nature--a Bass rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by
passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and
describing its warlike shadow over the liveliest and brightest
thoroughfare of the new town. It dominates the whole countryside
from water and land. The men who would have the courage to build
such a castle in such a spot are all dead; all dead, and the world
is infinitely more comfortable without them. They are all gone, and
no more like unto them will ever be born, and we can most of us
count upon dying safely in our beds, of diseases bred of modern
civilisation. But I am glad that those old barbarians, those
rudimentary creatures working their way up into the divine likeness,
when they were not hanging, drawing, quartering, torturing, and
chopping their neighbours, and using their heads in conventional
patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their leisure
intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle could
not be conceived, much less built, nowadays, when all our energy is
consumed in bettering the condition of the `submerged tenth'! What
did they care about the `masses,' that `regal race that is now no
more,' when they were hewing those blocks of rugged rock and piling
them against the sky-line on the top of that great stone mountain!
It amuses me to think how much more picturesque they left the world,
and how much better we shall leave it; though if an artist were
requested to distribute individual awards to different generations,
you could never persuade him to give first prizes to the centuries
that produced steam laundries, trolleys, X rays, and sanitary
plumbing.

What did they reck of Peace Congresses and bloodless arbitrations
when they lighted the beacon-fires, flaming out to the gudeman and
his sons ploughing or sowing in the Lang Dykes the news that their