Letter XXII.

Edinburgh.

Edinburgh, July 17, 1845.

I Had been often told, since I arrived in England, that in Edinburgh, I should see the finest city I ever saw. I confess that I did not feel quite sure of this, but it required scarcely more than a single look to show me that it was perfectly true. It is hardly possible to imagine a nobler site for a town than that of Edinburgh, and it is built as nobly. You stand on the edge of the deep gulf which separates the old and the new town, and before you on the opposite bank rise the picturesque buildings of the ancient city--

"Piled deep and massy, close and high,"

looking, in their venerable and enduring aspect, as if they were parts of the steep bank on which they stand, an original growth of the rocks; as if, when the vast beds of stone crystallized from the waters, or cooled from their fusion by fire, they formed themselves by some freak of nature into this fantastic resemblance of the habitations of men. To the right your eyes rest upon a crag crowned with a grand old castle of the middle ages, on which guards are marching to and fro; and near you to the left, rises the rocky summit of Carlton Hill, with its monuments of the great men of Scotland. Behind you stretch the broad streets of the new town, overlooked by massive structures, built of the stone of the Edinburgh quarries, which have the look of palaces.

"Streets of palaces and walks of slate,"

form the new town. Not a house of brick or wood exists in Edinburgh; all are constructed of the excellent and lasting stone which the earth supplies almost close to their foundations. High and solid bridges of this material, with broad arches, connect the old town with the new, and cross the deep ravine of the Cowgate in the old town, at the bottom of which you see a street between prodigiously high buildings, swarming with the poorer population of Edinburgh.

From almost any of the eminences of the town you see spread below you its magnificent bay, the Frith of Forth, with its rocky islands; and close to the old town rise the lofty summits of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crag, a solitary, silent, mountainous district, without habitations or inclosures, grazed by flocks of sheep. To the west flows Leith-water in its deep valley, spanned by a noble bridge, and the winds of this chilly climate that strike the stately buildings of the new town, along the cliffs that border this glen, come from the very clouds. Beyond the Frith lie the hills of Fifeshire; a glimpse of the blue Grampian ridges is seen where the Frith contracts in the northwest to a narrow channel, and to the southwest lie the Pentland hills, whose springs supply Edinburgh with water. All around you are places the names of which are familiar names of history, poetry, and romance.

From this magnificence of nature and art, the transition was painful to what I saw of the poorer population. On Saturday evening I found myself at the market, which is then held in High-street and the Netherbow, just as you enter the Canongate, and where the old wooden effigy of John Knox, with staring black eyes, freshly painted every year, stands in its pulpit, and still seems preaching to the crowd. Hither a throng of sickly-looking, dirty people, bringing with them their unhealthy children, had crawled from the narrow wynds or alleys on each side of the street. We entered several of these wynds, and passed down one of them, between houses of vast height, story piled upon story, till we came to the deep hollow of the Cowgate. Children were swarming in the way, all of them, bred in that close and impure atmosphere, of a sickly appearance, and the aspect of premature age in some of them, which were carried in arms, was absolutely frightful. "Here is misery," said a Scotch gentleman, who was my conductor. I asked him how large a proportion of the people of Edinbugh belonged to that wretched and squalid class which I saw before me. "More than half," was his reply. I will not vouch for the accuracy of his statistics. Of course his estimate was but a conjecture.

In the midst of this population is a House of Refuge for the Destitute, established by charitable individuals for the relief of those who may be found in a state of absolute destitution of the necessaries of life. Here they are employed in menial services, lodged and fed until they can be sent to their friends, or employment found for them. We went over the building, a spacious structure, in the Canongate, of the plainest Puritan architecture, with wide low rooms, which, at the time of the union of Scotland with England, served as the mansion of the Duke of Queensbury. The accommodations of course are of the humblest kind. We were shown into the sewing-room, were we saw several healthy-looking young women at work, some of them barefooted. Such of the inmates as can afford it, pay for their board from three and sixpence to five shillings a week, besides their labor.

In this part of the city also are the Night Asylums for the Houseless. Here, those who find themselves without a shelter for the night, are received into an antechamber, provided with benches, where they first get a bowl of soup, and are then introduced into a bathing-room, where they are stripped and scoured. They are next furnished with clean garments and accommodated with a lodging on an inclined plane of planks, a little raised from the floor, and divided into proper compartments by strips of board. Their own clothes are, in the mean time, washed, and returned to them when they leave the place.

It was a very different spectacle from the crowd in the Saturday evening market, that met my eyes the next morning in the clean and beautiful streets of the new town; the throng of well-dressed church-goers passing each other in all directions. The women, it appeared to me, were rather gaily dressed, and a large number of them prettier than I had seen in some of the more southern cities.

I attended worship in one of the Free Churches, as they are called, in which Dr. Candlish officiates. In the course of his sermon, he read long portions of an address from the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and prayer, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the time, and more especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College at Maynooth. The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague terms. In the course of the address the title of National Church was claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national independence. There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches; and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings. This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.

Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded. In the afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the congregation was thin.

This Maynooth grant has occasioned great dissatisfaction in England and Scotland. If the question had been left to be decided by the public opinion of these parts of the kingdom, the grant would never have been made. An immense majority, of all classes and almost all denominations, disapprove of it. A dissenting clergyman of one of the evangelical persuasions, as they are called, said to me--"The dissenters claim nothing from the government; they hold that it is not the business of the state to interfere in religious matters, and they object to bestowing the public money upon the seminaries of any religious denomination." In a conversation which I had with an eminent man of letters, and a warm friend of the English Church, he said: "The government is giving offense to many who have hitherto been its firmest supporters. There was no necessity for the Maynooth grant; the Catholics would have been as well satisfied without it as they are with it; for you see they are already clamoring for the right to appoint through their Bishops the professors in the new Irish colleges. The Catholics were already establishing their schools, and building their churches with their own means: and this act of applying the money of the nation to the education of their priests is a gratuitous offense offered by the government to its best friends." In a sermon which I heard from the Dean of York, in the magnificent old minster of that city, he commended the liberality of the motives which had induced the government to make the grant, but spoke of the measure as one which the friends of the English Church viewed with apprehension and anxiety.

"They may dismiss their fears," said a shrewd friend of mine, with whom I was discussing the subject. "Endowments are a cause of lukewarmness and weakness. Our Presbyterian friends here, instead of protesting so vehemently against what Sir Robert Peel has done, should thank him for endowing the Catholic Church, for in doing it he has deprived it of some part of its hold upon the minds of men."

There is much truth, doubtless, in this remark. The support of religion to be effectual should depend upon individual zeal. The history of the endowed chapels of dissenting denominations in England is a curious example of this. Congregations have fallen away and come to nothing, and it is a general remark that nothing is so fatal to a sect as a liberal endowment, which provides for the celebration of public worship without individual contributions.