for the success of this
remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on
the hills above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the
steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demolished and turned
once more into useful building material, if people who think almost
exactly the same thoughts about religion would condescend to worship God
under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to
pocket pride, and speak the foremost word?

CHAPTER V

GREYFRIARS

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antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others.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 strangely the city lies upon her hills. The enclosure is
of an irregular shape; the double church of Old and New Greyfriars
stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there,
and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope towards the north. The
open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin,
the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly
adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the
heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest
among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to
love for their own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and
even around country churches you will find a wonderful exhibition of
skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for
the Judgment Day. Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep
consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors pithily before the
churchyard loiterer; he was brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and
any dead farmer was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of
this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly
monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries;
and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance remains.
You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin
mottoes--some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, s