satisfactory crags in nature--a Bass rock upon dry
land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown
of battlements and turrets, and describing its warlike shadow over the
liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. It dominates
the whole countryside from water and land. The men who would have the
courage to build such a castle in such a spot are all dead; all dead,
and the world is infinitely more comfortable without them. They are all
gone, and no more like unto them will ever be born, and we can most
of us count upon dying safely in our beds, of diseases bred of modern
civilisation. But I am glad that those old barbarians, those rudimentary
creatures working their way up into the divine likeness, when they
were not hanging, drawing, quartering, torturing, and chopping their
neighbours, and using their heads in conventional patterns on the tops
of gate-posts, did devote their leisure intervals to rearing fortresses
like this. Edinburgh Castle could not be conceived, much less built,
nowadays, when all our energy is consumed in bettering the condition
of the 'submerged tenth'! What did they care about the 'masses,' that
'regal race that is now no more,' when they were hewing those blocks
of rugged rock and piling them against the sky-line on the top of that
great stone mountain! It amuses me to think how much more picturesque
they left the world, and how much better we shall leave it; though if
an artist were requested to distribute individual awards to different
generations, you could never persuade him to give first prizes to the
centuries that produced steam laundries, trolleys, X rays, and sanitary
plumbing.

What did they reck of Peace Congresses and bloodless arbitrations when
they lighted the beacon-fires, flaming out to the gudeman and his sons
ploughing or sowing in the Lang Dykes the news that their 'ancient
enemies of England had crossed the Tweed'!

I am the most peaceful person in the world, but the Castle was too much
for my imagination. I was mounted and off and away from the first moment
I gazed upon its embattled towers, heard the pipers in the distance, and
saw the Black Watch swinging up the green steps where the huge fortress
'holds its state.' The modern world had vanished, and my
steed was galloping, galloping, galloping back into the
place-of-the-things-that-are-past, traversing centuries at every leap.

'To arms! Let every banner in Scotland float defiance to the