EDINBURGH REVISITED.*

ME. JAMES BONE is a member of an accomplished family. His brother, Mr. Muirhead Bone, the artist, is justly cele-

brated ; another brother, Mr. David Bone, is known as a writer of sea stories, which have not been excelled in recent times for force and art within their compass. Mr. James Bone, who has long since won the gratitude of many news- paper readers who enjoy good art criticism, now comes for-

ward with what we fancy is his first book—at least no other is mentioned on his title page. It is a remarkable book and

one of which—to take a good test—his family may be proud. We do not profess to have read all the books on Edinburgh, hut we have read Stevenson and Chambers, and have in mind Sir Walter Scott, and yet we can honestly say that we know of no book which gives in so few words as this so satisfying, so complete, and so graceful a picture of Edinburgh. If you want to understand the heart of Edinburgh you can read it here better than in a hundred guide books. If it were not for the weight of the book and its slippery though handsome buckram sides we should advise every visitor to Edinburgh to carry it about with him. But we doubt whether he could make headway through the windy streets with the rebellious thing under his arm, and with it he might be too ready to excuse himself from mounting, as Mr. Bone did, much to his profit, to the top storeys of some of the lands, as they call the congeries of tenements in the Old Town of Edin- burgh. Let the reader digest the book at home before he goes eyploring and he will have an inimitable general survey of Edinburgh to which everything he sees will supply a footnote or a corroboration. Better still, perhaps, let him read it after his return from seeing the sights and he will find in it that

kind of commentary which can be provided only by a culti- vated observer who has knowledge and opinions of his own—

often audacious opinions—and is able to convey them in strong and pure English and happy phrases.

A Glasgow man himself, Mr. Bone views Edinburgh as an alien citizen, and yet always as a Scotsman. He apologizes for not knowing Edinburgh better, but it is a truism that the studious visitor sees more than the procrastinating resident.

In some of the lands Mr. Bone saw Adamic chimney-pieces and mural decorations which probably have never been seen by more than a handful of the residents in the New Town.

For the lands of the Old Town are, of course, the decayed relics. of a former greatness—the houses of the old gentry. Very likely there are many interior decorations still hidden behind accumulated dirt and whitewash. Mr. Bone's pleasure was to try to make the poor dwellers in the lands

talk about their decorations, and he uses words of generous and kindly satisfaction when he has come across an artistic feeling striving to translate itself into words. As he says in his preface, the study of such relics has not been dealt with except by a few re-

ferences in architectural books and in the reports of Edinburgh's many charities. We will quote from Mr. Bone's description of a visit to a room in one of the soaring lands :— " The room itself was the habitation of one family. The head of the house, an elderly brewer's drayman, lay in a bed that occupied a fair part of it. He was suffering from an injury to his leg. The wife, a comfortable, quiet sort of woman, not obsessed by her troubles and work, had kept the home as clean and tidy as practicable, but its aspect was dejected and poor.. Two children, one with bare feet, played on the floor. It was growing dark. As I looked at the picture she said, 'Ye should have come earlier if ye wanted to see the picture. Ye're ower late for it now' 'What is the right time for it ? ' A quarter to three, she replied at once, 'for it gets the sun just nice by the side o' the building.' I.pricked my ears. Could any collector amongst us, I wonder, tell to a quarter of an hour when his favourite picture would be in its best light ? She pointed out its beauties. Ye can see the ivy hanging ower the vans just awful bonny-like. Than stanes lying down there mak' ye think o' auld Edinburie Castle stanes fallen dorm.' She said they were 'a' very ta'en up wi' the picture: He (her husband) liked to look at it, and she had moved his bed that he could see it when he wanted without moving his head.

whiles stand an' look at it mysel' when rm reddin' things up, and rve seen us talkin' aboot thee men and what they're efter ' She pointed to the two debonair gentlemen, with their backeto the dejected room of the poor Scots family, mounting the glimmering marble steps to move through the palace with the broken arch, and out by boat to the golden island with the castle in the bay. 'The bairns are gey ta'en wi' it, too. I've catehed them sitting by the fire at night makin' up stories aboot thae men.' What sort of stories ? ' 'Oh, just a' havers, like. I heard the wee yin saying .• Edinburgh Revisited. By James Bone. With bray Drawings by Hanalip Fletcher. London ; Sidgwick and Jackson. that that yin wi' the lang legs was Wnllie Wallace. But they'll no let me hear them, and 'deed I dinna gie much heid to what they say, but whiles they go on talkin' and talkin' aboot them and the rest o't till I send them aff to their bed.'

" What did the little Scots bairns, crowded together hp the fire in the murky curtainless room in the old grandee's house, tell to one another about the Italian gallants strutting in the ancient. panel overhead in the flickering light? Whatever it was it would! be true romance. Perhaps Hans Christian Andersen or Robert Louis Stevenson, who were children, to. the end, could! have imagined its colour and simplicity.

"Possibly the panel itself was a weak affair by Old Rorie, after a forgotten Pannini, or some other artist of the late Roman school, but my impression is that it was better in its way than the Nories in the high-perched City Museum. My visit, of course, was only for a few minutes. One could not trespass further on the kindness of a woman with a sick husband and restless children. Moreover, I was overlooking her whole house—drawing-room, parlour, bedroom, kitchen, storeroom and hall—and what woman of any class would like a stranger to do that on a minute's notice? The extraordinary patience of all the people of the /ands with a wandering and inquisitive topographer I can never forget. These people had inhabited that room for twenty years (and in that time one person had come to see the picture), and the woman never wanted to leave it. The picture, which seemed to mean so much to them, had not always been appreciated by the tenant. It was blemished-by a large dirt-mark in the glowing Italian sky over the island. A former tenant had slashed a dirty household brush across it in a tantrum because the factor had turned her into the street."

If the chapters on the lands and their inmates are the most original in the book they are still but relevant details in the 'general purpose of the book which is to draw a very wide picture of Edinburgh and seize and fix its atmosphere. Mr.

Bone says as much of the New Town, of the Adams, of Hamilton, and of Playfair as of the Old Town, and he says much that is wonderfully revealing of the picturesque combination of the two. To read these pages would be to- know Edinburgh even if one had not seen it ; in true propor- tion one has the vision of the wind-swept streets, the gracious.

austerity of the treeless places, the steepness, the greyness, the marvellous values of the Old Town towering upwards and crowned by the Castle, and of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags kept unspoiled at the doors of the penetrating, critical. Edinburgh people. As Mr. Bone says, although the greatness- of Edinburgh is not architectural—it is not one of the treasure cities of Europe—yet the mediEeval effect (was it not insisted on by Defoe who saw the Old Town as a vast castle P) is

stronger than in most other highly architectural cities. Of the influence of Edinburgh as a whole on modern architecture Mr. Bone says :—

" Edinburgh is becoming once more one of the chief attractions for students of modern architecture and town-planning, many of whom, I believe, never see the Old Town nearer than Princes Street; and among the younger school of London architects, whose admiration for Adam is one of the features of our new Georgian age, a trip to Edinburgh is becoming a necessity. When they go they discover more than Adam, and the apparently endless vistas of stately crescent, terrace and square, all of beautiful mason- work with many refinements of detail, set in great spacious streets, have a powerful effect on their imagination. Incidentally, some have found in New Edinburgh the clue to Mr. Norman Shaw's massive treatment of London stone, and there has even been some talk of the Edinburking of Regent Street." The town-planning of Edinburgh received a checiE, as the good citizens' foresight outran the constable and perhaps brought on town-planning an unnecessary disrepute, but we venture to think that some of the " Modern Athenians " look on their unfinished temple on Calton Hill with a fond pride

as making the architecture of Edinburgh even more like that of fallen Athens than it would otherwise have been. Mr. Bone laughs in the right spirit of sympathy and reservation over the classicism of Edinburgh, and tells a delightful story of a grocer who marked his progressive stages in prosperity by using Doric columns in his first shop, Ionic in his second, and Corinthian in his third. We cannot overpraise his sanity; he despises dejection in spite of all his regrets at the wreckage done by men who pull down what better men built. He finds something to say in the general scheme even for the railway station in Princes Street which stands on the site of the old loch. He grows angry only as he contemplates the monster hotel at the east end of Princes Street—" too prosperous for a white elephant, not handsome enough for a giraffe "- because it puts Calton Hill out of scale and ruins what he thinks is Edinburgh's most delicate piece of archi- tecture, the Register House of Robert Adam. We have no room to write of Mr. Bone's reflections on the nautical aspect of Edinburgh, the Newhaven fish-wives, the whippet racing, or

the delightfully humorous account of the professional atmo- sphere (chiefly legal) of Edinburgh. We are conscious of only one cause of quarrel with him, and that is his assertion that Ox- ford occupies a prosafc site. We submit that the site of a city is to be estimated not merely by what can be seen from the city but by the surrounding places from which the city can be seen. Mr. Bone might ponder Matthew Arnold's lines on the spectacle of Oxford from the neighbouring hills. Of Mr. Hanslip Fletcher's drawings we mnst say that they are no more a mere complement to the text than the text, as so often in handsome volumes of this sort, is an appendage to the illus- trations. Most of them are first-rate and do justice to what we may call the dizziness of Edinburgh.