st. giles’s church, running downhill to the cowgate and covering the site of the present parliament house. it has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its history, i know only one token that remains. in the parliament close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the resting-place of the man who made scotland over again in his own image, the indefatigable, undissuadable john knox. he sleeps within call of the church that so often echoed to his preaching.

hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded charles second, made of lead, bestrides a tun-bellied charger. the king has his backed turned, and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous neighbour. often, for hours together, these two will be alone in the close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. on one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the parliament house, enclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe their shadows on it in the sun. at either end, from round st. giles’s buttresses, you command a look into the high street with its motley passengers; but the stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the parliament close to charles the second and the birds. once in a while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. the fact is far otherwise; within in the justiciary court a man is upon trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the gallery was found too narrow. towards afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent; and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.

the parliament close has been the scene of marking incidents in scottish history. thus, when the bishops were ejected from the convention in 1688, ‘all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in the parliament close:’ poor episcopal personages who were done with fair weather for life! some of the west-country societarians standing by, who would have ‘rejoiced more than in great sums’ to be at their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads together. it was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but one, at least, of the societarians had groaned in the boots, and they had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. again, at the ‘woeful union,’ it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from the last of scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the author of ‘robinson crusoe’ as he looked out of window.

one of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his trials (examinations as we now say) for the scottish bar, beheld the parliament close open and had a vision of the mouth of hell. this, and small wonder, was the means of his conversion. nor was the vision unsuitable to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation than a court of law? hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building with the arcade. to how many has not st. giles’s bell told the first hour after ruin? i think i see them pause to count the strokes, and wander on again into the moving high street, stunned and sick at heart.

a pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof, hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. this is the salle des pas perdus of the scottish bar. here, by a ferocious custom, idle youths must promenade from ten till two. from end to end, singly or in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. through a hum of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a macer announce a fresh cause and call upon the names of those concerned. intelligent men have been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of business or a shilling of reward. in process of time, they may perhaps be made the sheriff-substitute and fountain of justice at lerwick or tobermory. there is nothing required, you would say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. to breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! but those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most arduous form of idleness.

more swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges of the first appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme lords sit by three or four. here, you may see scott’s place within the bar, where he wrote many a page of waverley novels to the drone of judicial proceeding. you will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their lordships do not altogether disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. the broadest of broad scotch is now banished from the bench; but the courts still retain a certain national flavour. we have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. we treat law as a fine art, and relish and digest a good distinction. there is no hurry: point after point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to delighted brethren.

besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean, full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lanthorn light, in the very place where the old privy council tortured covenanters. as the parliament house is built upon a slope, although it presents only one story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. few places are more characteristic of this hilly capital. you descend one stone stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone cellars. now, you pass below the outer hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet. now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the justiciary court. many a foot that has gone up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. many a man’s life has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. but just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams on the wall. a little farther and you strike upon a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with productions from bygone criminal cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a shot-hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. i cannot fancy why they should preserve them unless it were against the judgment day. at length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next moment you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt industriously turning on its wheels. you would think the engine had grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious labours. in truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; and you will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the sunlight. for all this while, you have not been descending towards the earth’s centre, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations of the parliament house; low down, to be sure, but still under the open heaven and in a field of grass. the daylight shines garishly on the back windows of the irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old palsied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human pigs. there are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night and stagger to their pallets.