Page:RL Stevenson 1914 Edinburgh.djvu/106



T is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the sublime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radiant notion for Paradise: 'The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free.' He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are promised pleasant weather in 91