Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/683

661 EDINBURGH 661 area, and entirely surrounded and in part encroached on by its streets, is the Calton Hill, occupied by the Royal Astronomical Observatory, the floor of which stands at a height of 349 feet above the sea; and beyond the narrow valley, in which the Canongate and the Palace of Holyrood lie, Arthur s Seat and Salisbury Crags rear their lofty cliffs in boldly picturesque outline, the highest summit rising to the height of Arms of Edinburgh. 822 feet, and affording a magnificent prospect over land and sea. Bridges connect the different ridges on which the city is built, with crowded thoroughfares underneath. Many of the public buildings occupy lofty terraces, and thereby show to greater advantage than their architectural designs would otherwise secure for them. The valley between the Old and the New Town, and the slopes of the castle rock, are laid out as public gardens; and the Calton Hill and Arthur s Seat furnish promenades and carriage drives of unequalled variety and beauty as the public parks of a large city. Fine white freestone abounds in the immediate neighbourhood, and furnishes abundance of the best building material; while the hard trap-rock, with which the stratified sandstones of the coal formation have been extensively broken up and overlaid, supplies good materials for paving and roadmaking. Thus on a locality seemingly ill-adapted for the site of a great city, there has gradually arisen one which compares to advantage with the most picturesque and beautiful among the capitals of Europe. Sir David Wilkie came to it in 1799 fresh from a Fifeshire manse, to begin the studies in the Edinburgh school of design which ultimately secured for him his high fame as an artist. When he returned to it in later years, familiar with all that European art had to disclose, he thus gave utterance to his matured impressions : &quot; What the tour of Europe was necessary to see elsewhere I now find congregated in this one city. Here are alike the beauties of Prague and of Salzburg ; here are the romantic sites of Orvietto and Tivoli ; and here is all the magnificence of the admired bays of Genoa and Naples. Here, indeed, to the poetic fancy may be found realized the Roman Capitol and the Grecian Acropolis.&quot; The name of Edinburgh is a memorial of the intrusion of a new people, when, in the beginning of the 7th century, the race of Ida reared the fortress of Edwin s-burgh on the rocky height, and thereby established the Anglian power on the Forth. But this Teutonic invasion was not the first occupation of the site. Camden aimed at identifying it with the SrparoTreSov Hrepwrov of Ptolemy ; and although this has been rejected by later Roman antiquaries, the convergence of Roman roads towards the place, the traces of Roman art discovered from time to time within the old civic area, and the evidence of two Roman seaports, at Inveresk and Cramond, both connected with it by roads of Roman structure, all tend to eonfirm the idea that Edinburgh was one of the sites occupied by the Roman invaders. On their withdrawal it remained an important stronghold on the southern frontier of the Pictish kingdom. One learned Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Rev. D. H. Haig, in his Anglo-Saxon Conquest of Britain, has identified it as the Hill of Agned, the scene of Arthur s victory of Cat Bregion. For centuries after the founding of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, the lowlands extending from the Forth to the Tweed continued to be a debatable land held by uncertain tenure ; it was to a large extent settled anew at 271,658 against a debt of 425,195, which was compounded for by the issue of 3 per cent, bonds of annuity the loss to the creditors thus amounting to 25 per cent, of their claims. by Anglo-Saxon and Norman colonists under Malcolm Canmore and his sons. Edinburgh accordingly remained a frontier post beyond the Forth, until it became the capital of the Stuart kings. Then, for the first time, it rose into importance as a town. It shared in their triumphs, and bore the chief brunt in their repeated disasters ; and, even after their forfeiture of the crown, some of its most picturesque associations are with the Stuart claimants for the throne of their ancestors. Nevertheless Edinburgh continued till near the close of the 18th century to be circumscribed within the narrow bounds of the ancient city and the burgh of Canongate, with the main street extending along the height of the slope from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, and the Cowgate as the only other thoroughfare admitting of the passage of wheeled carriages. Hence the vehicle in general use was the sedan chair, by means of which the Scottish nobility and gentry paid fashionable visits in the narrow wynds of their ancient capital, and proceeded iu full dress to the assemblies and balls, which were conducted with the most aristocratic exclusiveness in an alley on the south side of the High Street, which still bears the name of the Assembly Close. Beyond the walls of the ancient city lay the burghs of Calton, Easter and Wester Portsburgh, the villages of St Cuthbert s, Moutrie s Hill, Broughton, Canonmills, Silver- mills, and Deanhaugh all of which have been successively swallowed up in the extension of the modern city. The ancient seaport of Leith, though a distinct parliamentary burgh, governed by its own magistrates, and electing its own representative to Parliament, has already extended its buildings, at one point at least, so as to conjoin with those of the neighbouring city. The progress of Edinburgh during the present century has been remarkable in many ways. In 1801 the popula tion, including the Canongate and other extra-mural suburbs, but exclusive of Leith, was 66,544; in 1871 it had risen to 196,979. But the characteristics of the city and its population are peculiar. From an early date the special associations with the national literature have been identified with the ancient capital. Barbour, indeed, the contemporary of Chaucer, was archdeacon of Aberdeen; and the royal author of the King s Quair is chiefly associated with Perth; but in the following reign Edinburgh had become the favourite residence of the Scottish kings. One of the foremost charges against James III. was that he preferred the society of artists and musicians to that of the rough barons of his court. Under the patronage of his son, the printing press was first set up at Edinbxirgh in 1507. At the court of Holyrood, so long as James IV. reigned, the rivalry of rank and genius involved no conflict. Of the three great poets of the reign, Dunbar is believed to have been a grandson of the earl of March ; Walter Kennedy was a younger son of the first Lord Kennedy ; Gawin Douglas the third son of the earl of Angus ; and Dunbar enumerates six or seven other literary contemporaries. In his Remonstrance to the King, he notes among the servitors of his royal master glazing-wrights, goldsmiths, lapidaries, apothecaries, painters, and printers ; and some of his own poems appear to have been among the first works issued from the Edinburgh press by the Scottish Caxton, Walter Chepman. Gawin Douglas, the author of the Palace of Honour, and the translator of Virgil, was provost of the collegiate church of St Giles; and Roull, another literary contemporary named by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makaris, is believed to have been provost of the neigh bouring collegiate church of Corstorphine. In the following reign Sir David Lindsay was the leader among the literary men of the Scottish capital; and in 1554 his famous Satire of the Three Estates was enacted in the presence of the court, at Greenside, a natural amphitheatre on the north.