Edinburgh

Cabinet 17

‘From the Old Town, from the New Town of Craig’s plan, and from the Newer Edinburgh that spreads to the Braid Hills and round Corstorphine, the face of Edinburgh is astonishingly fair.

Near or far it is the same. In the end you come back to the salient combination that distinguished ‘high Dunedin’ from all but a few great cities in the world – you can see it, and it is worth seeing.’

So wrote James Bone in his eulogy on Edinburgh, ‘the Athens of the North’. First published in 1911, Bone’s positiveness in his perambulations about the City equals S. T. Coleridge’s earlier ‘What a wonderful City Edinburgh is! What alternation of height and depth’ and William Power’s later ‘Nature took trouble over the site of Edinburgh.’

James Bone, The Perambulator in Edinburgh. Revised ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926.