Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
the circuit.... Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps
the best; since you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle,
and Arthur's Seat, which you can not see from Arthur's Seat. It is the
place to stroll on one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are
so common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the
sea, with a little of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar
to the quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations,
and greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a
faint, floating haze, a cunning decolorizer, altho not thick enough to
obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to
windward at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of
Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Bock it assumes the
aspect of a bank of thin sea fog.
Immediately underneath, upon the south, you command the yards of the
High School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail--a large place,
castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a
steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the
one, you may perhaps see female prisoners taking exercise like a string
of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play, and their shadows
keeping step with them. From the bottom of the valley, a gigantic
chimney rises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier
edifice than Nelson's Monument. Look a little farther, and there is
Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red
sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical
figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the
little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their
escape, and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in
white wine to retain her loveliness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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