Edinburgh: Picturesque NotesStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Edinburgh (Scotland) -- Description and travel
[Picture: The Grassmarket] For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in
one of its own inscriptions—an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed
a critical eye—is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom
Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the
Covenant was signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the
church-yard that extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell
Bridge—fed on bread and water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant
marksmen—lay five months looking for the scaffold or the plantations.
And while the good work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in
Greyfriars might have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned
the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner
farthest from Sir George, there stands a monument dedicated, in uncouth
Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There
is no moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co’monell; there
is not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so
much as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American
plantations; but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such
things interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on
earth as well as Julius Cæsar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I
know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn
how some of them—or some part of some of them—found their way at length
to such honourable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was
their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead. Some of
the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but
leave the rest in Patrick Walker’s language and orthography:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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