ps, while founding a new
town has not lost the old. But at the time of the Hanoverian
accession, and for generations later, not a house of the new town had
been built. Edinburgh was still a walled city, with many gates or
"ports," occupying the same ground that she had covered in the reign of
James the Third, along the ridge between the gray Castle on the height
at the west and haunted Holyrood in the plain at the east. All along
this ridge rose the huge buildings, "lands," as they were called,
stretching from peak to peak like a mountain-range--five, six,
sometimes ten stories high--pierced with innumerable windows, crowned
with jagged, fantastic roofs and gables, and as crowded with life as
the "Insulae" of Imperial Rome. Over all rose the graceful pinnacle of
St. Giles's Church, around whose base the booths of goldsmiths and
other craftsmen clustered. The great main street of this old town was,
and is, the Canongate, with its hundred or so of narrow closes or wynds
running off from it at right angles. The houses in these closes were
as tall as the rest, though the space across the street was often not
more than four or five feet wide. The Canongate was Edinburgh in the
early days of the last century far more than St. James's Street was
London. Its high houses, with their wooden panellings, with the old
armorial devices on their doors, and their common stair climbing from
story to story outside, have seen the whole panorama of Scottish
history pass by.

Life cannot have been very comfortable in Edinburgh. There were no
open spaces or squares in the royalty, with the exception of the
Parliamentary close. The houses were so well and strongly built that
the city was seldom troubled by fire, but they were poor inside, with
low, dark rooms. We find, in consequence, that houses inhabited by the
gentry in the early part of the eighteenth century were considered
almost too bad for very humble {86} folk at its close, and the success
of the new town was assured from the day when its first
foundation-stone was laid. But if not very comfortable, life was quiet
and simple. People generally dined at one or two o'clock in Edinburgh
when George the First was king. Shopkeepers closed their shops when
they dined, and opened them again for business when the meal was over.
There was very little luxury; wine was seldom seen on the tables of the
middle classes, and few people kept carriages. There were not many
amusements;