Chapter XXXI
Scott settled in Edinburgh—Defacement of City—Wrytte’s House—Gillespie the Snuff-seller—Erskine’s Joke—The Woods of Bellevue—Scott’s ideal rus in urbe.
Scott’s public career in literature practically began with the new century. His new duties did not require a change of dwelling-place. Edinburgh continued to be his home, and the centre of his deepest personal interests. The defacement of the city was proceeding merrily, and we cannot doubt that Scott was one of the few who disapproved. An anonymous writer in the Scots Magazine for July 1800 refers to the neglect of the Chapel Royal at Holyrood and the destruction of the Nunnery at Sciennes, and protests against the demolition of the old building Wrytte’s House, which had just been begun. It consisted of a keep presiding over a group of inferior buildings, most of it as old as the middle of the fourteenth century, and all delightfully picturesque. The writer gives some details which are worth quoting: ‘This magnificent building is adorned with a profusion of sculptured figures, especially above the windows. Above the main door, in beautiful workmanship, are blazoned the arms of Great Britain, with the inscription, J. 6. M. B. F. E. H. R. etc.,... there is a rough but curious piece of sculpture, reminding Nobility of her origin;—Adam digging the ground and Eve twirling the distaff, with the old rhyme beneath:
When Adam delv’d and Eva span,
Quhar war a’ the gentiles than?’
Other figures represented the Virtues and the Five Senses. There was a head in bas relief of Julius Cæsar. This, says the writer, is going to be preserved because it has been thought to bear some resemblance to the visage of the celebrated tobacconist whose pious bequest has eventually produced so woful a revolution!
The execrable Vandals who did it were the Trustees of Gillespie’s Hospital.
‘Duke Luke did this:
God’s ban be his!’
But lest we should be tempted to imprecate upon these long-departed Dogberries the curses thundered by Dr. Slop upon the head of poor Obadiah, listen now to Lord Cockburn: ‘If I recollect right, this was the first of the public charities of this century by which Edinburgh has been blessed, or cursed. The founder was a snuff-seller, who brought up an excellent young man as his heir, and then left death to disclose that, for the vanity of being remembered by a thing called after himself, he had all the while had a deed executed by which this, his nearest, relation was disinherited.’
One of Henry Erskine’s jokes was at the expense of this double-minded old snuff-seller. He suggested for Gillespie’s carriage panels the motto, ‘Quid rides,’ and beneath it:
‘Wha wad hae thocht it,
That noses wad hae bocht it?’
After briefly describing the old castle, Cockburn goes on: ‘Nothing could be more striking when seen against the evening sky. Many a feudal gathering did that tower see on the Borough Moor; and many a time did the inventor of logarithms, whose castle of Merchiston was near, enter it. Yet it was brutishly obliterated, without one public murmur.... The idiot public looked on in silence. How severely has Edinburgh suffered by similar proceedings, adventured upon by barbarians, knowing the apathetic nature, in these matters, of the people they have had to deal with. All our beauty might have been preserved, without the extinction of innumerable antiquities, conferring interest and dignity. But reverence for mere antiquity, and even for modern beauty on their own account, is scarcely a Scotch passion.’
Another case. In the Scots Magazine for May appeared, among the odd scraps of news, this paragraph—‘The elegant villa of Bellevue, the property of the late Mrs. General Scott, in the neighbourhood of this city, has been purchased by the Town Council; the terms, we understand, are a feu-duty of £1050 per annum, with the privilege of buying it up, within seven years, for £20,200. The pleasure ground is to be laid out for building conformable to a plan.’
The grounds of Bellevue were practically the whole space between the east end of Queen Street and Canonmills, now fully covered with streets and houses. The site of the villa was about the centre of the Drummond Place enclosure, and on it was erected a custom-house which the old guide-book calls ‘another splendid appendage to this flourishing city, which is now so rapidly enlarging its dimensions.’ Such was the idea of the unspeakable Philistines who destroyed this unmatched scene of beauty, and transformed it into a commonplace urban corner. The desecration does seem, however, to have been lamented, if not more actively resented. Lord Cockburn speaks of people ‘shuddering when they heard the axes busy in the woods of Bellevue, and furious when they saw the bare ground. But the axes, as usual, triumphed.’ The old woodcut, stiff and hard in its lines, showing the three-storied barracks of Queen Street, commanding a free view west, north, and east, upon an open sylvan scene, is enough to make one weep; and pathetic, too, in the same way is Cockburn’s story: ‘No part of the home scenery of Edinburgh was more beautiful than Bellevue.... The whole place waved with wood, and was diversified by undulations of surface, and adorned by seats and bowers and summer-houses. Queen Street, from which there was then an open prospect over the Firth to the north-western mountains, was the favourite Mall. Nothing certainly, within a town, could be more delightful than the sea of the Bellevue foliage, gilded by the evening sun, or the tumult of blackbirds and thrushes sending their notes into all the adjoining houses in the blue of a summer morning. We clung long to the hope that, though the city might in time surround them, Bellevue at the east, and Drumsheugh (Lord Moray’s place) at the west, end of Queen Street, might be spared.... But the mere beauty of the town was no more thought of at that time by anybody than electric telegraphs and railways; and perpendicular trees, with leaves and branches, never find favour in the sight of any Scotch mason. Indeed in Scotland almost every one seems to be a “foe to the Dryads of the borough groves.” It is partly owing to our climate, which rarely needs shade; but more to hereditary bad taste. So that at last the whole spot was made as dull and bare as if the designer of the New Town himself had presided over the operation.’
There are many allusions in the works of Scott to ‘the rage of indiscriminate destruction which has removed or ruined so many monuments of antiquity.’ With special reference to Edinburgh, showing how little the barbarous ‘improvements’ of the new commercial generation were to his mind, Chrystal Croftangry, coming back to his native city after long absence, decides to choose his dwelling-place not in George Square—nor in Charlotte Square—nor in the old New Town—nor in the new New Town—but in the Canongate—‘Perhaps expecting to find some little old-fashioned house, having somewhat of the rus in urbe, which he was ambitious of enjoying.’