she read Latin at
Holyrood in the early days before trouble came.

[Illustration: GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD]

PART IV

THE MODERN CITY

CHAPTER I

A BURGHER POET

After the extraordinary climax of dramatic interest which brought the
history of Edinburgh and of Scotland to the knowledge of the whole
world, and which has continued ever since to form one of the most
exciting chapters in general history, it was inevitable that when that
fated Court dispersed, and the lady who was its charm and head
disappeared also under the tragic waves which had been rising to engulf
her, there should fall a sudden blank into the record, a chill of
dulness and tedium, the charm departed and the story done. In fact, it
was not at all so, and the metropolis of Scotland continued to seethe
with contending elements, and to witness a continued struggle,
emphasised by many a martyrdom and deed of blood, and many a desperate
battle both hand to hand and head to head in the streets and in the
council chambers, all with more or less the religious question involved,
and all helping to work out the final settlement. When that final
settlement came after all the tumults and blood it had cost, it is
scarcely possible not to feel the downfall from those historical
commotions to the dead level of a certain humdrum good attained, which
was by no means the perfect state hoped for, yet which permitted peace
and moderate comfort and the growth of national wellbeing. The little
homely church towers of the Revolution, as they are to be seen, for
instance, along the coast of Fife, are not more unlike the Gothic spires
and pinnacles of the older ages, than was the limited rustical provision
of the Kirk, its restricted standing and lowered pretensions, unlike the
ideal of Knox, the theocracy of the Congregation and the Covenant.
Denuded not only of the wealth of the old communion, but of those
beautiful dwelling-places which the passion of the mob destroyed and
which the policy of the Reformers did not do too much to
preserve--deprived of the interest of that long struggle during which
each contending presbyter had something of the halo of possible
martyrdom about his head--the Church of the Revolution Settlement lost
in her established safety, if not as much as she gained, yet something
which it was not well to lose. And the kingdom in general dropped in
something like the same way into a sort of prose of existence, with most
of the pictur