A letter to the Lord Provost on the best ways of spoiling the beauty of Edinburgh / by Lord Cockburn.

Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Lord Provost on the best ways of spoiling the beauty of Edinburgh / by Lord Cockburn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    ing supplied a greater number of eminent men to literature, to science, and to the arts, than any one town in the empire, with the single exception of London. But none of these things, nor all of them, make it Edin- burgh. Other places have some of them, or greater attrac- tions. But no other place excites the same peculiar interest. Deducting foreign students, there is probably not one stranger out of each hundred of the many who visit us, who is attracted by anything but the beauty of the city and its vicinity. It is not our lectures, nor our law, nor our intellectual re- putation, that give us our particular fame. It is our curious, and matchless, position,—our strange irregularity of surface, —its picturesque results,—our internal features and scenery, —our distant prospects,—our varied, and ever-beautiful neigh- bourhood,—and the endless aspects of the city, as looked down upon from adjoining heights, or as it presents itself to the plains below. Extinguish these, and the rest would leave it a very inferior place. Very respectable; but not what it is. These natural advantages have been improved by modern art. Holyrood, though not in such bad company as it lately was, is still polluted by the almost actual contact of base works and houses. And the Castle is still allowed to be degraded by dull walls and hideous roofs. But these evils are old. The better modern spirit is manifest and gratifying. Heavy uniform lines are rapidly breaking into variety; scarcely a street is contented without its ornamental edifice ; respectable chartered companies, with a proper social pride, vie with each other in the splendour of their offices; sculpture aids architec- ture; and, besides handsome secondary buildings, there are several of a higher character, and of the greatest excellence.
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