yself peculiarly happy in being permitted to address the
citizens of Edinburgh on the subject of architecture, for it is one
which, they cannot but feel, interests them nearly. Of all the cities in
the British Islands, Edinburgh is the one which presents most advantages
for the display of a noble building; and which, on the other hand,
sustains most injury in the erection of a commonplace or unworthy one.
You are all proud of your city; surely you must feel it a duty in some
sort to justify your pride; that is to say, to give yourselves a _right_
to be proud of it. That you were born under the shadow of its two
fantastic mountains,--that you live where from your room windows you can
trace the shores of its glittering Firth, are no rightful subjects of
pride. You did not raise the mountains, nor shape the shores; and the
historical houses of your Canongate, and the broad battlements of your
castle, reflect honor upon you only through your ancestors. Before you
boast of your city, before even you venture to call it _yours_, ought
you not scrupulously to weigh the exact share you have had in adding to
it or adorning it, to calculate seriously the influence upon its aspect
which the work of your own hands has exercised? I do not say that, even
when you regard your city in this scrupulous and testing spirit, you
have not considerable ground for exultation. As far as I am acquainted
with modern architecture, I am aware of no streets which, in simplicity
and manliness of style, or general breadth and brightness of effect,
equal those of the New Town of Edinburgh. But yet I am well persuaded
that as you traverse those streets, your feelings of pleasure and pride
in them are much complicated with those which are excited entirely by
the surrounding scenery. As you walk up or down George Street, for
instance, do you not look eagerly for every opening to the north and
south, which lets in the luster of the Firth of Forth, or the rugged
outline of the Castle Rock? Take away the sea-waves, and the dark
basalt, and I fear you would find little to interest you in George
Street by itself. Now I remember a city, more nobly placed even than
your Edinburgh, which, instead of the valley that you have now filled by
lines of railroad, has a broad and rushing river of blue water sweeping
through the heart of it; which, for the dark and solitary rock that
bears your castle, has an amphitheater of cliffs crested with cypresses
and olive; which, fo