enson calls it one of the most satisfactory crags in nature--a
Bass rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains,
carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its
warlike shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the
new town. It dominates the whole countryside from water and land. The
men who would have the courage to build such a castle in such a spot
are all dead; all dead, and the world is infinitely more comfortable
without them. They are all gone, and no more like unto them will ever
be born, and we can most of us count upon dying safely in our beds, of
diseases bred of modern civilization. But I am glad that those old
barbarians, those rudimentary creatures working their way up into the
divine likeness, when they were not hanging, drawing, quartering,
torturing, and chopping their neighbors, and using their heads in
conventional patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their
leisure intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle
could not be conceived, much less built, nowadays, when all our energy
is consumed in bettering the condition of the "submerged tenth"! What
did they care about the "masses," that "regal race that is now no
more," when they were hewing those blocks of rugged rock and piling
them against the sky-line on the top of that great stone mountain! It
amuses me to think how much more picturesque they left the world, and
how much better we shall leave it; though if an artist were requested
to distribute individual awards to different generations, you could
never persuade him to give first prizes to the centuries that produced
steam laundries, trolleys, X rays, and sanitary plumbing.

What did they reck of Peace Congresses and bloodless arbitrations when
they lighted the beacon-fires, flaming out to the gudeman and his sons
ploughing or sowing in the Lang Dykes the news that their "ancient
enemies of England had crossed the Tweed"!

I am the most peaceful person in the world, but the Castle was too
much for my imagination. I was mounted and off and away from the first
moment I gazed upon its embattled towers, heard the pipers in the
distance, and saw the Black Watch swinging up the green steeps where
the huge fortress "holds its state." The modern world had vanished,
and my steed was galloping, galloping, galloping back into the
place-of-the-things-that-are-past, traversing centuries at every
leap.

"To arms! Let every banner in