Excerpt from Edinburgh: A Historical Study<br><br>IT was told of the devoted and thoroughly compe tent secretary of a certain Antiquarian Society that, when he retired on a pension earned by his long service, he ceased to Show any interest in archaeology. When a friend expressed surprise that he should so completely have abandoned the study which had absorbed the energy of his active years, he replied: Well, I have had more than my share of it, and now I wish to God there were nothing older in the world than a new-laid egg!<br><br>If, as is not improbable, the reader should find in the following pages more of a dead past than is to his taste, it will be fortunate for the author if impatience finds no sharper expression than by a sen tence, I think, in one of Lord Morley's books, to the effect that he did not in the least want to know what had happened in the past, except as it enabled him to see more clearly through what was happening in the present. So it is with the ancient capital of Scotland. To enter into the Spirit of the place as a visitor - to love it intelligently as a citizen thereof - some know ledge of its chequered past is essential.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.