n, and which, rounding over its steep
slope, descended towards another and yet another terrace before it stood
complete, a new-born partner and companion in life of the former
capital, lavish in space as the other was confined, leisurely and
serious as the other was animated--a new town of great houses, of big
churches--dull, as only the eighteenth century was capable of making
them--of comfort and sober wealth and intellectual progress. The
architects who adorned the Modern Athens with Roman domes and Greek
temples, and placid fictitious ruins on the breezy hill which possessed
a fatal likeness to the Acropolis, would have scoffed at the idea of
finding models in the erections of the fourteenth century--that
so-called dark age--or recognising a superior harmony and fitness in
native principles of construction.

Yet though the public taste has now returned more or less intelligently
to the earlier canons, it would be foolish not to recognise that there
is a certain advantage even in the difference of the new town from the
old. It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous,
mediaeval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers,
the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and
witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character
of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing
by the old. Those who built it considered it an extraordinary
improvement upon all that Gothic antiquity had framed. They were far
more proud of these broad streets and massive houses than of anything
their fathers had left to them, and flung down without remorse a great
deal of the antiquated building after which it is now the fashion to
inquire with so much regret. Notwithstanding the change of taste since
that time, the New Town of Edinburgh still regards the old with a little
condescension and patronage; but there is no opposition between the two.
They stand by each other in a curious peacefulness of union, each with a
certain independence yet mutual reliance. London and Paris have rubbed
off all their old angles and made themselves, notwithstanding the
existence of Gothic corners here and there, all modern, to the
extinction of most of the characteristic features of their former
living. But happy peculiarities of situation have saved our northern
capital from any such self-obliteration. Edinburgh has been fortunate
enough to preserve both sides--the anci