ent picturesque grace, the modern
comfort and ease. And though Mr. Ruskin has spoken very severely of the
new town, we will not throw a stone at a place so well adapted to the
necessities of modern life. Those bland fronts of polished stone would
have been more kindly and more congenial to the soil had they cut the
air with high-stepped gables and encased their stairs in the rounded
turrets which give a simple distinctive character to so many Scottish
houses; and a little colour, whether of the brick which Scotch builders
despise or the delightful washes[6] which their forefathers loved, would
be a godsend even now. But still, for a sober domestic partner, the new
town is no ill companion to the ancient city on the hill.

[6] In this respect I venture to think all Scotland errs. Many houses
throughout the country, built roughly with a rude and irregular but solid
mason-work, were made points of light in the landscape by these washes of
colour which poor dwellings retain. There is a yellow which I remember on
many old houses in which the stains of time and weather produced
varieties of tone almost as agreeable as the mellowing of marble under
the same influences, which are now stripped into native roughness and
rise in sombre grey, sometimes almost black, abstracting a much-needed
warmth from the aspect of the country round.

This adjunct to the elder Edinburgh had come into being between the time
when Allan Ramsay's career ended in the octagon house on the Castle
Hill, and another poet, very different from Ramsay, appeared in the
Scotch capital. In the meantime many persons of note had left the old
town and migrated towards the new. The old gentry of whom so many
stories have been told, especially those old ladies who held a little
court, like Mrs. Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all
things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's
lively pages--continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept
their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached
through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge
outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch
metropolis was now rapidly tending across the lately erected bridge
towards the new great houses which contemplated old Edinburgh across the
little valley, where the Nor' Loch glimmered no longer and where fields
lay green where marsh and water had been. The North Bridge was a noble
stru