Edinburgh was then, and remained for generations to come, much the same as it appeared when Mary Stuart first visited it. Historians like Brantome, and poets like Ronsard, lamented for their fair princess exiled in a savage land. But the daughter of the House of Lorraine might well have been content with the curious beauty of her new capital. Even now, more than three centuries since Mary Stuart landed in Scotland, and more than a century and a half since her descendant raised the standard of rebellion against the Elector of Hanover, Edinburgh Old Town retains more of its antique characteristics than either of the capitals of the sister kingdoms. It is true that the Northern Athens has followed the example of its Greek original in shifting the scene of its social life. The Attic Athens of to-day occupies a different site from that of the city of Pericles. New Edinburgh {85} has reared itself on the other bank of that chasm where once the North River flowed, and where now the trains run. Edinburgh, however, more fortunate than the city of Cecrops, while founding a new town has not lost the old. But at the time of the Hanoverian accession, and for generations later, not a house of the new town had been built. Edinburgh was still a walled city, with many gates or "ports," occupying the same ground that she had covered in the reign of James the Third, along the ridge between the gray Castle on the height at the west and haunted Holyrood in the plain at the east. All along this ridge rose the huge buildings, "lands," as they were called, stretching from peak to peak like a mountain-range--five, six, sometimes ten stories high--pierced with innumerable windows, crowned with jagged, fantastic roofs and gables, and as crowded with life as the "Insulae" of Imperial Rome. Over all rose the graceful pinnacle of St. Giles's Church, around whose base the booths of goldsmiths and other craftsmen clustered. The great main street of this old town was, and is, the Canongate, with its hundred or so of narrow closes or wynds running off from it at right angles. The houses in these closes were as tall as the rest, though the space across the street was often not more than four or five feet wide. The Canongate was Edinburgh in the early days of the last century far more than St. James's Street was London. Its high houses, with their wooden panellings, with the old armorial devices on their doors, and their common stair climbing from story to story outside, have seen the whole panorama of Scottish history pass by.