CURRENT LITERATURE. •
ROMANTIC ED INBUR GH.
Romantic Edinburgh. By John Geddie. (Sands and Co. 6s)— Mr. Geddie has a really admirable gift as a cicerone. In his little books on the Water of Leith and the Fife coast he has already produced two of the best specimens we know of 'the romantic guide-book, the, pleasant talk of a well-informed and, judicious enthusiast. He has now done. the same service for the Scottish capital, and the work, is so much the better as the subject is more fascinating.. The book may- be best described as an enlarged and annotated version of Stevenson's" Picturesque Notes," with the gaps filled up and the details of the landscape provided. Where Stevenson passes over a street with a sentence or an epithet, Mr. Geddie lingers loiingly-in each close and stairway, and is ready with lists Of cad occupants and gossip about- forgotten_ fes- tivities. The book is a sketch of the history of Edinburgh, social, literary, and legal, but at the same time the proper work of a guide-book is always kept well in view, and the book is so arranged that the wayfaring man, though a fool could scarcely miss its purport. Mr. Geddie makes the complete circuit of the city. First the High Street and its neighbourhood, then round the Flodden Wall, then the suburbs on the south, then over to the New- Town, and at last Leith, Portobello, and the shore of the Firth. The author's local knowledge is amazing, for there is 'scarcely an Edinburgh celebrity' of the last few centuries, however small, who is not given a local habitation and an anseate. But if he has a passion for details, he has also the gilt of broad, picturesque description. The book helps us- to realise the slow growth of the city over its base of ravines and rugged hillsides. We see the Old Town, stretched, as Carlyle said, like a rhinoceros-skin over the ribs of the slope, running from the Castle to Holyrood, and holding in its precincts relics of every great event in Scottish history. And then, as population increases and the rich demand air and light, it stretches perforce to the fields towards the south, and bridges the ravines of the Nor' Loch to found the imposing Princes Street. And as the archi- tecture changed so did the habits of the people, from the old cosy High Street days when great families lived on . the fourth stery, to the elegance of George Street and St. Andrew Square and the Edinburgh of Scott and Jeffrey. Mr. Geddie writes :with ease and grace and bears his learning lightly, but the petietice and industry of the book are as noteworthy as its attractiveness.
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