ess of the aspect of Edinburgh to its visitors is thus
not [Page: 109] merely pictorial. Be the spectator conscious of this or
no, it turns primarily upon the contrast of the mediaeval hill-city with
its castle ramparts, its fretted cathedral crown, with park and
boulevard, with shops, hotels and railway stations. But the historic
panorama is unusually complete. See the hill-fort defended by lake and
forest, becoming "_castrum puellarum_," becoming a Roman and an
Arthurian citadel, a mediaeval stronghold of innumerable sieges, a
centre of autocratic and military dictatures, oligarchic governments, at
length a museum of the past. So in the city itself. Here the narrow
ridge crowded into a single street all the essential organs of a
capital, and still presents with the rarest completeness of
concentration a conspectus of modern civic life and development; and
this alike as regards both spiritual and temporal powers, using these
terms in their broadest senses as the respective expressions of the
material order and its immaterial counterparts. Thus the royal and noble
castles of the Middle Age become with the Renaissance here as everywhere
something of palaces, while with the industrial revolution they have
become replaced by factories or transformed into breweries. So the
guidance of speculative thought, once concentrated in the mediaeval
abbey, becomes transferred to the Reformation assembly of divines, to
the Renaissance college; and again at the Revolution, is largely taken
over by the speculative encyclopaedists, of whom Hume and Smith were but
the most eminent. Nor are later developments less obvious. Of the
following generation, we have the neo-classic architecture which
everywhere dominated Europe after the French Revolution and during the
First Empire, while of the next generation's reaction against all this
in the romantic movement, the neo-Gothic monument of Scott is the most
characteristic possible representative. Again, just as in the Oxford
movement we had the (appropriately regional) renascence of the idealism
of the Cavaliers, so in Edinburgh we have naturally the simultaneous
renascence of the Puritan ideal, e.g., in the Free Church, whose
monument accordingly rises to dominate the city in its turn. The later
period of prosperous Liberalism, the heroic enthusiasms of Empire, have
each left their mark; and now in the dominant phase of social evolution,
that of Finance, the banks, the financial companies, the p