numerous feudal terms, the words of a vanished world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Regent Road was made, the burying-ground was of necessity cut right through. The soil, a very debris of humanity, was removed to the new Calton burying-ground, which is a little way eastward, also on the south slope of the hill. It is in this new Calton burying-ground that his father was interred, with other members of the family. But R. L. S. took more interest in the other—at least, so we gather from his written word; for he means it when, in that brilliant essay called Old Mortality, he says: "In the hot fits of youth I came to be unhappy." It is densely crowded. The most famous grave is that of David Hume, a round, Roman-like tower, which accident and history, rather than design, make strikingly, almost startlingly, prominent, from various spots in the city, especially from the North Bridge. There is also a high obelisk, called the Martyrs' Monument, erected in 1844 to the memory of Thomas Muir and his fellows, who were tried, and banished from Scotland in 1793, by Stevenson's idol, Lord Braxfield.

This essay has some splendid passages on the last days of his friend James Walter Ferrier. His grave is not in any of those three, but in that which lies around St. Cuthbert's Church, as Henley has recorded in memorable lines

Our Athos rests-the wise, the kind,
The liberal and august, his fault atoned,
Rests in the crowded yard

There at the west of Princes Street.

This last place of tombs has no mention from him, yet it was often under his eye, since on its west side it borders the Lothian Road, which is referred to more than once by him in a half-jesting, half-serious fashion, as a familiar if not favourite promenade. It dates from about a century ago, and the legend runs that, in accordance with a bet made by Clerk of Penicuik, it was constructed, however roughly, in one day. A poor woman, it is said, who had a cottage there, quitted it one morning to attend to her affairs in town. In the evening it had clean vanished, and a broad thoroughfare stood in its place. The Lothian Road may be called the Tottenham Court Road of Edinburgh. It is a broad, but you cannot say noble, street. One house of en-tertainment in it was a favourite haunt of our author. In a letter of May 1894 to Mr. Baxter he comically suggests that the Edinburgh edition should be called the Lothian Road edition, with the picture of the old Dutch lugger in the corner. The "Dutch lugger" was the name he gave to the landlord of the house he frequented. In another letter he talks of it as rather a convivial place, but most would class it with Leith Walk, another street where the fates willed that R. L. S. should be often present, as a dreary thoroughfare not old enough to have the charm of antiquity, not new enough to have that of novelty.

Such were the homes and chief haunts of R. L. S. in the city of his birth. But Edinburgh presents itself to us in connection with him in another aspect. It was his favourite literary subject, never more

so than when he was far away from it in time or space. It is quite another kind of Edinburgh that we have now to visit and examine, an Edinburgh that is only very partially that of his own day, much of it vanished ere he was born; the Edinburgh of his writings.

CHAPTER III

EDINBURGH IN FACT AND FANCY

HE feelings of R. L. S. for Edinburgh were a mixture of opposites. The wind, the wet, the chill, the gloom affected him with a physical loathing for which there was good reason, since he must have died had fate confined him within its bounds. Likewise he detested the rigid conventions of the class to which he belonged. He was set to uncongenial tasks. The forms of religion practised in the place called forth his anger and contempt. They seemed to him to miss what religion really was. On the other hand, the city had a powerful attraction for him, which grew stronger the farther he was distant from it. When he was there, the events of every day, something cross-grained in the weather and the folk, acted as a continual irritant; but far off those pinpricks were forgotten, and Auld Reekie asserted over him a singular, a peculiar charm-partly because he was a native, as well as a Scot among Scotsmen, but chiefly that it suited as no other place ever could the peculiar bent of his genius as man of letters. The town, the people, the history, the legends, all were material ready made to his hand. Had he not been a Scotsman, it is possible that he might have neglected

Edinburgh altogether as subject, though even then, had he known as much of it as he afterwards did of London or Paris, he would have written something noteworthy about it. However this may be, had he been born elsewhere in Scotland, he must have made Edinburgh his chief literary subject. Aberdeen or even Stirling would not have been rich enough in matter; and as for Glasgow-what was there in Glasgow, past or present, to attract him?

As prelude to what follows, a few words on this famous city will be in place. The Edinburgh of history and romance is a very small portion of the town of to-day, but it is that small portion with which R. L. S., and we after him, are mainly concerned. Two miles or over from the Firth of Forth there rises a mass of hills. One of these running east and west has a nearly perpendicular western flank. On its eastern side it descends to the plain in a slope of about a mile. The western summit is the Castle rock. At the bottom of the eastern descent is the palace of Holyrood; the ground between is the High Street, which the Canongate continues to Holyrood. To the north and south of the ridge narrow ways called closes descend to the level. On the north there lay at the bottom for centuries the Nor' Loch. The closes to the south finish in the Cowgate, which thus is parallel with the High Street. The Cowgate runs westward into the open place of the Grassmarket, and from it southward there are, or were, other closes by which you reach various famous places such as Greyfriars and the College. A wall called the Flodden Wall, because