Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson People’s Edition . london SEELEY & CO. Ltd. , 38 Great Russell Street 1903...

The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills.  No situation could be more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects.  From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns.  To the east you may catch at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stir

The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh.  It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits as a whole.  The Old Town depends for much of its effect on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its situa

Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precincts of St. Giles’s Church.  The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the Krames are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious.  As St. Giles’s must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling, sunle

The character of a place is often most perfectly expressed in its associations.  An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has happened amongst congenial surroundings.  Ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property of their scene.  To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature seemed each to contain its own legend ready made, which it was his to call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought wit

It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others.  The Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer evenings; for their gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the tallest of the castle crags in front.  Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how

It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very emblem of what is condemnable in architecture.  Much may be said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly picturesque.  An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the sublime

Mr. Ruskin’s denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.  Many however find a grand air and something settled and imposing in the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind.  But upon the subject of our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with Mr. Ruskin’s, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his large d

The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great elevation, which the town embraces.  The old London road runs on one side of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes the circuit.  You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of monuments.  Dugald Stewart has the honours of situation and architecture; Burns is memorialised lower down upon a spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the Calt

The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the winter wind.  Snell , blae , nirly , and scowthering , are four of these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with them; and for my part, as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and as I set my face northwards, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek.  Even i

On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow.  On the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on Arthur’s Seat.  The character of the neighbourhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile an