Chapter 5

GREYFRIARS.

IT was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the
Grey Friars: a new and semi-rural cemetery in those days,
although it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been
superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must have
had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their gardens
were situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the
tallest of the castle crags in front. Even now, it is
one of our famous Edinburgh points of view; and strangers
are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how
strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New
Greyfriars stands on the level at the top; a few thorns
are dotted here and there, and the ground falls by
terrace and steep slope towards the north. The open
shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the
margin, the place is girt by an array of aristocratic
mausoleums appallingly adorned.

Setting aside the tombs of Roubiliac, which belong
to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to
my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly
illustrating death. We seem to love for their own sake
the emblems of time and the great change; and even around
country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets
pealing for the Judgment Day. Every mason was a
pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death,
and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon
mortality, and any dead farmer was seized upon to be a
text. The classical examples of this art are in
Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by
contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so
apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look
with a smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes - some
crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing
on a scroll from angels' trumpets - on the emblematic
horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and
all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our
fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their
sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort
of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the
merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet;
but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect
of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious to
the point of melancholy.

Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low
class present their backs to the churchyard. Only a few
inches separate the living from the dead. Here, a window
is partly blocked up by