Whenever Scott's landau went up the Canongate, his coachman knew without special instructions that the pace must be a walk; and no funeral, says Lockhart, ever moved more slowly, for wherever the great enthusiast might turn his gaze there was recalled to his mind some tradition of blood and mystery at which his eye would sparkle and his cheek glow. How by the force of his genius he inoculated the world with his enthusiasm about the semi-savage Scotia of the past is a well-known story: thousands of tourists, more or less struck with the Scott madness, yearly wander through the streets of old Edinburgh; and although within the quarter of a century since Sir Walter's death many memorials of the past have been swept away under the pressure of utility or necessity, the Old Town still poses remarkably well, and, gathering her rags and tatters about her, contrives to keep up a strikingly picturesque appearance. [Illustration: THE CASTLE AND ALLAN RAMSAY'S HOUSE.] The Old Town of Edinburgh is built upon a wedge-shaped hill, the Castle occupying the highest point, the head of the wedge, and the town extending along the crest, which slopes gradually down toward the east, to Holyrood Palace in the plain. Lawnmarket, High street and Canongate now form one continuous street, which, running along the crest of the hill, may be considered as the backbone of the town, with wynds and closes radiating on each side like the spines of the vertebrae. The closes are courts, culs-de-sac--the wynds, thoroughfares. These streets--courts where, in the past, lived the nobility and gentry of Edinburgh--are now, for the most part, given up to squalor and misery, and look like stage-scenes perpetually "set" for melodramatic horrors. The late Dr. Thomas Guthrie, whose parish included a large portion of this Egypt, used often to illustrate his eloquence with graphic word-pictures suggested by his experiences in these dark places. "The unfurnished floor," he writes, "the begrimed and naked walls, the stifling, sickening atmosphere, the patched and dusty window--through which a sunbeam, like hope, is faintly stealing--the ragged, hunger-bitten and sad-faced children, the ruffian man, the heap of straw where some wretched mother in muttering dreams sleeps off last night's debauch or lies unshrouded and uncoffined in the ghastliness of a hopeless death, are sad scenes. We have often looked on them, and they appear all the sadder for the restless play of fancy excited by some vestiges of a fresco-painting that still looks out from the foul and broken plaster, the massive marble rising over the cold and cracked hearthstone, an elaborately-carved cornice too high for shivering cold to pull it down for fuel, some stucco flowers or fruit yet pendent on the crumbling ceiling. Fancy, kindled by these, calls up the gay scenes and actors of other days, when beauty, elegance and fashion graced these lonely halls, and plenty smoked on groaning tables, and where these few