Friend Mac Donald Part 25

In this exhibition of sculpture, I discover Walter Scott, Robert Burns, David Livingstone, James Watt, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Thomas Campbell, and Sir Robert Peel. Some are on foot, some on horseback.

There are none driving, but there is Scott who, in the centre of this Kensal Green, is perched on the summit of a column eighty feet high. It is enough to make the tallest chimney of the neighbourhood topple over with envy. By dint of a little squeezing, it would be easy to make room for a dozen more statues.

In Queen's Street, quite close to George Square, we find the Royal Exchange--an elegant building in the Corinthian style--in front of which stands an equestrian statue of gigantic dimensions.

It is Wellington--the inevitable, the eternal, the everlasting Wellington.

Oh, what a bore that Wellington is!

This statue was erected at the expense of the town for a sum of 10,000.

Wellington will never know what he has cost his compatriots.

Let us go up George Street, turn to the left by High Street, towards the north-east, and we shall come to the Cathedral, the only one which the fanatic vandalism of the Puritans spared. I was told in Scotland that this is how it escaped. The Puritans had come to Glasgow in 1567 to destroy the Cathedral of Saint Mungo. But a gardener, a practical Scot of the neighbourhood, reasoned with them in the following manner:

"My friends, you are come with the meritorious intention of destroying this temple of popery. But why destroy the edifice? It will cost a mint of money to build such another. Could not you use this one and worship G.o.d in it after our own manner?"

The Puritans, who were Scots too, saw the force of the argument and the cathedral was saved.

The edifice is gothic, and very handsome. I recommend especially the crypt, under the choir. The windows are most remarkable.

Around the cathedral is a graveyard containing fine monuments. I read on a tablet, put up in commemoration of the execution of nine covenanters (1666-1684) the following inscription, which shows once more how they forgive in Scotland. Here is the hint to the persecutors:

"_They'll know at resurrection day To murder saints was no sweet play._"

Let us return down High Street as far as Argyle Street, the great artery of Glasgow.

After a few minutes' walking, we come to Buchanan Street, the fashionable street of Glasgow--I mean the one which contains the fashionable shops, the Regent Street of this great manufacturing city.

The houses are well-built, I do not say tastefully, but solidly. This might be said indeed of the whole town: it is dirty, but substantial.

Let us push on to Sanchyhall Street, and there turn to the west. We presently come to the park of Kelvingrove, undulating, well laid out, and surrounded with pretty houses: it is the only part of Glasgow which does not give you cold shivers. Among the well-kept paths, flowerbeds, and ponds, you forget the coal-smoke for awhile. At the end of the park runs the Kelvin, a little stream which you cross to get to Gilmore Hill, on the summit of which stand the buildings of the university. The interior of these buildings is magnificent.

The Bute Hall is one of the finest halls I ever saw: 108 feet long, 75 broad, and 70 high. A splendid library and all the comfortable accessories, which they are careful to supply studious youth with in this country. The university cost more than half-a-million. With the exception of a few other parks--which, however, cannot be compared to those of London--there is nothing more to be seen in Glasgow, and if your business is transacted, go to your hotel, strap your luggage, and be off.

But if you prefer it, we will arm ourselves with umbrellas and return to the streets, and see what kind of people are to be met there.

That which strikes one at a first visit, is that from five in the afternoon almost every respectable-looking person has disappeared, and the town seems given over to the populace. Like the City proper in London, Glasgow is only occupied by the superior cla.s.ses during business hours. From four to five o'clock there is a general stampede towards the railway stations. The _employe_, who earns two or three hundred a year, has his villa or cottage in the suburbs. The rich merchant, the engineer, the ironmaster, all these live far from the city.

The streets of Glasgow, from six or seven in the evening, are entirely given up to the manufacturing population--the dirtiest and roughest to be seen anywhere, I should think.

I have seen poverty and vice in Paris, in London, in Dublin, and Brussels, but they are nothing to compare to the spectacle that Glasgow presents. It is the living ill.u.s.tration of some unwritten page of Dante.

"But there is money in Glasgow."

The lower-cla.s.s women of London do wear a semblance of a toilette: fur mantles in rags, battered, greasy hats with faded flowers, flounced skirts in tatters--an apology for a costume, in short.

But here, there is nothing of all that. No finery, not even a hat. The tartan seems to take the place of all.

The attributions of this tartan are multiple. It is as useful to the women of the lower cla.s.ses in the great Scotch towns as the reindeer is to the Laplander.

This tartan serves them as a hood when it is cold; as an umbrella when it rains; as a blanket in winter nights; as a mattress in summer ones; as a basket when they go to market; a towel when they do their own and their children's dry-polishing; a cradle for their babies, which they carry either slung over their back, Hottentot fashion, or hanging in front, like the kangaroos. When poverty presses hard, the tartan goes to the p.a.w.nbroker's shop, whence it issues in the form of a sixpence or a shilling, according to its value. After living in them they live on them, and so these useful servants pa.s.s from external to internal use, and appease the hunger or thirst of their owners for a day or two. A very G.o.dsend this tartan, as you see.

A Glasgow police inspector told me that, having one day to make a search at a p.a.w.nbroker's in the town, he had found more than fifteen hundred of these shawls on the premises. "Many of those poor borrowers are Irish,"

he said. Did he say this to pa.s.s on to a neighbour that which seemed to him a disgrace to his own country? In any case, it is a fact that there are a great number of Irish in Glasgow.

No doubt poverty, with its accompaniments of shame and vice, exists in all great cities; but here it has a distressing aspect that it presents in no other country. The Arab beggar makes one smile as he majestically drapes around him his picturesque, multicoloured rags; the lazzarone, lying on the quay of Naples under the radiant Italian sky, is a prince compared to the wretch who drags out his existence in the dirty streets or garrets of Glasgow.

"But there is money in Glasgow."

In Paris, the newspapers are sold in shops or pretty kiosks kept by clean, tidy, respectable women. In London and other large English towns, the papers are cried in the streets by low-cla.s.s men and boys. In Glasgow and Edinburgh the work is done by ragged children, who literally besiege you as you walk the streets: poor little girls half-naked, shivering, and starving, with their feet in the mud, try to earn a few pence to appease their own hunger, or, perhaps, furnish an unnatural parent with the means of getting tipsy. Others have a little stock of matches that they look at with an envious eye, one fancies, as one thinks of Andersen's touching tale.

Oh, pity for the poor little children!

In a country so Christian, so philanthropic, can it be that childhood is abandoned thus? Asylums for the aged are to be seen in plenty, and is not youth still more interesting than age, and must it needs commit some crime before it has the right to enter some house of refuge?

I cannot tell you how sad the sight of those poor little beings, forsaken of G.o.d and man, made me feel.

But how shall I describe my feelings when, having drawn the attention of a Scotchman who was with me to one of these pitiful little creatures, I heard him say:

"Do not stop, the immorality of those children is awful."

No, it is not possible; it must be a bad dream, a hideous nightmare.

"It is a fact," said my companion, who knows Glasgow as he knows himself.

"But there is money in it."

It seems incomprehensible that these children should not be reclaimed, still more incomprehensible that no one seeks to do it. The money spent in statues of Wellington would more than suffice, and the Iron Duke would be none the worse off in Paradise.

Yes, this is what may be seen in Glasgow, in that city so pious, that to calm the feelings of some of the inhabitants, the literary and scientific lectures which used to be given to the people on Sunday evenings in Saint Andrew's Hall have had to be discontinued.

Heaven be thanked, Glasgow is not Scotland, and we can go and rejoice our eyes in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Braemar, and elsewhere, and admire the lakes and the blue mountains.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Edinburgh -- Glasgow's Opinion thereof, and vice versa. -- High Street. -- The old Town. -- John Knox's House. -- The old Parliament House. -- Holyrood Palace. -- Mary Stuart. -- Arthur's Seat. -- The University. -- The Castle. -- Princes Street. -- Two Greek Buildings. -- The Statues. -- Walter Scott.

-- The inevitable Wellington again. -- Calton Hill. -- The Athens of the North and the modern Parthenon. -- Why did not the Scotch buy the ancient Parthenon of the modern Greeks? -- Lord Elgin. -- The Acropolis of Edinburgh. -- Nelson for a Change.

A railway journey of an hour and ten minutes transports you from darkness into light. You leave Glasgow in gloom, wrapped in its eternal winding-sheet of fog and mud, and you arrive at Edinburgh to find clean streets, pure air, and a clear beautiful sky. Such at least was my own experience, six times repeated. The prospect delights the eyes and heart; your lungs begin to do their work easily; you breathe freely once more, and once more feel glad to be alive.

You alight at Waverley Station in the centre of the city. You cannot do better than go straightway and take up your quarters at the Royal Hotel, Princes Street, opposite the gigantic Gothic monument erected to Walter Scott. Ask for a room looking on the street. Take possession of it without delay, and open your window: the sight that will meet your gaze is truly enchanting. At your feet, the most elegant street imaginable.

No houses opposite: only large gardens, beautifully kept, sloping gracefully away to the bottom of a valley, whence the ground rises almost perpendicularly, bearing on its summit houses of a prodigious height. It is the old town of Edinburgh, where everything will bring back memories of Mary Stuart and the novels of Scott. On the right the famous castle perched on a sheer rock nearly four hundred feet high; the whole bathed in a blue-grey haze that forms a light veil to soften its colouring and contour. It is impossible to imagine a more romantic sight in the midst of a large modern city.

Whether your tastes be archaeological or artistic, you will be able to satisfy them in one of the two towns of Edinburgh, the old city to the south, or the modern town to the north.