Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/682

660 G60 EDINBURGH court and capital from the Tay to the Forth. The corona tion of James II. was celebrated in Holyrood Abbey instead of at Scone ; and the widowed queen took up her residence, with the young king, in the Castle of Edinburgh. Of fourteen Parliaments summoned during this reign, only one was held at Perth, five met at Stirling, and all the others at Edinburgh; and, notwithstanding the favour shown for Stirling as a royal residence in the following reign, every one of the Parliaments of James III. was held at Edinburgh. James II. showed special favour to Edinburgh by conferring on it various privileges relating to the holding of fairs and markets, and the levying of customs ; and by a royal charter of 1452 he gave it pre-eminence over the other burghs. Further immunities and privileges were conferred on it by James III. ; and by a precept, known as the Golden Charter, of 1482, he conferred on the provost and magistrates the hereditary office of sheriff, with power to hold courts, to levy fines, and to impose duties on all merchandise landed at the port of Leith. Those privileges were renewed and extended by various sovereigns, and specially by a general charter granted to the city by James VI. in 1603, the year of his accession to the English throne. James III. was a great builder ; and, in the prosperous era which followed on his son s accession to the throne, the new town of the 15th century spread over the open valley to the south, with the Cowgate as its chief thoroughfare. But the death of James IV. in 1513, along with other disastrous results of the battle of Flodden, brought this era of prosperity tc an abrupt close. The citizens hastened to construct a second line of wall, inclosing the Cowgate and the heights beyond, since occupied by the Greyfriars Church and Heriot s Hospital, but still excluding the Canongate, as pertaining to the Abbey of Holyrood. The new wall long determined the limits of the town. For upwards of two centuries after its erection the requisite Plan of Edinburgh. accommodation for the increasing population was secured by crowding buildings on every available spot within the protection of the walls, displacing the earlier structures by lofty piles of building within the straightened area, and projecting from them overhanging additions of timber. By those means the northern and southern slopes of the ridge along which the main street of the old town was formed were crowded with the picturesque alleys and closes which contributed so much to the peculiar aspect which the ancient city still retained when in 1808 Scott thus pictured it : &quot;Such dusky grandeur clothed the height, &quot;Where the huge castle holds its state, And all the steep slope down, Whose ridgy back heaves to the sky, Piled deep and massy, close and high, Mine own romantic town.&quot; Within this ancient civic area stand the collegiate church of St Giles for a time the cathedral of the diocese of Edinburgh, the Parliament House and law courts, and the civic Council Chambers. Here also in earlier years of the present century stood the old Tolbooth, or Heart of Mid-Lothian, and other buildings of note, including mansions of the Scottish nobility, and even of royalty. But it forms a mere historic nucleus of the modern city, which for a century past has been extending over the neighbouring heights, northward towards the ancient sea port of Leith, and southward and westward to the lower slopes of the Pentland Hills. The area included within the parliamentary boundary extends to 4179 acres, or 6| square miles; but, owing to its singularly irregular site, while the lower parts of the city stand little more than 100 feet above the level of the sea, the higher parts rise in some places to 250 feet, and the summit of the castle rock is 383 feet above tho sea. 1 &quot;Within the same civic 1 The extensive building operations engaged in by the corporation at the beginning of the century were the main cause of the insolvency of the city in 1833, when the property of the corporation was valued