Not long ago I was in Edinburgh, -for the first time, I am ashamed to say. I arrived late at night, from

Where fair Tweed flows round holy Melrose,

And Eildon slopes to the plain;

and as a friend had promised to meet me at noon of the next day to do the honours of his town to the stranger, there was a fair morning before me to explore on my own account. Fair indeed the morning was not, in respect that it was conspicuously saft, but that did not matter. For one thing, I had grown used to it; and for another, the peculiar atmospheric condition known. north of the Tweed as soft has not that aggressiveness of moisture which marks the rainy day of the Southron; lenis minimeque pertinax it might be called, gentle and not too violently insisting, though it does insist. As I stepped out into Prince's Street betimes next morning after breakfast ing on a herring from Loch Fyne, which might have prompted the memorable interpellation, “Aiblins, it was a whale!"-it needed not the tall Gothic monument rising at the eastern end of that stately thoroughfare to remind me in whose romantic town I was. I trust I am not saying unpermitted things when I hint that the chief impression a stranger is likely to get from his first visit to Scotland is, that it was discovered, if not created by Walter Scott. Wherever he goes, whatever he sees, Highland and Lowland, lake and stream, grey ruin and green glen, that potent spirit is lord and master of all. There is

nothing quite like it, I think, else where; no other land on which the genius of one man has written his name so deep. Greece still cherishes

the memory of Byron, and few Englishmen at least who travel those haunted shores are likely soon to forget that he owed to them his best poetry and gave them in return his life. But Byron's is after all but one of many memories that throng that marvellous land. In Scotland all seems Scott. There Nature and Man, the Present and the Past, all seem to speak to us with his voice, and take the most part of their beauty and their glory from him. The Bruce and the Douglas, Cavalier and Covenanter, noble and moss-trooper,-they start from their graves at every turn to the call of the Great Magician.

The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, Mid mouldering ruins low he lies

yet surely of few men are the old words so true, He being dead yet speaketh. But these reflections cannot certainly be very original; and may possibly bring on me the fate of the unlucky Frenchman who, venturing to praise Fenimore Cooper's delightful novels, was scornfully asked by one of Cooper's countrymen what claim he had with his boulevards, his gaslamps, and his absinthe, to write of the life and the men whom the creator of Leather-Stocking drew.

I had promised myself overnight to devote some part of the morning to tracing the route of Dundee's famous ride out of Edinburgh as set forth in Sir Walter's immortal ballad. Those galloping stanzas were clear enough in my head, and in my pocket was a little map of the city; so I proposed to make this essay in topography without asking help of any man. The motive of this resolve was two-fold; partly it came from a misgiving that the answers might not

be always sufficiently intelligible to my untrained ear; and partly it came, I fear, from a foolish pride (not uncommon, perhaps, among my countrymen) which urged me to

assume

the airs of old acquaintance-an assumption, as I have good reason to know, which did not for one moment impose on the smallest of the barelegged urchins who trotted so complacently about the muddy streets.

Burke has observed that "an amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object". To a man enveloped in the wet folds of a macintosh and burdened with an open umbrella, the frequent study of a map entails a conflict with difficulty more considerable than amicable; it was perhaps just this difference which deferred my acquaintance with my object. At any rate it was not till I had made some progress in a directly contrary direction after first debouching into the High Street, and had stumbled into some half-dozen superfluous closes and wynds by the way, that I found myself triumphantly marching down what remains of "the sanctified bend of the Bow" into the Grassmarket (so empty on that dismal morning that I had little difficulty in peopling it with shadowy crowds of sour canting Whigs) and so out through the West Port, and round the Castle back again to my hotel in Prince's Street. There did not, I may here say, seem to me anything so impossible in Dundee's interview with the Duke of Gordon as has been sometimes assumed. An active man, even in riding-boots, might make his way up the north-western face of the rock, and might have made it yet more easily when, as seems probable they did then, the walls came lower down than they do now. At any rate the fact of the interview rests on unimpeachable authority, and it must have taken place somewhere on the side, northern or western, farthest from the town; possibly, as has been urged, at the Wallace or Well-House tower within the gardens, where are gathered what remains of the original

fortifications. very confidently a postern which, though built up, was still to be seen in his time.

But Dalrymple gives

My friend, like the lady who made that unlucky appointment with Glasgerion, was more than true to his promise. He not only met me to the moment at the hour and place appointed, but gave me a most delicate lunch at his club. As we sat at table I recounted with some exultation my morning ramble, to which my friend, listening, as his manner is, courteously, made answer that it was extremely interesting, but that in point of fact he had always understood that Dundee rode out of the city by a directly opposite road. As there happened to be a copy of Mark Napier's voluminous biography of the gallant Graham in the library of that club, we were able at any rate to refer to authority. My friend was right, if Napier was. Dundee is there reported to have led his troopers down the High Street, through the Nether Bow Port, about where Knox's house stands, then turning to the left down the Leith Wynd, at the back of Jeffrey Street, he gained the Long-gate, the road on the farther side of the North Loch, which is now called Prince's Street, and so came to the Castle on its north-western face. Consequently he went no nearer to the West Bow or the Grassmarket than did Montrose before him (also, I am sorry to say, according to Sir Walter) when he walked from the Tolbooth to be hanged in the High Street. I might indeed have remembered this, having read Napier's book not so very long ago. But I did not; perhaps my head was too full of Sir Walter's romance to have room for the hard facts of history, if facts they were.

But why did Sir Walter do this thing? In his diary for December 22nd, 1825, when the clouds were gathering thick around him though the storm had not yet broken, he notes: "The air of Bonnie Dundee running in my head to-day, I wrote a

few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers. leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9 ". "I wonder if they are good", he naïvely adds! The air was an old Scottish one, and among Burns' songs will be found one to it, of which the first stanza (the second only being his work) has this line,

Between Saint Johnston and Bonnie Dundee.

But what was probably running in Scott's head was a not very delicate song, apparently of English manufacture, relating the disreputable adventures of two Highlanders, Jockey the Laird and Sawney the Man, in the town of Dundee. The refrain of this song runs almost on all fours with Sir Walter's:

Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can, Come saddle my horse and call out my

man,

Come open the gates and let me go free, For I'se gang no more to Bonnie Dundee !

The sanctified bend of the Bow, the Grassmarket and the West Port are, then, all inventions of Sir Walter. He took his story of the ride from Dalrymple, who only says that "Dundee left the house [the Parliament House where the Convention was sitting] in a rage, mounted his horse, and with a troop of fifty horsemen who had deserted to him from his regiment in England, galloped through the city". Balcarres, who had promised to ride with his friend, is briefer still: "So he went straight away with about fifty horses". I do not know of any contemporary account of the incident, except Balcarres'; but Napier seems to have read a manuscript in the Advocates' Library, purporting to have been written by some one in the Castle during the siege who may have seen Dundee coming with his troopers along the Lang-gate.

We will not follow Scott's amiable friend (and fellow-antiquary) Mr. Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who called him

"the greatest dunce and liar in antiquity I ever knew"; but it is certain that he used to kick the "chuckiestanes" of history aside very freely when they got in his way. Still it is not impossible that he may have read some old narrative or known some tradition which had been lost before Napier wrote, or perhaps become discredited by later information or conjecture. In the case of Montrose's death this excuse will hardly serve. There are several contemporary accounts of the scene which must have been known in his time. He seems to have relied upon Wishart, who merely says that the Marquis was brought from the prison to the place of execution; and as the common place of execution was then, as it was down to Scott's own day, the Grassmarket, the mistake is at least intelligible. But in respect of Dundee's ride, unless we suppose that Scott was using some old authority, whether of tradition or of more substantial weight, we must take it that he merely selected the most picturesque route. The town in those days stretched almost entirely on the south side of the High Street, and it was in the smaller streets and wynds running down from that thoroughfare to the Cowgate that the lower and more turbulent part of the population dwelt. Dundee's lodgings were probably in the High Street, where most of the aristocracy then lived; and as the city proper then ended at the Nether Bow, the Canongate being without the walls, the route down the West Bow and through the Grassmarket would lead him through that part of the town where the Cowls of Kilmarnock, the Westland Whigs who had been brought in by Hamilton to hold the Jacobites in check, and among whom a plot was, or was believed to be, on foot to assassinate the man they most feared and hated on earth, were most likely to be gathered.

This wilful violation of historical fact, or what is at least accepted for such, may give occasion to the enemy