When, in 1884, Edinburgh University, “the Town College,” celebrated her Tercentenary, and invited all the greatest celebrities of Europe to attend it, the streets of the sober grey city were for one wondrous week illuminated by flashes of academic colours and faces of foreign poets and soldiers, foreign men of science and statesmen, foreign historians and philosophers, foreign theologians and artists; Englishmen, Canadians, and Americans; Frenchmen, Germans, and Austrians; Russians, Italians, and Greeks. It was a week of compliments and fireworks, of lions and lionising, when every one who wished saw his own special Shelley plain, and he stopped and spoke to him; and then all the great European savants went away again, the richer by another honorary degree, and left Edinburgh to calm down again, the richer by another memory. The town itself has changed greatly since the days when Cockburn, Jeffrey, and Horner stood in Queen Street and listened to the corncrake in the fields stretching between them and the sea. It has changed since they lamented the cutting down of the trees round “Bellevue,” the beautiful house of General Scott, in the centre of Drummond Place. It has changed since the “Highland Lady” spent the winters of her girlhood there, attended the routs and balls, and walked in Princes Street attired in a white gown, a pink spencer, yellow tan boots with dangling tassels, and a deep-poked bonnet with three tall white ostrich feathers held aloft by the wind. The men and women who felt Edinburgh their own during the first half of last century would scarcely find their way about it to-day; they would wander through vast tracts of busy streets where for them were green fields and yellow whins, and discover further indentations of the country in new suburbs embracing fragments of old villages, or enclosing in a new street some ancient castle or homestead. Merchiston Castle, for instance, the home of the Napiers, a hoary and battlemented old keep, now stands within a walled garden among modern villas; and the fine old turreted dwelling of Chiesley of Dalry is now imbedded in mean streets, and saved from ignominy, and kept clean and orderly, by being an Episcopalian Training College. The various new buildings that have sprung up during the Victorian era to decorate or to deface the city are of course too numerous to mention; but a few of them are closely connected with the social life of Edinburgh yesterday. “It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter Scott,” writes the author of _Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_; “the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters.”[63] It stands on the green velvet of the grass of Princes Street Gardens, noblest in the long line of statues of Edinburgh’s notable citizens, facing the gayest and most