* These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow.  I confess the news caused me both pain and merriment.  May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations?  Small blame to them if they keep ledgers:  ’tis an excellent business habit.  Churchgoing is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living.  It is not their fault it the city calls for something more specious by way of inhabitants.  A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham.  And let them console themselves — they do as well as anybody else; the population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic stage.  To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of gold; I have not yet written A book about Glasgow.

And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance.  For centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to ships at sea.  It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on Greenside, or by the King’s Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers.  Down in the palace John Knox reproved his queen in the accents of modern democracy.  In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows’ nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith.  Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the Castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day and night with ‘tearful psalmns’ to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah.  There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, offered up the often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums.  Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses’ tails — a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight.  There