This is from the south; but, seen from the western roads and heights, the city is even more striking. As you drive to the Forth Bridge along the fine old coach road to Queensferry,--the very road along which Jonathan Oldbuck and his companion drove in their journey in _The Antiquary_--you pass an occasional farm-house with mellow stacks about it and a smoky throat, and you must remember you are “within a mile of Edinburgh toun,” where “Bonny Jockie, blythe and gay, kissed sweet Jenny making hay.” Here, turn your head and you will see the dark mass of Arthur’s Seat lifted up in the air, and upon its western wall the fretted outline of the city and the Castle Rock, seeming not painted but actually engraven like some old hieroglyphic. To view Edinburgh from the north, you must journey over the Forth Bridge and look across from the Fife coast opposite. From the wooded “haughs” between Aberdour and Burntisland, Edinburgh, seen through a veil of green summer leaves across six miles of rough bright blue, seems painted in air, a scene of magic loveliness not to be excelled in all the idyllic world of romance or dream. In the nearest foreground the little island of Inchcolm with its tiny golden strand and ruined monastery; farther out to sea Inchkeith’s lighthouse ringed with a fringe of foam; and, beyond, a world of heights and hollows: Arthur’s Seat and the rigid uncurved slant of the Salisbury Crags, and the gabled intricacy of the Old Town, stretching from the hollow up to the black mass of rock on which the Castle glooms in mid-air, and then the New Town fantastically domed and steepled in the low foreground, and the white-columned summit of Calton Hill. Down at the water’s edge, between the Forth and this fairy show, are the dusky roofs and docks and shipping of Granton and Leith. Away to the west, the dwindling Forth is spanned by the arches of the monster bridge; and beyond it stretch the woods of Dalmeny and Abercorn. In the far east, where the Forth has widened to the sea, are the outjutting headlands, and on one of them is the curious cone called Berwick Law; while, behind all, for a background, the distant Pentlands slope to the south in softest purple. Dear to the heart of the resident is the view seen as one comes down the Mound on a winter’s afternoon at sunset, when the Castle stands dark against the glorious red of the western sky, and Princes Street, her lamps and her windows all alight, looks like a jewelled necklace.