Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words."

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh:Picturesque Notes (1903 edition)[7]It was then published as a book divided into ten chapters and consisting of a series of essays describing different areas of Edinburgh: the Old Town, the Parliament Close, Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, the New Town, the villas in Morningside, Calton Hill and the Pentland Hills.

[8] Despite his affection for the city, Stevenson did not shy away from detailing the darker aspects of life in Edinburgh however; including references to its more gruesome history and inhabitants such as Deacon Brodie, whose dual life proved inspiration for Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Major Thomas Weir, who was executed for adultery, bestiality and incest and accused of witchcraft.

[8] Stevenson's vivid and frank depiction of the city also includes mention of Edinburgh's plague-ridden past, when officials punished those hiding their plague symptoms by drowning women in the Quarry Holes and hanging men in their own doorways.

[1] This caused the inclusion of this notable footnote from Stevenson responding to criticisms to appear in the first chapter of subsequent editions:[2]"These sentences have, I hear, given offence in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow.

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.

Moreover, he had dipped deep into the huge stores of matter, legendary, historical, semi-historical, ready to the hand of him of who would know about the Scottish capital....To the Scot, it ought to be a sort of Bible.