The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present “Old Town” which figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary’s time, and is in fact its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago. The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise altered. The first part of the long ascent from Holyrood was the Canongate. Though occupying nearly half of the whole, and in complete junction with the Edinburgh proper up to which it led, it was a separate “burgh of regality,” which had formed itself, as its name implies, under the protection of the abbots and canons of Holyrood. By virtue of that original, it was not yet included in the municipal jurisdiction of the Edinburgh Magistrates and Town Council, but held out under a magistracy of its own. Hence some characteristics distinguishing this lower part of the ascent from the rest. The old Canongate was by no means the dense exhibition of dingy picturesqueness now known as the Canongate of Edinburgh, with repulsive entries and closes on both sides, leading to cages of crammed humanity of the poorer sort, or to inner recesses of bone-yards, pipe-clay yards, and the like. It had the sparseness and airiness of a suburb of the Court. The houses, whether of stone or partly of wood, were pretty thickly put together, indeed, along the immediate street-margins, with the inevitable access to many of them by entries and closes, but did not go so deeply back on either side as not to leave room for pleasant gardens and tracts of vacant ground behind. A paved and causewayed street, ascending continuously between two rows of houses, of irregular forms and varying heights, but few of them of more than three storeys; other houses at the backs of these to some little