At the bottom of the High Street, on the south side, there is an uncommonly huge and dense mass of stone buildings or lands, penetrated only by a few narrow closes. One of these is Hyndford’s Close, a name indicating the noble family which once had lodgment in it. This was a Scotch peerage not without its glories—witness particularly the third earl, who acted as ambassador in succession to Prussia, to Russia, and to Vienna. It is now extinct: its bijouterie, its pictures, including portraits of Maria Theresa, and other royal and imperial personages, which had been presented as friendly memorials to the ambassador, have all been dispersed by the salesman’s hammer, and Hyndford’s Close, on my trying to get into it lately (1868), was inaccessible (literally) from filth.

The entry and stair at the head of the close on the west side was a favourite residence, on account of the ready access to it from the street. In the second floor of this house lived, about the beginning of the reign of George III., Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and there brought up her beautiful daughters, one of whom became Duchess of Gordon. The house had a dark passage, and the kitchen door was passed in going to the dining-room, according to an agreeable old practice in Scotch houses, which lets the guests know on entering what they have to expect. The fineries of Lady Maxwell’s daughters were usually hung up, after washing, on a screen in this passage to dry; while the coarser articles of dress, such as shifts and petticoats, were slung decently out of sight at the window, upon a projecting contrivance similar to a dyer’s pole, of which numerous specimens still exist at windows in the Old Town for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants.

So easy and familiar were the manners of the great in those times, fabled to be so stiff and decorous, that Miss Eglintoune, afterwards Lady Wallace, used to be sent with the tea-kettle across the street to the Fountain Well for water to make tea. Lady Maxwell’s daughters were the wildest romps imaginable. An old gentleman, who was their relation, told me that the first time he saw these beautiful girls was in the High Street, where Miss Jane, afterwards Duchess of Gordon, was riding upon a sow, which Miss Eglintoune thumped lustily behind with a stick. It must be understood that in the middle of the eighteenth century vagrant swine went as commonly about the streets of Edinburgh as dogs do in our own day, and were more generally fondled as pets by the children of the last generation.[224] It may, however, be remarked that the sows upon which the Duchess of Gordon and her witty sister rode, when children, were not the common vagrants of the High Street, but belonged to Peter Ramsay, of the inn in St Mary’s Wynd, and were among the last that were permitted to roam abroad. The two romps used to watch the animals as they were let loose in the forenoon from the stable-yard (where they lived among the horse-litter), and get upon their backs the moment they issued from the close.

The extraordinary cleverness, the genuine wit, and the delightful abandon of Lady Wallace made an extraordinary impression on Scottish society in her day. It almost seemed as if some faculty divine had inspired her. A milliner bringing home a cap to her when she was just about to set off to the Leith races was so unlucky as to tear it against the buckle of a porter’s knee in the street. ‘No matter,’ said her ladyship; and instantly putting it on, restored all to grace by a single pin. The cap thus misarranged was found so perfectly exquisite that ladies tore their caps on nails, and pinned them on in the hope of imitating it. It was, however, a grace beyond the reach of art.

Of the many bon mots attributed to her, one alone seems worthy, from its being unhackneyed, of appearing here. The son of Mr Kincaid, king’s printer—a great Macaroni, as the phrase went; that is, dandy—was nicknamed, from his father’s lucrative patent, Young Bibles. This beau entering a ballroom one evening, some of the company asked who was that extraordinary-looking young man. ‘Only Young Bibles,’ quoth Lady Wallace, ‘bound in calf, and gilt, but not lettered!’

[In the same stair in Hyndford’s Close lived another lady of rank, and one who, for several reasons, filled in her time a broad space in society. This was Anne, Countess of Balcarres, the progenitrix of perhaps as many persons as ever any woman was in the same space of time. Her eldest daughter, Anne, authoress of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray, was, of all her eleven children, the one whose name is most likely to continue in remembrance—yea, though another of them put down the Maroon war in the West Indies. When in Hyndford’s Close, Lady Balcarres had for a neighbour in the same alley Dr Rutherford, the uncle of Sir Walter Scott; and young Walter, often at his uncle’s, occasionally accompanied his aunt ‘Jeanie’ to Lady Balcarres’s. Forty years after, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne Barnard, nÉe Lindsay, he told her: ‘I remember all the locale of Hyndford’s Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin and Columbine, and the harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to soil the hem of your ladyship’s garment, is now a resort for the lowest mechanics—and so wears the world away.... It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs, than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosie retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the resort of misery, filth, poverty, and vice.’[225]

The late Mrs Meetham, a younger sister of Miss Spence Yeaman, of Murie, in the Carse of Gowrie, had often heard her grand-aunt, Miss Molly Yeaman, describe, from her own recollection, the tea-drinkings of the Countess of Balcarres in Hyndford’s Close. The family was not rich, and it still retained something of its ancient Jacobitism. The tea-drinkings, as was not uncommon, took place in my lady’s bedroom. At the foot of a four-posted bed, exhibiting a finely worked coverlet, stood John, an elderly man-servant, and a character, in full Balcarres livery, an immense quantity of worsted lace on his coat. Resting with his arm round a bedpost, he was ready to hand the kettle when required. As the ladies went chattering on, there would sometimes occur a difficulty about a date or a point in genealogy, and then John was appealed to to settle the question. For example, it came to be debated how many of the Scotch baronetcies were real; for, as is still the case, many of them were known to be fictitious, or assumed without legal grounds. Here John was known to be not only learned, but eloquent. He began: ‘Sir James Kinloch, Sir Stuart Threipland, Sir John Wedderburn, Sir —— Ogilvy, Sir James Steuart of Coltness’ [all of them forfeited baronets, be it observed]: ‘these, leddies, are the only real baronets. For the rest, I do believe, the Deil’——then a figurative declaration not fit for modern print, but which made the Balcarres party only laugh, and declare to John that they thought him not far wrong.]