palace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions
were so parceled out among the least and lowest in society, that the
hearth-stone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be
partitioned off into a bedroom by the new.

[1] These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town; and a
proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news
caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded
fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small
blame to them if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business habit.
Church-going is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency
of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude
one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the city
calls for something more specious by the way of inhabitants. A man in a
frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has
the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham. And let them
console themselves--they do as well as anybody else; the population of
(let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same
romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but
that is of gold: _I have not yet written a book about Glasgow._

CHAPTER II

OLD TOWN: THE LANDS

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
situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is
the making of the other.

The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and