Whether in one of the piazzas or in both, one has but to imagine the litter that would be left on market days, and to add that to the litter disgorged into the street upwards from the closes, or flung down into the street from the fore-stairs, to see that a good deal of Dunbar’s earlier description must be allowed to descend through Lindsay’s intermediate and more gorgeous one, as still true of the ordinary Edinburgh of the date of Queen Mary’s return. No one really knows a city who does not know it by night as well as by day. Night obscures much that day forces into notice, and invests what remains with new visual fascinations, but still so that the individuality of any city or town is preserved through its darkened hours. Every town or city has its own nocturnal character. Modern Edinburgh asserts herself, equally by night as by day, as the city of heights and hollows. From any elevated point in her centre or on her skirts, if you choose to place yourself there latish at night, you may look down upon rows of lamps stretched out in glittering undulation over the more level street spaces; or you may look down, in other directions, upon a succession of tiers and banks of thickly edificed darkness, punctured miscellaneously by twinkling window-lights, and descending deeply into inscrutable chasms. More familiar, and indeed so inevitable that every tourist carries it away with him as one of his most permanent recollections of Edinburgh, is the nightly spectacle from Princes Street of the northern face of the Old Town, starred irregularly with window-lights from its base to the serrated sky-line. Perhaps this is the present nocturnal aspect of Edinburgh which may most surely suggest Old Edinburgh at night three hundred years ago. For, though we must be careful, in imagining Old Edinburgh, to confine ourselves strictly and exactly to as much of the present Edinburgh as stands on the ancient site, and therefore to vote away Princes Street, the whole of the rest of the New Town, and all the other accretions, this aspect of the Old Town at night from the north cannot have changed very greatly. A belated traveller passing through the hamlets that once straggled on the grounds of the present New Town, and arriving at the edge of the North Loch, in what is now the valley of Princes Street Gardens, must have looked up across the Loch to much the same twinkling embankment of the High Street and its closes, and to much the same serrated sky-line, lowering itself eastward from the shadowy mass of the Castle Rock. If the traveller desired admission into the town, he could not have it on this side at all, but would have to go round to some of the ports in the town-wall from its commencement at the east end of the North Loch. He might try them all in succession,—Leith Wynd Port, the Nether Bow Port, the Cowgate Port, the Kirk of Field Port, Greyfriars Port, and the West Port,—with the chance of finding that he was too late for entrance at