PAINTED BY JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I. DESCRIBED BY ROSALINE MASSON WITH TWENTY-ONE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR LONDON: ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK COMPANY, LTD. 1904 ***On page 88, line 2, for James III. read James V....

T HE great line of east coast lying between the two headlands of Norfolk and Aberdeenshire is nowhere broken by another so bold and graceful indentation as that of the Firth of Forth. The Forth has its birth among hills that look down on Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; flows thence in a pretty tortuous course towards the east, forming a boundary-line between the countries of the Gael and the Sassenach; is replenished by the Teith from the Trossachs and by the Allan from Strathmore; meanders at the

THE SIX ROYAL JAMESES; MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS; AND PRINCE CHARLIE T HERE are two Holyroods—Holyrood Abbey, dating back to the twelfth century, and founded by David I.; and Holyrood House, the palace of the Stuarts, dating from fully three centuries later. The Abbey had always contained royal apartments, and had been a place of royal residence in turn with the Castle; and so it was natural that the tradition should be retained, and the royal palace built in connection with the splendid old Abbey. O

GAVIN DOUGLAS, JOHN KNOX, AND JENNY GEDDES T HERE is a saying that no one who has suffered an Episcopalian childhood knows the story of Jonah and the gourd, and that the reply given is invariably, “Jonah and the gourd? The gourd ? What about a gourd? I know all about the whale , of course!” It is observable that the ordinary tourist who visits Edinburgh associates St. Giles’s Church with the one incident of Jenny Geddes throwing her stool at the dean—an incident of which it might be submitted th

It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towns on hills and haughs than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosic retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled. Sir Walter Scott , Letter to Lady Anne Barnard . T HE long irregular line of slowly ascending mediæval street from Holyrood to the Castle was, and is, the backbone of Old Edinburgh. From this backbone there jut out on either side, forming,

T HE cosmopolitan view is nowadays the fashionable one, and no man stoops to own to a national prejudice, a national accent, or even a national pride. It may be as well. Trafalgar might have been won had Nelson never advised his men to hate a Frenchman as they would the devil. Perhaps, and perhaps not. It sounds a trifle harsh that King Robert the Bruce, on the mere suspicion that Sir Piers de Lombard had “ane English hart,” “made him to be hangit and drawen.” Perhaps, and perhaps not. At any ra

W HEN James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his—as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the street “midd

T OWARDS the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,” however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and sunshine, and swept ove

Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings.... Positively, when I contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species

S OCIAL Edinburgh of yesterday,—that is to say, the social life of Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen Victoria,—what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds of names rise in the memory—names of all sorts and conditions of men, “thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery in the bac

Robert Louis Stevenson , remembering his Edinburgh days, must have remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence, nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands. During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row was his home prope

I N Edinburgh, at whatever other hour of the day the resident or tourist may let his mind dwell in the past, at one o’clock he will always be brought back to the present moment; for at one o’clock the gun goes off at the Castle, and horses and men and women that are gun-shy are greatly startled, and every one pulls out his watch. But, except precisely at one o’clock, it is as impossible to exist in Edinburgh without living in the past as it would be to walk along Princes Street without seeing th