Who Said What About Edinburgh, Otherwise Known as Auld Reekie or Auld Greekie?

THE ATHENS OF THE NORTH

Pompous the boast, and yet a truth it speaks A 'modern Athens,' fit for modern Greeks.

.....James Hannay, in The Edinburgh Courant, 10 November 1860

Most of the denizens wheeze, sniffle, and exude a sort of snozzling whnoff whnoff, apparently through a hydro-phile sponge.

.....Ezra Pound quoted by Hugh McDiarmid (C.M. Grieve), as Epigraph to Edinburgh, Lady Poet, 1943

Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills.
The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.

.....Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh Picturesque Notes, 1879

Who indeed, that has once seen Edinburgh, with its couchant rag-lion, but must see it again in dreams, waking or sleeping? My dear Sir, do not think I blaspheme when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, 'mine own romantic town', is as prose compared to poetry, or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy epic compared to a lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning.

You have nothing like Scott's monument, or if you had that, and all the glories of architecture assembled together, you have nothing like Arthur's Seat, and above all you have not the Scotch national character; and it is that grand character after all which gives the land its true charm, its true greatness.

.....Charlotte Bronte, Letter to W. Smith Williams 1850

It's hard to pick out a single characteristic shared by the people of Edinburgh. In fact it's hard to say what you even call them. Edinbrughians? Edinburghers? We've settled for Edinburghers. It may sound like fast food but it's easy to spell.

.....Barry Gordon and Jan-Andrew Henderson in WHO WANTS TO BE AN EDINBURGHER? The Quiz Book for Edinburgh's Bright Sparks, Black & White Publishing Ltd. Edinburgh 2004

Edinburgh is a rancid stew of lawyers, bankers, politicos, journalists, arty types, friends of the English, educationalists, soft bastards and priests, lost in a private world of intrigue and futile self-advancement.

...FAINTHEART: An Englishman Ventures North of the Border by Charles Jennings, Abacus, Time Warner Books U.K., www.TimeWarnerBooks.co.uk; Copyright 2001 by Charles Jennings ISBN 0349114404

This accursed, stinking, reeky mass of stones and lime and dung.

......Thomas Carlyle, Letter to his brother John, 10 February 1821

When I lived there, very few maids had shoes and stockings, but plodded about the house with feet as big as a family Bible, and legs as large as portmanteaus.

......Sydney Smith, Letter to Lady Mary Bennet, 20 December 1820

See yon hamlet, o'ershadowed with smoke;
See yon hoary battlement throned on the rock;
Even there shall a city in splendour break forth,
The haughty Dun-Edin, the Queen of the North;
There learning shall flourish, and liberty smile,
The awe of this world, and the pride of the isle.

......James Hogg, The Queen's Wake, 1819

Nae Heathen Name shall I prefix
Frae Pindus or Parnassus;
AULD REEKIE dings them a' to sticks
For rhyme-inspiring Lasses.

......Robert Burns, To Miss Ferrier, 1787

I... am not sorry to have seen that most picturesque (at a distance) & nastiest (when near) of all capital Cities.

......Thomas Gray, Letter to Thomas Wharton, c. 30 September 1765

What a wonderful City Edinburgh is! - What alterna­tion of Height & Depth! - a city looked at in the polish'd back of a Brobdignag Spoon, held lengthways - so enormously stretched-up are the Houses!

.....Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letter to Robert Southey, 13 September 1803

It was a patriarchial Fife laird, Durham of Largo, who had the honour of giving to Edinburgh the sobriquet of " Auld Reekie." It appears that this old gentleman was in the habit of regulating the time of evening worship by the appearance of the smoke of Edinburgh, which he could easily see through the clear summer twilight from his own door.

When he observed the smoke increase in density, in consequence of the good folks of the capital preparing their supper, he would call all the family into the house, saying — " It's time, noo, bairns to tak the buiks, and gang to our beds, for yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nichtcap."

......Robert Chambers, in Scottish Treasure Trove, Edited by George Blake, John O'London's Little Books,circa 1925

Baxter made a good remark about Princes Street, that it was the most elastic street for length that he knew; sometimes it looks as it looked tonight, interminable, a way leading right into the heart of the red sundown; sometimes again, it shrinks together, as if for warmth, on one of the withering, clear, east-windy days, until it seems to lie underneath your feet.

.....Robert Louis Stevenson, Letter to Mrs Sitwell, 4 October 1873

Tho' many Cities have more People in them, yet, I believe, this may be said with Truth, that in no City in the World so many People live in so little Room as at Edinburgh.

......Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-7

SEE WHO SAID WHAT ABOUT...

Glasgow
Inverness, Capital of the Scottish Highlands
The Scottish Islands
The Scottish Mountains
The Scots