[Picture: The Last of the Town Guard] With the suppression of “the Forty-five,” the stirring warlike story of Edinburgh came to an end; but not until 1807, when the Edinburgh police came into existence, was the semi-military Town Guard, raised in 1682, abolished. The Town Guard and the townspeople were always at odds, and hated one another cordially. Recruited from the army, and armed with the formidable weapons called “Jeddart axes,” it was originally a fine body, designed rather to keep the town in order than to protect it, and its members never lost sight of that fact. In its last years, however, the Town Guard declined in importance and in numbers, and, coming to be regarded as a refuge for old pensioners who could scarcely manage to crawl about, became an object of derision. Then the sins of their forerunners were visited upon the heads of those unhappy old men, and it became a common sight to see them baited by mischievous small boys. The last of the Town Guard tottered about Parliament Square in his queer uniform and three-cornered hat, hardly able to shoulder his axe, and regarded by the inhabitants as one of their most genuine antiquities, until he too followed his comrades to the tomb. [Picture: Stately Princes Street] XXXVI ONE must needs admire Edinburgh. You may have seen the noblest cities of the world; have stood upon the Acropolis at Athens, on the Heights of Abraham at Quebec; have viewed Rome and her seven hills, or Constantinople from the Golden Horn; but Edinburgh still retains her pride of place, even in the eyes of the much travelled. You need not be Scottish to feel the charm of her, and can readily understand why she means so much to the Scot; but your gorge rises at the immemorial dirt of the Old Town, simultaneously with your admiration of its wondrous picturesqueness, and stately Princes Street seems to you a revelation of magnificence even while the bulk of the New Town appears grey, formal, and forbidding. The great gulf fixed between Old Town and New, that ravine in which the railway burrows, and on whose banks the Princes Street Gardens run, renders that thoroughfare, with its one side of grass and trees and the other of fine shops and towering houses, reminiscent to the Londoner of Piccadilly. But Piccadilly has not a towering Castle on one side of it, nor a Calton Hill at the end; nor, on the other hand, does Piccadilly know such easterly blasts as those that sweep down the long length of Princes Street and freeze the very marrow of the Southerner. [Picture: Edinburgh, New Town, 1817, from Mons Meg Battery] “The same isothermal line,” wrote Robert Chambers, “passes through Edinburgh and London.” “Still,” James Payn used to say, “I never knew of a four-wheeled cab being blown over by an east wind in London, as has just happened in Edinburgh,” and R.L.S. tells us frankly that his native city has “the vilest climate under heaven.”