Chapter 8

THE CALTON HILL.

THE east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy
hill, of no great elevation, which the town embraces.
The old London road runs on one side of it; while the New
Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes the
circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to
find yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart
has the honours of situation and architecture; Burns is
memorialised lower down upon a spur; Lord Nelson, as
befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the
Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently
and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and
a butter-churn; comparisons apart, it ranks among the
vilest of men's handiworks. But the chief feature is an
unfinished range of columns, 'the Modern Ruin' as it has
been called, an imposing object from far and near, and
giving Edinburgh, even from the sea, that false air; of a
Modern Athens which has earned for her so many slighting
speeches. It was meant to be a National Monument; and
its present state is a very suitable monument to certain
national characteristics. The old Observatory - a quaint
brown building on the edge of the steep - and the new
Observatory - a classical edifice with a dome - occupy
the central portion of the summit. All these are
scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep.

The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's
injustice to the dead. You see Dugald Stewart rather
more handsomely commemorated than Burns. Immediately
below, in the Canongate churchyard, lies Robert
Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane
while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been
somewhat too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet,
on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgotten. The
votaries of Burns, a crew too common in all ranks in
Scotland and more remarkable for number than discretion,
eagerly suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him
the poetic impulse and, up to the time when he grew
famous, continued to influence him in his manner and the
choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged
his debt in a fragment of autobiography, but erected a
tomb over the grave in Canongate churchyard. This was
worthy of an artist, but it was done in vain; and
although I think I have read nearly all the biographies
of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of
nature was not violated, or where Fergusson was not
sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality.
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll
Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to
gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
without disparaging all others. They are