Chapter 2

OLD TOWN - THE LANDS.

THE Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief
characteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view,
the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most
common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the
whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since
everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of
art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits
as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
on the new quarters that lie around it, on the
sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back
it up. If you were to set it somewhere else by itself,
it would look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder and
loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and
fantastic modern city; for there the two re-act in a
picturesque sense, and the one is the making of the
other.

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of
diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the
waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the
west. On the one side of it and the other the new towns
of the south and of the north occupy their lower,
broader, and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of
the Castle over-tops the whole city and keeps an open
view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on every
side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in
quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on
the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town
blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A city that
is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this distant
aspect that she got her nickname of AULD REEKIE. Perhaps
it was given her by people who had never crossed her
doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs,
they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and
the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to
them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the
same field; and as that was all they knew of the place,
it could be all expressed in these two words.

Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is
properly smoked; and though it is well washed with rain
all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among
its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious
situations, not in extent, but in height and density.
Public buildings were forced, wherever there was room for
them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thorough - fares
were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour's shoulder, as
in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population
slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction.