same face comes often
under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable
figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept
falling--grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat,
the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair
falling scant and grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of
him, he was standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud.
I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something
heart-breaking in this gradual declension at so advanced an age; you
would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities;
you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place
in life, whence he could pass quietly and honourably into the grave.

One of the earliest marks of these _degringolades_ is, that the victim
begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every
window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had
played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave
him so pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.

It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch
of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made
Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an
aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the
reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and
lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past--perhaps
the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch-bowl,
some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks' feathers on the
chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight. That
is not an ugly picture in itself, nor wi