Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, “a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town,” as Mr. Robert Chambers describes it, had become densely over-populated. Seventy thousand inhabitants lived, breathed, and had their being within its confined area. The quaint and impressive site of this “city set on a hill,” however, did not admit of an easy extension of its boundaries. Fields and braes lay to the north, open and ready, blazing with whins and sunshine, and swept over by the fresh winds off the sea--a perfect _El Dorado_ for the stifling and cramped inhabitants to look at from the high windows of the eyries in the dark obscurities of their closes and wynds. But, between the city and this fair open country, there lay a deep chasm filled by the Nor’ Loch; and so Edinburgh remained in its old state, a city straggling down the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood, with St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth standing in the centre of this street and blocking its breadth, and all the teeming wynds and closes leading from it, and with the lower-lying Cowgate over the ridge to the south, terminating in the Grassmarket beneath the Castle Rock. “Everything,” says Mr. Robert Chambers, “was on a homely and narrow scale. The College--where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names--was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes or dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the _Poker Club_ in a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close.... The town was, nevertheless, a familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and [Illustration: PRINCES STREET FROM THE STEPS OF THE NEW CLUB The spectator is looking east towards the Scott Monument, which rises in the centre of the picture; to the right of the monument is a portion of the Royal Institution, while to the left is the tower of the North British Railway Hotel, with the top of the Nelson Monument appearing over the window shade. Down the steps of the New Club a page boy is carrying golf clubs. The time is a sunny afternoon in September.] simple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest in each other. Acquaintances might not only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party walls, but from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip.... The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere.” And the overcrowding!