Letters of a Traveller Part 9

These parks have been called the lungs of London, and so important are they regarded to the public health and the happiness of the people, that I believe a proposal to dispense with some part of their extent, and cover it with streets and houses, would be regarded in much the same manner as a proposal to hang every tenth man in London. They will probably remain public grounds as long as London has an existence.

The population of your city, increasing with such prodigious rapidity; your sultry summers, and the corrupt atmosphere generated in hot and crowded streets, make it a cause of regret that in laying out New York, no preparation was made, while it was yet practicable, for a range of parks and public gardens along the central part of the island or elsewhere, to remain perpetually for the refreshment and recreation of the citizens during the torrid heats of the warm season. There are yet unoccupied lands on the island which might, I suppose, be procured for the purpose, and which, on account of their rocky and uneven surface, might be laid out into surpa.s.singly beautiful pleasure-grounds; but while we are discussing the subject the advancing population of the city is sweeping over them and covering them from our reach.

If we go out of the parks into the streets we find the causes of a corrupt atmosphere much more carefully removed than with us. The streets of London are always clean. Every day, early in the morning, they are swept; and some of them, I believe, at other hours also, by a machine drawn by one of the powerful dray-horses of this country. Whenever an unusually large and fine horse of this breed is produced in the country, he is sent to the London market, and remarkable animals they are, of a height and stature almost elephantine, large-limbed, slow-paced, s.h.a.ggy-footed, sweeping the ground with their fetlocks, each huge foot armed with a shoe weighing from five to six pounds. One of these strong creatures is harnessed to a street-cleaning machine, which consists of brushes turning over a cylinder and sweeping the dust of the streets into a kind of box. Whether it be wet or dry dust, or mud, the work is thoroughly performed; it is all drawn into the receptacle provided for it, and the huge horse stalks backward and forward along the street until it is almost as clean as a drawing-room.

I called the other day on a friend, an American, who told me that he had that morning spoken with his landlady about her carelessness in leaving the shutters of her lower rooms unclosed during the night. She answered that she never took the trouble to close them, that so secure was the city from ordinary burglaries, under the arrangements of the new police, that it was not worth the trouble. The windows of the parlor next to my sleeping-room open upon a rather low balcony over the street door, and they are unprovided with any fastenings, which in New York we should think a great piece of negligence. Indeed, I am told that these night robberies are no longer practiced, except when the thief is a.s.sisted by an accessary in the house. All cla.s.ses of the people appear to be satisfied with the new police. The officers are men of respectable appearance and respectable manners. If I lose my way, or stand in need of any local information, I apply to a person in the uniform of a police officer. They are sometimes more stupid in regard to these matters than there is any occasion for, but it is one of the duties of their office to a.s.sist strangers with local information.

Begging is repressed by the new police regulations, and want skulks in holes and corners, and prefers its pet.i.tions where it can not be overheard by men armed with the authority of the law. "There is a great deal of famine in London," said a friend to me the other day, "but the police regulations drive it out of sight." I was going through Oxford-street lately, when I saw an elderly man of small stature, poorly dressed, with a mahogany complexion, walking slowly before me. As I pa.s.sed him he said in my ear, with a hollow voice, "I am starving to death with hunger," and these words and that hollow voice sounded in my ear all day.

Walking in Hampstead Heath a day or two since, with an English friend, we were accosted by two laborers, who were sitting on a bank, and who said that they had came to that neighborhood in search of employment in hay-making, but had not been able to get either work or food. My friend appeared to distrust their story. But in the evening, as we were walking home, we pa.s.sed a company of some four or five laborers in frocks, with bludgeons in their hands, who asked us for something to eat. "You see how it is, gentlemen," said one of them, "we are hungry; we have come for work, and n.o.body will hire us; we have had nothing to eat all day." Their tone was dissatisfied, almost menacing; and the Englishman who was with us, referred to it several times afterward, with an expression of anxiety and alarm.

I hear it often remarked here, that the difference of condition between the poorer and the richer cla.s.ses becomes greater every day, and what the end will be the wisest pretend not to foresee.

Letter XXII.

Edinburgh.

Edinburgh, _July_ 17, 1845.

I Had been often told, since I arrived in England, that in Edinburgh, I should see the finest city I ever saw. I confess that I did not feel quite sure of this, but it required scarcely more than a single look to show me that it was perfectly true. It is hardly possible to imagine a n.o.bler site for a town than that of Edinburgh, and it is built as n.o.bly. You stand on the edge of the deep gulf which separates the old and the new town, and before you on the opposite bank rise the picturesque buildings of the ancient city--

"Piled deep and ma.s.sy, close and high,"

looking, in their venerable and enduring aspect, as if they were parts of the steep bank on which they stand, an original growth of the rocks; as if, when the vast beds of stone crystallized from the waters, or cooled from their fusion by fire, they formed themselves by some freak of nature into this fantastic resemblance of the habitations of men. To the right your eyes rest upon a crag crowned with a grand old castle of the middle ages, on which guards are marching to and fro; and near you to the left, rises the rocky summit of Carlton Hill, with its monuments of the great men of Scotland. Behind you stretch the broad streets of the new town, overlooked by ma.s.sive structures, built of the stone of the Edinburgh quarries, which have the look of palaces.

"Streets of palaces and walks of slate,"

form the new town. Not a house of brick or wood exists in Edinburgh; all are constructed of the excellent and lasting stone which the earth supplies almost close to their foundations. High and solid bridges of this material, with broad arches, connect the old town with the new, and cross the deep ravine of the Cowgate in the old town, at the bottom of which you see a street between prodigiously high buildings, swarming with the poorer population of Edinburgh.

From almost any of the eminences of the town you see spread below you its magnificent bay, the Frith of Forth, with its rocky islands; and close to the old town rise the lofty summits of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crag, a solitary, silent, mountainous district, without habitations or inclosures, grazed by flocks of sheep. To the west flows Leith-water in its deep valley, spanned by a n.o.ble bridge, and the winds of this chilly climate that strike the stately buildings of the new town, along the cliffs that border this glen, come from the very clouds. Beyond the Frith lie the hills of Fifeshire; a glimpse of the blue Grampian ridges is seen where the Frith contracts in the northwest to a narrow channel, and to the southwest lie the Pentland hills, whose springs supply Edinburgh with water. All around you are places the names of which are familiar names of history, poetry, and romance.

From this magnificence of nature and art, the transition was painful to what I saw of the poorer population. On Sat.u.r.day evening I found myself at the market, which is then held in High-street and the Netherbow, just as you enter the Canongate, and where the old wooden effigy of John Knox, with staring black eyes, freshly painted every year, stands in its pulpit, and still seems preaching to the crowd. Hither a throng of sickly-looking, dirty people, bringing with them their unhealthy children, had crawled from the narrow wynds or alleys on each side of the street. We entered several of these wynds, and pa.s.sed down one of them, between houses of vast height, story piled upon story, till we came to the deep hollow of the Cowgate. Children were swarming in the way, all of them, bred in that close and impure atmosphere, of a sickly appearance, and the aspect of premature age in some of them, which were carried in arms, was absolutely frightful. "Here is misery," said a Scotch gentleman, who was my conductor. I asked him how large a proportion of the people of Edinbugh belonged to that wretched and squalid cla.s.s which I saw before me. "More than half," was his reply. I will not vouch for the accuracy of his statistics. Of course his estimate was but a conjecture.

In the midst of this population is a House of Refuge for the Dest.i.tute, established by charitable individuals for the relief of those who may be found in a state of absolute dest.i.tution of the necessaries of life. Here they are employed in menial services, lodged and fed until they can be sent to their friends, or employment found for them. We went over the building, a s.p.a.cious structure, in the Canongate, of the plainest Puritan architecture, with wide low rooms, which, at the time of the union of Scotland with England, served as the mansion of the Duke of Queensbury.

The accommodations of course are of the humblest kind. We were shown into the sewing-room, were we saw several healthy-looking young women at work, some of them barefooted. Such of the inmates as can afford it, pay for their board from three and sixpence to five shillings a week, besides their labor.

In this part of the city also are the Night Asylums for the Houseless.

Here, those who find themselves without a shelter for the night, are received into an antechamber, provided with benches, where they first get a bowl of soup, and are then introduced into a bathing-room, where they are stripped and scoured. They are next furnished with clean garments and accommodated with a lodging on an inclined plane of planks, a little raised from the floor, and divided into proper compartments by strips of board. Their own clothes are, in the mean time, washed, and returned to them when they leave the place.

It was a very different spectacle from the crowd in the Sat.u.r.day evening market, that met my eyes the next morning in the clean and beautiful streets of the new town; the throng of well-dressed church-goers pa.s.sing each other in all directions. The women, it appeared to me, were rather gaily dressed, and a large number of them prettier than I had seen in some of the more southern cities.

I attended worship in one of the Free Churches, as they are called, in which Dr. Candlish officiates. In the course of his sermon, he read long portions of an address from the General a.s.sembly of the Free Church of Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and prayer, on account of the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the time, and more especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College at Maynooth. The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague terms. In the course of the address the t.i.tle of National Church was claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national independence. There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches; and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings.

This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.

Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded. In the afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the congregation was thin.

This Maynooth grant has occasioned great dissatisfaction in England and Scotland. If the question had been left to be decided by the public opinion of these parts of the kingdom, the grant would never have been made. An immense majority, of all cla.s.ses and almost all denominations, disapprove of it. A dissenting clergyman of one of the evangelical persuasions, as they are called, said to me--"The dissenters claim nothing from the government; they hold that it is not the business of the state to interfere in religious matters, and they object to bestowing the public money upon the seminaries of any religious denomination." In a conversation which I had with an eminent man of letters, and a warm friend of the English Church, he said: "The government is giving offense to many who have hitherto been its firmest supporters. There was no necessity for the Maynooth grant; the Catholics would have been as well satisfied without it as they are with it; for you see they are already clamoring for the right to appoint through their Bishops the professors in the new Irish colleges. The Catholics were already establishing their schools, and building their churches with their own means: and this act of applying the money of the nation to the education of their priests is a gratuitous offense offered by the government to its best friends." In a sermon which I heard from the Dean of York, in the magnificent old minster of that city, he commended the liberality of the motives which had induced the government to make the grant, but spoke of the measure as one which the friends of the English Church viewed with apprehension and anxiety.

"They may dismiss their fears," said a shrewd friend of mine, with whom I was discussing the subject. "Endowments are a cause of lukewarmness and weakness. Our Presbyterian friends here, instead of protesting so vehemently against what Sir Robert Peel has done, should thank him for endowing the Catholic Church, for in doing it he has deprived it of some part of its hold upon the minds of men."

There is much truth, doubtless, in this remark. The support of religion to be effectual should depend upon individual zeal. The history of the endowed chapels of dissenting denominations in England is a curious example of this. Congregations have fallen away and come to nothing, and it is a general remark that nothing is so fatal to a sect as a liberal endowment, which provides for the celebration of public worship without individual contributions.

Letter XXIII.

The Scottish Lakes.

Glasgow, _July_ 19, 1845.

I must not leave Scotland without writing you another letter.

On the 17th of this month I embarked at Newhaven, in the environs of Edinburgh, on board the little steamer Prince Albert, for Stirling. On our way we saw several samples of the Newhaven fishwives, a peculiar race, distinguished by a costume of their own; fresh-colored women, who walk the streets of Edinburgh with a large wicker-basket on their shoulders, a short blue cloak of coa.r.s.e cloth under the basket, short blue petticoats, thick blue stockings, and a white cap. I was told that they were the descendants of a little Flemish colony, which long ago settled at Newhaven, and that they are celebrated for the readiness and point of their jokes, which, like those of their sisters of Billingsgate, are not always of the most delicate kind. Several of these have been related to me, but on running them over in my mind, I find, to my dismay, that none of them will look well on paper. The wit of the Newhaven fishwives seems to me, however, like that of our western boatmen, to consist mainly in the ready application of quaint sayings already current among themselves.

It was a wet day, with occasional showers, and sometimes a sprinkling of Scotch mist. I tried the cabin, but the air was too close. The steamboats in this country have but one deck, and that deck has no shelter, so I was content to stand in the rain for the sake of the air and scenery. After pa.s.sing an island or two, the Frith, which forms the bay of Edinburgh, contracts into the river Forth. We swept by country seats, one of which was pointed out as the residence of the late Dugald Stewart, and another that of the Earl of Elgin, the plunderer of the Parthenon; and castles, towers, and churches, some of them in ruins ever since the time of John Knox, and hills half seen in the fog, until we came opposite to the Ochil mountains, whose grand rocky b.u.t.tresses advanced from the haze almost to the river. Here, in the windings of the Forth, our steamer went many times backward and forward, first towards the mountains and then towards the level country to the south, in almost parallel courses, like the track of a ploughman in a field. At length we pa.s.sed a ruined tower and some fragments of ma.s.sy wall which once formed a part of Cambus Kenneth Abbey, seated on the rich lands of the Forth, for the monks, in Great Britain at least, seem always to have chosen for the site of their monasteries, the banks of a stream which would supply them with trout and salmon for Fridays. We were now in the presence of the rocky hills of Stirling, with the town on its declivity, and the ancient castle, the residence of the former kings of Scotland, on its summit.

We went up through the little town to the castle, which is still kept in perfect order, and the ramparts of which frown as grimly over the surrounding country as they did centuries ago. No troops however are now stationed here; a few old gunners alone remain, and Major somebody, I forget his name, takes his dinners in the banqueting-room and sleeps in the bed-chamber of the Stuarts. I wish I could communicate the impression which this castle and the surrounding region made upon me, with its vestiges of power and magnificence, and its present silence and desertion.

The pa.s.sages to the dungeons where pined the victims of state, in the very building where the court held its revels, lie open, and the chapel in which princes and princesses were christened, and worshiped, and were crowned and wed, is turned into an armory. From its windows we were shown, within the inclosure of the castle, a green knoll, grazed by cattle, where the disloyal n.o.bles of Scotland were beheaded. Close to the castle is a green field, intersected with paths, which we were told was the tilting-ground, or place of tournaments, and beside it rises a rock, where the ladies of the court sat to witness the combats, and which is still called the Ladies' Rock. At the foot of the hill, to the right of the castle, stretches what was once the royal park; it is shorn of its trees, part is converted into a race-course, part into a pasture for cows, and the old wall which marked its limits is fallen down. Near it you see a cl.u.s.ter of gra.s.sy embankments of a curious form, circles and octagons and parallelograms, which bear the name of King James's Knot, and once formed a part of the royal-gardens, where the sovereign used to divert himself with his courtiers. The cows now have the spot to themselves, and have made their own paths and alleys all over it. "Yonder, to the southwest of the castle," said a sentinel who stood at the gate, "you see where a large field has been lately ploughed, and beyond it another, which looks very green. That green field is the spot where the battle of Bannockburn was fought, and the armies of England were defeated by Bruce." I looked, and so fresh and bright was the verdure, that it seemed to me as if the earth was still fertilized with the blood of those who fell in that desperate struggle for the crown of Scotland. Not far from this, the spot was shown us where Wallace was defeated at the battle of Falkirk. This region is now the scene of another and an unb.l.o.o.d.y warfare; the warfare between the Free Church and the Government Church. Close to the church of the establishment, at the foot of the rock of Stirling, the soldiers of the Free Church have erected their place of worship, and the sound of hammers from the unfinished interior could be heard almost up to the castle.

We took places the same day in the coach for Callander, in the Highlands.

In a short time we came into a country of hillocks and pastures brown and barren, half covered with ferns, the breckan of the Scotch, where the broom flowered gaudily by the road-side, and harebells now in bloom, in little companies, were swinging, heavy with the rain, on their slender stems.

Crossing the Teith we found ourselves in Doune, a Highland village, just before entering which we pa.s.sed a throng of strapping la.s.ses, who had just finished their daily task at a manufactory on the Teith, and were returning to their homes. Between Doune and Callander we pa.s.sed the woods of Cambus-More, full of broad beeches, which delight in the tenacious mountain soil of this district. This was the seat of a friend of the Scott family, and here Sir Walter in his youth pa.s.sed several summers, and became familiar with the scenes which he has so well described in his Lady of the Lake. At Callander we halted for the night among a crowd of tourists, Scotch, English, American, and German, more numerous than the inn at which we stopped could hold. I went out into the street to get a look at the place, but a genuine Scotch mist covering me with water soon compelled me to return. I heard the people, a well-limbed brawny race of men, with red hair and beards, talking to each other in Gaelic, and saw through the fogs only a glimpse of the sides of the mountains and crags which surrounded the village.

The next morning was uncommonly bright and clear, and we set out early for the Trosachs. We now saw that the village of Callander lay under a dark crag, on the banks of the Teith, winding pleasantly among its alders, and overlooked by the grand summit of Benledi, which rises to the height of three thousand feet. A short time brought us to the stream

"Which, daughter of three mighty lakes, From Vennachar in silver breaks,"

and we skirted the lake for nearly its whole length. Loch Vennachar lies between hills of comparatively gentle declivity, pastured by flocks, and tufted with patches of the p.r.i.c.kly gorse and coa.r.s.e ferns. On its north bank lies Lanrick Mead, a little gra.s.sy level where Scott makes the tribe of Clan Alpine a.s.semble at the command of Roderick Dhu. At a little distance from Vennachar lies Loch Achray, which we reached by a road winding among shrubs and low trees, birches, and wild roses in blossom, with which the air was fragrant. Crossing a little stone bridge, which our driver told us was the Bridge of Turk, we were on the edge of Loch Achray, a little sheet of water surrounded by wild rocky hills, with here and there an interval of level gra.s.sy margin, or a grove beside the water.

Turning from Loch Achray we reached an inn with a Gaelic name, which I have forgotten how to spell, and which if I were to spell it, you could not p.r.o.nounce. This was on the edge of the Trosachs, and here we breakfasted.

It is the fashion, I believe, for all tourists to pa.s.s through the Trosachs on foot. The mob of travellers, with whom I found myself on the occasion--there were some twenty of them--did so, to a man; even the ladies, who made about a third of the number, walked. The distance to Loch Katrine is about a mile and a half, between lofty mountains, along a glen filled with ma.s.ses of rock, which seem to have been shaken by some convulsion of nature from the high steeps on either side, and in whose shelves and crevices time had planted a thick wood of the birch and ash.

But I will not describe the Trosachs after Walter Scott. Head what he says of them in the first canto of his poem. Loch Katrine, when we reached it, was crisped into little waves, by a fresh wind from the northwest, and a boat, with four brawny Highlanders, was waiting to convey us to the head of the lake. We launched upon the dark deep water, between craggy and shrubby steeps, the summits of which rose on every side of us; and one of the rowers, an intelligent-looking man, took upon himself the task of pointing out to us the places mentioned by the poet. "There," said he, as we receded from the sh.o.r.e, "is the spot in the Trosachs where Fitz James lost his gallant gray." He then repeated, in a sort of recitation, dwelling strongly on the rhyme, the lines in the Lady of the Lake which relate that incident. "Yonder is the island where Dougla.s.s concealed his daughter. Under that broad oak, whose boughs almost dip into the water, was the place where her skiff was moored. On that rock, covered with heath, Fitz James stood and wound his bugle. Near it, but out of sight, is the silver strand where the skiff received him on board."

Further on, he pointed out, on the south side of the lake, half way up among the rocks of the mountain, the place of the Goblin Cave, and still beyond it

"The wild pa.s.s, where birches wave, Of Beal-a-nam-bo."