Edinburgh as a Brain-Stimulant

RUSHED at the rate of sixty miles an hour into the capital of Scotland, and set down with the shriek of the steam - whistle — compared with which a sound of an American locomotive is a harpsichord — here we are.

The sensitive traveller will not sleep the first night in Edinburgh, and will do well if the second night he can be composed. The restlessness may not be ascribed to a lack of comfortable couch, for the art of bed-making has been carried to perfection here. You are not called, as in many an American hotel, to sleep on a promontory of mattresses, not certain on which side you may fall off into the sea. There are no lumps in the bed that take you in the middle of the back, or hardnesses in the pillow that make you dream like Jacob on the stones, barring out the ladder and the angels. The foot - board is not so near the head -board that the sleeper is all the night long reminded of his end. There are no stray points of feathers thrust through the linen to tickle you under the ribs. The covers do not come within just three inches of being large enough when you pull them up, making bare the foot, or when, by the grasp of the “comfortable” between the large toe and the fatty portion of the foot, you pull them down, exposing the shoulder, so that you fancy, in your disturbed slumber, that you are perishing in a snow-bank. But a broad, smooth, affluent couch, on which you may sublimely roll, reckless of covers, and confident that beyond the point at which you stop there is still further expanse of comfort and ease.

But the restlessness will be accounted for by the fact that in no city under the sun is there so much to excite the memory and the imagination. It is a stimulant amounting to intoxication. We find gentlemen whose minds have been overworked in this city seeking mental quiet. As well go to Iceland to get warm, or to Borneo to get cool. The Past and the Present jostle each other. The shoulder of modern architecture is set against the arch of the twelfth century. Antiquity says, “I will furnish the ideas,” and the Present says, “I will freeze them into stone.” You take in with one glance “The Abbey,” built by Roman Catholic David the First, which has for seven hundred years sat counting its beads of stone, and that modern structure “The Donaldson Hospital,” a palace of charity, crowned with twenty-four turrets, inviting to its blessing the poor children of the city, and launching them on the world every way equipped — knowledge in their heads, grace in their hearts, and money in their pockets. While in one part of the castle you are examining old “Mons Meg,” the big gun that burst in the time of James the Second, you hear from another part of the castle the merciless bang of Professor Smythe’s time -gun, fired off by a wire reaching across the city from the Observatory.

Edinburgh and Boston have each been called “the modern Athens.” We shall not here decide between them. They are much alike in literary atmosphere, but at the antipodes in some respects. In Boston, literature has a Unitarian tinge; in Edinburgh, a Presbyterian. In this Scotch capital, religion, politics, science, and literature are inextricably mixed. The late Sir James Y. Simpson, M. D., whose face Is In all the photographic showwindows of the city, and whose life was spent in surgery, recently made an address on “Dead in Trespasses and Sins;” and Doctor Brown, a practising physician on Rutledge Street, wrote of “Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh;” and the collection-boxes of the Scotland Bible Society are set in the railroad stations; and Reverend Doctor Arnot, last Sabbath, at the close of his sermon, turned around and bowed to the judges of the court seated in the gallery; and over a door in “Lady Stair’s Close” is the inscription: “Fear the Lord and depart from evil.” In this city, acutest analysis could hardly tell where literature or politics ends or theology begins. But since the brain and the heart are only about a foot and a half apart, I know not why there should be such effort to separate the Intellectual from the spiritual. All frank and intense writers on secular themes have given us a glimpse of their higher faith. We know the theology of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Babington Macaulay and William C. Bryant as well as that of Jonathan Edwards and Archibald Alexander. There is no need that the literati of the world go dodging and skulking about the pillars of St. Paul as though ashamed to be found there.

Reaching from Edinburgh Castle, throned on the rocks, down under the city to the Abbey of Holyrood, there is an underground passage six hundred years old. Queen Victoria, a few years since, offered a large reward to any man who would explore that passage. The poor fellow who undertook it choked to death in the damps and gases, and the Queen withdrew her inducement, lest some one else should perish in the undertaking. I would that the way between the castle of beauty and strength, and the abbey of religion, in all ages, were not a dark tunnel difficult of exploration, but a brilliant causeway, and that we all might walk there.

Let Science and Piety walk with hooked arms in the hall of the university, and ivy climb over the cathedral wall, and every church belfry be an observatory, and learning and goodness be so thoroughly intertwined and interlocked that every man shall be both philosopher and Christian. Then Galileo will not only see that “the world moves,” but that it moves in the right direction; and the gowned professors of the academy and the surpllced officials of the chapel will unite their strength to shorten the distance between the castle and the abbey.

At this summer season, Edinburgh sleeps under a very thin covering of shadows. There is no night there. At ten o’clock p. m. I walked up on Calton Hill, and saw the city by daylight. And the evening and the morning were the same day. The American is perplexed as to what time he ought to retire, and at four o’clock in the morning springs out of bed, feeling that he must have overslept, till he looks at his watch. The day and the night are here twin sisters — the one a blonde, the other a brunette. At this season, when tourists are most busy, the curtain does not fall on Edinburgh.

The city has been compressed into small compass, so that it might be under the defence of the cruns of the Castle. A house ten stories high is not an unusual thing. There are no “magnificent distances.” It is but two minutes’ walk from the Netherbow to the Canongate. It is only ten minutes’ ride from Holyrood to the Castle. In one short saunter you go from examining the Scottish crown in the “Jewel-room” on the Hill, down to the museum, in which you see the stool that Jenny Geddes threw at the head of the bishop.

The city has a superb belt of what the Scotch have chosen to call “Hospitals.” They are not places where fractures are splintered, or physical diseases assaulted; but are educational institutions. Considering ignorance a horrible sickness — the wasting away of a marasmus, the benumbing of a palsy, the sloughing off of a gangrene — public charity has erected these “Hospitals” for the cure of intellectual malady.

A printer of the city gave one million fifty thousand dollars for the building and maintenance of one of these institutions, where two hundred and twenty poor children are taught. The structure is vast and imposing; battlemented and towered, and embosomed in foliage and flowers — strength in the arms of beauty, without being shorn of any of its locks.

The John Watson’s Hospital, the Orphan Hospital, the Gillespie Hospital, the Merchant Maiden Hospital, the George Heriot Hospital — the surplusage of bequests not yet employed, and seemingly not needed for structures of the same character — show how much the people hate darkness and love light. God gave to Edinburgh, as to Solomon, the choice of riches, honor, or wisdom. She chose wisdom; and the riches and the honor have been thrown in as a bounty. While the antiquarian stands studying the grotesque gargoyles which frown and mow and run out the tongue from the venerable roofs and arches of the city, I see more to admire in the chubby faces of the educated children.

But, while Edinburgh is preparing for a grand future, she is not willing that her dead shall fall back into the shadows. With a tight grip of fingers in bronze and stone she holds on to the men of the past. She has for the last thirty years been building monuments, and she will keep on building them. As she denied the request of the Queen that Dr. Simpson be buried in Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh will not now put on the limits the sculptors who perpetuate him. Walter Scott alive, hobbling along the Grassmarket, made not so much impression on this city as to-day, looking down on Princess Street, from under a canopy of stone, one hundred and ninety feet high, the dog Bevis at his feet; while breakmg out In sculpture on the sides are the “Last Minstrel,” and “Lady of the Lake,” and Meg Merrilies, the queen of witches, with her long skinny arms seeming to marshal all the apparitions of ghostdom.

Here dwelt Alexander Smith, destroyed by his own mental activity, the fire of his genius consuming not only the sacrifice but the altar; and Hugh Miller, who with his stone chisel cut his way into the mysteries of the earth and the heart of nations; and Playfair, and Dugald Stewart, and Henry Mackenzie, and Doctor Blair, and Thomas de Quincy. Here Christopher North put on his “sportingjacket,” out of the pockets of which he pulled for many of us Windermere and the Highlands; his swarthy figure in bronze, now standing in the East Gardens, his hair looking like the toss of a lion’s mane, his eye wild as a stormy night on the moors, his apparel as sloven as his morals.

But these men were of the past. The harvest of giants has been reaped. Edinburgh has but two or three men of world-wide fame remaining. Doctor John Brown, author of “Rab and his Friends,” may still be found on Rutledge Street; but he has dropped his royal pen, and has no more “Spare Hours” for the reading public, now that he gives his entire time to his medical profession. If the dogs, whose greatest champion he is, knew that he had abandoned their cause, they would set up a universal howl, and the spirit of “Rab” would come forth to haunt him, wagging before him that immortal stump of a tail. Though the Doctor has sent his dogs scampering through every American study, and through many a lady’s parlor, he has no dog left. His last one, Kent by name, was so much in danger of being contaminated by the more vulgar dogs of the city, that he was sent over to Ireland to be companion and defender to the Doctor’s married daughter. A large portrait of “Kent” hangs over the parlor mantle on Rutledge Street. You would not wonder that all Doctor Brown’s dogs have been so kind and wise and good, if you only knew their master.

It seems that in one case, at least, his plea for unhappy curs has been effectual. Eleven years ago a poor and unknown man was buried in Gray Friars Churchyard. His dog, “Bobby,” a Scotch terrier, was one of the mourners. Next day he was found lying on the grave; but, as nothing but bronze or stone dogs are lawful in such places, Bobby was kicked out of the yard. The second morning he was found there, and was still more emphatically warned to give up his melancholy habits. But when, the third morning, he was found on the grave, the old curator had compassion, and ever since the bereft creature has been taken care of. For years he was allowed steaks from an officer of the city. I wish that all the dogs that live on Government were as worthy.

We take the train from Edinburgh with a heavy heart. We need a year to study this city of the past and the present — its crescents, and mansions, and squares, and monuments, and palaces; a city which hovers above crags, and dives Into ravines, and climbs precipices, and shimmers in the blaze of midsummer noon, and rolls upon the soul a surge of associations that break us down” into a heartfelt prayer for the peace and happiness of Scodand.