OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH.* THIS is not a perfect book,
for Mr. James Grant is by no means a perfect writer. Incessant production, for a generation, of
novels of the "romantic" kind does not conduce to accuracy of thought or of style, and Mr. Grant has not got beyond the Cavalier and other convictions or prejudices of his early Yellow Frigates and Black Dragoons. He evidently still considers Argyll—the Argyll who was the rival of Montrose and the correspondent of Cromwell—as a canting traitor. After all that recent historical research has proved, he has no better description for one of the ablest monarchs that ever ruled England—although he quite misunderstood the character of the forces that resisted him in Scotland—as " the cruel and treacherous Edward I." There is, too, a note of guide-book provincialism in his estimates of men and things. All his Scotch geese are cosmopolitan, or at least Imperial, swans. The rocks in the vicinity of Edinburgh are " stupendous craigs ;" the professors she "raises" or houses are almost all " distinguished," or " eminent," or have " world-wide reputations." Considering everything that has been said and written of late years, one gets a little tired of "the Edinburgh through the noble streets of which Scott limped in his old age, white-haired and slow, leaning often on the arm of Lockhart or the grey-haired Ettrick Shepherd ; the Edinburgh where the erect and stalwart form of the athletic `Christopher North,' with his long locks of grizzled yellow— his tawny mane,' as he called them—floating on the breeze, his keen, blue eye seemingly fixed on vacancy, his left hand planted behind his back, and his white neckcloth oft awry, strode daily from Gloucester Place to the University, or to ` Ebony's,' to meet Jeffrey, Rutherford, Cockburn, 'Delta,' Aytonn, Edward Forbes, and Carlyle ; the Edinburgh where Simpson, the good, the wise, and the gentle, made his discovery concerning chloroform, and made his mark, too, as 'the grand, old Scottish doctor,' whose house in Queen Street was a focus for all the learned and all the literati of Europe and America ; the Edinburgh of the Georgian and Victorian age."
On the other hand, the preparation of this work has obviously been to Mr. Grant a labour of love. Nothing but indefatigable industry, stimulated by unflagging enthusiasm, could have produced three large and closely-printed volumes on Edinburgh. He has read all that has been written about the place—a library in itself. He has made a street-to-street, a house-to-house visitation of it. Every " land," every monument, every " cairn," every church, has been forced to give up its historical secret. Edinburgh is besides, a city of a size quite manageable for the purposes of such description as we have here. Mr. Grant, indeed, talks of " the Edinburgh of the Victorian age " as " a vast city stretching nearly from the wild and pastoral hills of Braid to the sandy shores of the Firth of Forth." But, after all, a town with a population of less than a quarter of a million cannot in these days be described as "vast." Besides, Edinburgh is not likely to increase much or rapidly. It is no longer what Mr. Grant would style "a focus for literati ; the railway has brought it too near London for it ever to play that part again. The overshadowing commercial importance of Glasgow, and the rapid growth of Dundee and Aberdeen, will prevent its ever being a capital again in any real sense. Its natural beauty, and what its inhabitants delight to call its "advantages," clearly indicate its future as a city of education, and retirement, and pleasant, if somewhat " superior " bourgeois society,—a combination of Oxford and the Hague. Such a city is not likely to increase to unwieldy dimensions. It is bound to live essentially in, if not on, the past. But it will always be " very interesting," as the lady globe-trotter whom one is sure to meet at a Continental table d'hôte styles every old town under the sun. It is possible to write a perfect " Old and New Edinburgh," it is hardly possible to write a perfect " Old and New London." It nay certainly be said of this work that, between Mr. Grant's letterpress and the abundant and admirable illustrations, ranging from maps and views of Edinburgh, at all stages of its history, to the inimitable though widely different portraits of Kay and Raeburn, and the productions of modern photography, it is much better and completer than anything of the kind that has preceded it. In all essential respects, it is a model work of the kind.
Edinburgh, as the city of beauty and violence, of tragedy and letters, of conviviality and religion, of Mary and Bothwell and Knox, of Nichol Muschat and Major Weir and Deacon Brodie, of the Porteous mob and the Burke and Hare murders, of the Countess of Eglinton, Miss Nicky Murray and Dr. Alexander Webster, of the Hellfire Club and the Free Church, of Jeffrey and Wilson and Russel, is far too well known for us to require todwell upon the main points and special excellences of any work descriptive of it. There is no central idea in these volumes. Mr. Grant's method is simplicity itself ; after giving the general history of Edinburgh, he visits every street and square, wynd and close, and tells the story of all the houses in each. But then there seems to have been no central idea in the history of Edinburgh, properly—that is to say, municipally—so styled. Its burghal life is singularly poor. It has produced no man of the calibre of the Arteveldes, or of the De Witts, or even of Alderman Beckford. Its citizens at no time played even such a spirited part in the national history as did the men of Aberdeen, who fought and fell in repelling Celtic invasion at that Battle of Harlaw which was at least as great a deliverance for Lowland or Saxon Scotland as Bannockburn itself. They seem, indeed, from the days of the Bruce to the days of Charles Edward, to have gone on their way trading and making money, and going to law, and to have taken but slight interest—save, indeed, when Knox and his successors called the whole Scotch middle-class to arms—in the foreign invasions, Holyrood intrigues, and " Clean-the-Canseway " butcheries, which passed for the history of Edinburgh and of Scotland. One rises from these volumes with a painful sense of the servility of the Edinburgh burghers to the nobles that bickered and swaggered in their midst, although, as Carlyle writes in his diary, those were " a selfish, ferocious, famishing, unprincipled set of hymnas, from whom at no time and in no way has the country received any benefit." " Persons of distinction " appear to have been allowed to do almost anything they chose, in old, and even in new Edinburgh. Tolerably far on in its history, the leader of a band of riotous schoolboys shot a leading magistrate dead, but got off scot-free, because he was " a gentleman's son " ! In 1739, but little seems to have been thought of the eccentricities of James, second Earl of Rosebery, the ne'er-do-well of his house, who published in the Edinburgh newspapers an advertisement relating to the elopement of one Polly Rich, who "had been engaged by him for a year," in which he offered a reward of three guineas to any one who would return Polly to "her owner," either at John's Coffeehouse " or the Earl of Rosebery's, at Denham's Land, Bristow, and no question will be asked. She is a London girl, and what they call a cockney." It may be true that the struggle for existence was so keen in Scotland, that no time was allowed for the growth of a spirit of burgher independence in towns like Edinburgh. If so, then
" pity 'tis true."
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