trades, there is no entry under the heading of inn-keepers. There are vintners, who, I suppose, were also tavern-keepers, and stablers, who kept the inns. It was to this curious appellation that Topham referred when he said that the inn-keepers had the modesty to call themselves stable-keepers.
A few years after Johnson's visit a good hotel was at last opened in the New Town. The accommodation was elegant, but the charges extravagant.[1] The French traveller, Saint Fond, who stayed in it about the year 1780, said that the house was magnificent and adorned with columns, as his bill was with flourishes and vignettes. Half a sheet of note-paper was charged threepence, with sixpence added for the trouble of fetching it. He paid twice as much for everything as in the best inn on the road from London. In all his journeyings through England and Scotland he was only twice charged exorbitantly—at Dunn's Hotel in Edinburgh, and at the Bull's Head in Manchester.[2]
Johnson, coming from Berwick by the coast-road, entered Edinburgh by the Canongate. It was on a dusky night in August that, arm in arm with Boswell, he walked up the High Street. "Its breadth and the loftiness of the buildings on each side made," he acknowledged, "a noble appearance."[3] In the light of the day he does not seem to have been equally impressed. "Most of the buildings are very mean," he wrote to Mrs. Thrale; "and the whole town bears some resemblance to the old part of Birmingham."[4] In his Letters he does not touch on that appearance so unusual to Englishmen which, as we learn from his narrative, generally struck him in the ancient towns of Scotland.[5] Wesley's attention was caught by this same "peculiar oddness" and "air of antiquity." They were like no places that he had ever seen in England, Wales, or Ireland.[6] It was not, however, to Birmingham that that great traveller likened the famous High Street. There was nothing, he said, that could compare with it in Great Britain. Defoe's admiration had risen still higher. In his eyes it ranked as almost the largest, longest, and finest street in the world. Its solidity of stone he contrasted with the slightness of the houses in the South. Lofty though the buildings were, placed, too, on "the narrow ridge of a long ascending mountain," with storms often raging round them,
