Chapter 8 - Page 2

indeed mistaken
if they think to please the great originals; and whoever
puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better than
dedicate his labours to the memory of Burns, who will be
the best delighted of the dead.

Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is
perhaps the best; since you can see the Castle, which you
lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot
see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on one
of those days of sunshine and east wind which are so
common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze
comes off the sea, with a little of the freshness, and
that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is
delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and
greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It
brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning
decolourizer, although not thick enough to obscure
outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the
Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the
Bass Rock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea
fog.

Immediately underneath upon the south, you command
the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts
of the new Jail - a large place, castellated to the
extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the
Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see female prisoners
taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other,
schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step
with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller
and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a
little farther, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its
Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry
pacing smartly too and fro before the door like a
mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost,
you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over
which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where
Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white
wine to entertain her loveliness. Behind and overhead,
lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to
Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of
Salisbury Crags: and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark
and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of
Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue
of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the
right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one
above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk
and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. -
Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same
instant of time, a ball rises to the