of a chapel at Holyrood. The Regent Albany founded chapels[23]; and storks built nests in the roof. Every one seemed busy building in the church.

In 1454 William Preston of Gorton bequeathed to St. Giles’s a much-prized relic—“the arm-bone of Sanct Gele,” which he had procured from France; and the Provost and magistrates built the “Preston Aisle” as a mark of gratitude, with “a brass for his lair,” and a chaplain “to sing at the altar from that time forth”; and the male representative of the Preston family, until the Reformation, bore the sacred relic in all processions.

In 1467 St. Giles’s was transformed from a parish church into a collegiate church, having a Provost, a perpetual Vicar having care of souls, a minister of the choir, fourteen canons or prebendaries, a sacristan, a beadle, a secular clerk, and four choristers taught by the best-qualified canon. By the time St. Giles’s became a collegiate foundation it was rich in chaplainries and altarages; and afterwards there were many more endowments. Each trade that formed into a Guild maintained its own altar; and, as these Guilds were rich, this was a great source of wealth. The last endowment before Flodden was an annuity of twenty-three merks from Walter Chepman, the earliest Scottish printer, to found a chaplaincy at the altar of St. John the Evangelist. This was confirmed by charter of James IV., on the 1st of August 1513—eight days before Flodden.

Ah, the summer days of Edinburgh in the year 1513! The King reading the poems of his Franciscan friar Dunbar, printed by the honoured and pious Chepman, who endowed the altars of St. Giles’s, where the young Poet-Provost, of the proud race of Douglas, walked at the end of the chanting procession amid the stone pillars, and went home afterwards to turn Virgil into Scottish verse....

Gavin Douglas had been made Provost by James IV. in 1501, when he was but twenty-six, and it was whilst he was living in the Provost’s dwelling, bounding the west side of the churchyard (where Parliament House now stands), that he wrote The Palace of Honour and King Hart, and turned Virgil’s Æneid into the vernacular. Gavin Douglas was the third son of that grim old statesman, the Earl of Angus, who had earned the sobriquet of “Archibald Bell-the-Cat” on the day when the haughty Scottish nobles hanged all James III.’s plebeian favourites over the bridge at Lauder.

Scott makes the Earl of Angus say; but “Gawain” penned many a line, and penned the last of the Æneid on the 22nd of July 1513, when

After Flodden there were many prayers in St, Giles’s, but few endowments.[24] No doubt, when that first Proclamation bade the women go into the churches and pray, many a Scottish wife, many a mother, many a girl with a secret sorrow to carry with her to the grave, took her broken heart into the shadows of the old Church, and wept her supplications before the little altars there.

Gavin Douglas was still Provost of St. Giles’s during these troubled days, and his father, the Earl of Angus, was Provost of the city, having succeeded Sir Alexander Lauder of Blyth, who had marched under him to Flodden, and fallen on the field. So the Douglases held the helm; and there could be this entry in the Burgh Records:—

In 1516 Gavin Douglas was made Bishop of Dunkeld; but five years later, on Albany’s return to the regency, the day of the Douglases was over, and Gavin found an asylum in England (his nephew, the Earl of Angus, was now Henry VIII.’s brother-in-law, having married the widowed Queen Margaret); and he died in London of the plague in 1522.

Through the later part of the sixteenth century Scotland lay between Scylla and Charybdis—between France and England; and politics, at home and abroad, were strenuous. Henry VIII. “scourged Scotland as no English king had scourged her since Edward I.,” and his soldiers left Edinburgh burnt to the ground, and laid waste a circuit of five miles round it. France offered help with one hand, and with the other attempted to grasp the Scottish crown for the coronation of the Dauphin on his marriage to Mary Stuart. Meanwhile Protestantism, already established in England, was gaining a gradual and independent hold in Scotland; and against this, and against the English alliance it threatened, Mary of Lorraine and Cardinal Beaton struggled desperately and in vain. In 1534 and 1540 Cardinal Beaton burnt heretics; in 1546 Cardinal Beaton was murdered. Mary of Lorraine had been made Regent in succession to Arran—to the intense disapproval of Buchanan and Knox; “als semlye a sight (yf men had eis) as to putt a sadill upoun the back of ane unrewly kow,” is Knox’s rough comment. She filled Edinburgh with her countrymen, and heaped honours on them, and riots in the streets of Edinburgh ensued between the French soldiers and the native citizens, and hatred of the French and of their faith grew bitter and strong.

In 1556 the most precious of the Church valuables were stolen, and the life-sized statue of the patron saint was ducked in the Nor’ Loch by the rabble and then burnt. The Archbishop of St. Andrews “caused his curate Tod to curse them as black as cole,” and the Church authorities borrowed an image from Greyfriars for the St. Giles’s Day procession, in which the Queen Regent herself walked to do them honour; but when she left it a riot ensued, and the borrowed image was rudely handled and defaced.

After this the Church valuables were boarded out for safety among the faithful; but the army of the Congregation entered the town on 29th June 1559, and that same day the stones of St. Giles’s echoed back the stern thundering eloquence of John Knox, the great Presbyterian reformer. John Knox was the first minister of the city under the new form of religion, and he preached in the central part of the church, opening from the south, which division was called “the Old Kirk.”[26]

The interior of the Church was partitioned off and the subdivisions appropriated, not only by various preachers of the new religion for their own special services, but also by the laity for various secular purposes. A court of justice was held in one, a grammar school in another, the town clerk’s office in a third, a prison in a fourth, and so on; and the Town Council found one of the ancient chapels a suitable place in which to erect looms to test the exhibits of city weavers accused of peculations. Any great religious upheaval produces, on the part of the rude and vulgar, these manifestations of irreverence toward the old order of things; and too much importance must not be attached to them.

Darnley, three weeks after his marriage to Queen Mary, attended service at St. Giles’s, but Knox preached “an hour or more longer than the time appointed” on the wickedness of princes, and how “boys and women” are set up as rulers and tyrants; and young Darnley was “crabbit” afterwards, spent the afternoon in hawking, and never came to St. Giles’s again.

After Queen Mary’s flight to England, Edinburgh was in a state of civil war; and Kirkaldy of Grange, who held the Castle for the Queen for three years, garrisoned St. Giles’s as a fort, hoisted cannon and soldiers up into the steeple, and loopholed the gables for arquebuses, and John Knox once again fled for his life.

Until 1585 Edinburgh citizens had contentedly, and perhaps with sufficient punctuality, regulated their doings by the bells of St. Giles’s; but in that year the Town Council bought, for the sum of fifty-five pounds Scots, a clock from the Abbey Church of Lindores, and hung it up in the steeple. Stormy hours were the hands of that clock from the quiet Fifeshire Abbey destined to mark!

In King James VI.’s reign, stirring events happened in the Church of St. Giles. The King often used the Church for conferences, which sometimes ended in disputes between the King and representatives of early Presbyterian zeal, not conducted with due regard to kingly dignity on either side. In 1596 it was the scene of a difference of opinion of this nature, and James had to take refuge from it in the adjacent Tolbooth, and thence, when the Tolbooth was attacked by an armed mob, to hurry home to Holyrood. It was after this incident that the King, instead of carrying out his original intention of razing Edinburgh to the ground and salting its site, contented himself with ordering the four ministers of St. Giles’s to live in different and distant parts of the town, instead of all four together in “ain clois,” hatching treason at their ease.

It was in St. Giles’s Church, in 1603, that King James bade farewell to his Scottish subjects, and that he was preached to by the Rev. Mr. Hall, a Presbyterian divine, and wept over and exhorted,—and in his turn wept, and promised, and took leave. It was at St. Giles’s Church, in 1617, that King James attended a service immediately on his entry into Edinburgh on his first visit home from England. He had promised to return to his Scottish capital every third year; but the years had extended to fifteen, during which he had been able, as the powerful sovereign of all Britain, to complete his long-cherished plan for the establishment of Episcopacy in Scotland. It was therefore not now a Presbyterian minister who preached, but the Bishop of St. Andrews.

In 1628 the “Krames” were first erected,—wooden booths with lean-to roofs, sticking like barnacles on to the sides of the church, and filling up the angles between the buttresses. The church then, rising out of a huddledom of booths and goldsmiths’ shops and open markets and stalls and jostling crowds, all closely hemmed in by the tall houses of the narrow street, must have resembled many of the foreign Cathedrals of the present day.

In 1633 Edinburgh became an Episcopal See, the diocese being formed out of that of St. Andrews; and St. Giles’s, which during its long Roman Catholic existence had been first a parochial church and then a collegiate church, was converted into a cathedral church. It is still very commonly called “St. Giles’s Cathedral,” the designation dating from this short period of its life. The first Bishop of Edinburgh was William Forbes, who died in the same year that he was appointed, 1634, and was succeeded by five others, the fifth being Bishop Abernethy Rose, the last of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh. He was deprived on the abolition of Episcopacy in 1688, and became Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and died in 1720 in Whitehorse Close. “I know at least one person,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers in his Traditions of Edinburgh, “who never goes past the place without an emotion of respect, remembering the self-abandoning devotion of the Scottish prelates to their engagements at the Revolution.”

It was on the 23rd of July 1637 that the folly and obstinacy of Charles I. brought about the riot in the Cathedral during which the celebrated Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the Dean.

“Since the days of John Knox,” says Professor Hume Brown in his History of Scotland, “the citizens of Edinburgh had been noted for their stubborn adhesion to Presbyterian doctrine and polity. With no other section of his subjects had James VI. found greater difficulty in enforcing the Articles of Perth. In 1584, Bishop Adamson, as the representative of Episcopacy, had been violently interrupted while conducting service in the church of St. Giles. If, therefore, Edinburgh should patiently endure the new Liturgy,[27] its example could not fail to have a good effect on the rest of the country. It was in the same church of St. Giles that the experiment with the new Service-Book was now made; and, unluckily for its promoters, Edinburgh even surpassed its evil record. Every precaution was taken to ensure the decorous behaviour of the congregation. The two archbishops with several of their suffragans, the Lords of Privy Council, and the Lords of Session, were present to give solemnity to the occasion. No sooner, however, had the dean opened the new Liturgy than the tumult began. There arose ‘such an uncouth noise and hubbub in the Church that not any one could either hear or be heard. The gentlewomen did fall a tearing and crying that the Masse was entered among them and Baal in the Church. There was a gentleman who standing behind a pew and answering Amen to what the dean was reading, a she zealot hearing him starts up in choler, “Traitor (says she), dost thou say Mass at my ear,” and with that struck him on the face with her bible in great indignation and fury.’[28] It was in vain that Archbishop Spottiswoode endeavoured to allay the tumult, and the service closed amid uproar and confusion—the bishop being pursued to his residence with volleys of stones and imprecations. Such was the discouraging reception of Laud’s Service-Book in the leading church of Scotland.”[29]

And during this uproar tradition avers that a “kail-wife,” when the collect was given out, hurled her stool at the Dean, crying, “Deil colic the wame o’ ye!”

It is all very well to cast doubt on whether Jenny Geddes existed in mortal life: none can doubt her claim to immortality. If tangible proof be demanded,—is not the very stool she aimed at the Dean to be seen in the Scottish Antiquarian Museum to this day?

It is difficult now for a stranger to understand fully the very strong antagonism between the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians.

the little street urchins still cry in shrill disapproval as the “chapels” skale.[30] The antagonism was in its early days political and temperamental as well as ecclesiastical, for the Episcopalians were royalists and cavaliers to a man. In the eighteenth century the terms Episcopalian and Jacobite were held as almost synonymous. The two classes were diametrically opposed in their dispositions and ways and ideals; and yet each represented many of the finest characteristics of the Scottish character, and each can lay claim to a goodly number of the Scotsmen and Scotswomen of whom Scotland is proudest and fondest. But the feeling betrays itself even yet where education has tended to sharpen the angles of temperament instead of rounding them off.

“This is Edinburg,” a Cockney youth with a tourist ticket was overheard to say, as the train approached the Northern Capital.

“Oh, Edinboro’, is it?” answered his companion, letting down the window. “Oh, I s’y, this ain’t town,—I can smell the ’y!”

“That is the fimous Castle of Edinburg,” said the first, and both gazed out at the Calton jail.

A little old woman, shrivelled with age, and neat and clean as a russet apple in her white mutch and her shawl, gave a restless movement, but said nothing. No one noticed her.

“Wasn’t it at Edinboro’ that Janie Gedds lived?” asked the second youth, drawing in his head.

“Janie Gedds?—’oo was she?”

“W’y, Janie Gedds, that threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a Church service.”

“Threw a stool at a dean’s ’ead and stopt a Church service? W’y, w’atever did she do that for? W’at imperence!”

And then suddenly the little old woman whom no one had noticed leant forward, a flash of fire in the deep-set eyes under the white mutch, and a brown wrinkled fist thrust out from the folds of the shawl. “Indeed, an’ she was verra richt, sirs! Verra richt, she was!—An’ I’d dae the same mysel’!”

The two Cockney youths collapsed as completely as ever did the dean.

When the deep-laid schemes of Charles I. “went agee,” the Presbyterians held undisputed possession of the Church of St. Giles. It was during this time that Sir John Gordon of Haddo, a Royalist, was imprisoned in the “Priest’s Chamber,” afterwards known as “Haddo’s Hole.” But, when Cromwell entered Edinburgh after the battle of Dunbar, the town was flooded with English Independents,—all manner of sects,—who preached in St. Giles’s Church and harassed the Presbyterians more than ever either Roman Catholics or Episcopalians had done, until even the General Assembly itself was prohibited by them from meeting in the church, and “It must have been a curious spectacle to see these gentlemen marched out of St. Giles’s by a band of fanatics more fanatical than themselves.”[31] So, when there came the Restoration of 1660, and Charles II. promised all that the Presbyterians asked, there was general rejoicing, and feasting at the City Cross, and after the Lord Provost and magistrates had “turned up their spiritual thanks to Heaven for so blessed an occasion,” they “in a most magnificent manner regaled themselves with those human lawful refreshment which is allowable for the grandeur of so eminent a blessing.”[32] And even Jenny Geddes, it is told, contributed her creels and her creepies to help form a bonfire.

But the Covenanters were to learn not to put their faith in princes—especially in princes coerced to their faith. On the 11th of May 1661, the head of the gallant Royalist, the Marquis of Montrose, was taken down from its spike on the Tolbooth, and his mutilated remains were gathered, and buried in St. Giles’s with pomp and pity by Wishart, who had been his chaplain, and who, a year later, was consecrated Bishop of Edinburgh. When the poor persecuted Covenanters taken at Rullion Green were imprisoned in Haddo’s Hole and treated with barbarous severities, it was this Wishart who fed them and did all he could to obtain mercy for them,—this Wishart, who had himself suffered so much at the hands of Covenanters that to his dying day he bore the marks on his face of the rats who “had been like to devour” him in his loathsome dungeon.[33]

It is pleasant to turn from all the stormy and tragic memories of man’s inhumanities to man to the pretty and peaceful fact that in the spring of 1700 there were hung in the steeple of St. Giles’s “a good and sufficient cheme or sett of musical bells, according to the rules of musick, for the use of the good toun of Edinburgh.” Was this the peal that continued faithfully to jangle—

until, by reason of age, the jangling grew fitful, with little pauses and blanks of silence, like a pulse that is beating out its last of a long and busy life?...

If the Beatitude promised to those whom men shall revile and persecute and despitefully use is also granted to stone and lime, then “Sanct Gellis kirk “ is blessed indeed. Over six centuries ago it was burnt to ashes by the English, and carefully and reverently restored and rebuilt. Then, for nearly two hundred years it was slowly enriched and laboriously embellished, till every pillar had its shrine and every niche its altar, and its outer walls were irregular with the chapels that had been added to it, and the beautiful open arched crown steeple, the pride of Edinburgh to-day, was added by unknown hands.

And then all the altars were dashed down and the images burnt; and, scarcely had the Church been “cleansed of popery,” when she was again sprinkled and re-consecrated after the sacrilege; then again she was “purged of idolatry,” and the Latin chantings of a French bishop had to give place to the noise of workmen’s hammers and the creaking of pulleys and the falling of altars and carvings, and nine days later St. Giles’s found herself bare and empty and—whitewashed!

Her shadows have been cast by the wax candles bequeathed for the souls of those in purgatory; and they have been banished by the torches when John Knox held his Communions at four o’clock on winter mornings. Her aisles have echoed to many doctrines, many angry denunciations, many whispered prayers; they have held cannon and soldiers, they have immured prisoners, they have seen gay wedding pageantries, they have watched martyrs and statesmen laid to rest. And at last they were left dusty and neglected: cobwebs hung on the walls,—spiders spun their altars unreproved.

In 1758 the old Norman doorway, a survival of the thirteenth century, was ruthlessly demolished: and, in 1829, under the name of “improvement,” the architecture of the church was ruined, at the cost of over twenty thousand pounds, according to the taste of the builders,—the roof was plastered, the carvings and tombs and monuments were broken, destroyed, and desecrated, galleries were built, and all the past was insulted and the present rendered hideous,—and then again it was left in dirt and neglect. From this state it was rescued in 1883 by the late William Chambers, who undid the deeds of vandalism as far as possible, and magnificently restored the old Church of St. Giles.

CHAPTER IV
STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS

THE long irregular line of slowly ascending mediÆval street from Holyrood to the Castle was, and is, the backbone of Old Edinburgh. From this backbone there jut out on either side, forming, as it were, the ribs from the spine, all those narrow wynds and quaint closes so characteristic of the Old Town, and so full of the traditions and stories of Old Town life. The main street itself is in three divisions—the Canongate, nearest to Holyrood, then the main portion, or High Street, and, highest up and nearest to the Castle, the Lawnmarket. Between the Canongate and the High Street there used, in bygone days, to be the famous old city gate, the Netherbow Port, for the Canongate, a separate burgh, was beyond the Flodden wall, which at this point crossed the ridge of the town. At the junction

of the High Street and the Lawnmarket stood the Church of St. Giles, and, right out in the middle of the street and dividing the traffic into two narrow streams, the hoary Tolbooth, or “Heart of Midlothian.”

This, then, was Old Edinburgh, the Edinburgh that Taylor, the Water-poet, so well describes. “So, leaving the castle,” he writes, “as it is both defensive against any opposition and magnificke for lodging and receite, I descended lower to the city, wherein I observed the fairest and goodliest streete that ever mine eyes beheld, for I did never see or heare of a street of that length (which is half an English mile from the castle to a faire port, which they call the Nether-bow); and from that port, the streete which they call the Kenny-hate is one quarter of a mile more, downe to the kings palace, called Holyrood-house; the buildings on each side of the way being all of squared stone, five, six, or seven stories high, and many by-lanes and closes on each side of the way, wherein are gentlemens houses, much fairer than the buildings in the high-street, for in the high-street marchants and tradesmen do dwell, but the gentlemens mansions and goodliest houses are obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes: the walles are eight or tenne foote thicke, exceeding strong, not built for a day, a weeke, a moneth, or a yeere, but from antiquitie to posteritie, for many ages.”[34]

Edinburgh, before the sudden extension of its boundaries at the end of the eighteenth century, was thus a small, compact city, measuring in its proudest days but a mile in length and a half mile in width; but, though it was small, it was densely populated. Bounded in its growth by deep ravines and by a wall and a great loch—defences against the English—it extended itself in the only way it could, upwards towards the sky, whence it need fear “no enemy, but winter and rough weather.” Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets, with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite incomprehensible to the modern citizen.

The nobles of Scotland, before the Union drew them away to London, had their fine old town residences in Edinburgh—the “lands”[35] bearing their names. These were generally within closes, “obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes,” as Taylor has it; but many were in the Cowgate, a fashionable suburb, or in the Canongate, which, being nearest Holyrood, was the court end of the city. It is down this “fairest and goodliest streete” that the tourist of to-day drives from the Castle to Holyrood, or up from Holyrood to the Castle. The driver will point with his whip at a gabled house standing forward into the street, and tell him it is John Knox’s house. At the Church of St. Giles he will probably stop the cab and descend, and, finding the door locked, will wander round the building and gaze down at the heart marked on the stones where once stood the Tolbooth, and at the initials I. K. where Knox is supposed to be buried, though another version has it that his grave is below the equestrian statue of Charles II. And so he will find himself in the precincts of Parliament House, built on ground which in past ages was the graveyard of the parish church. If he enter and have a glimpse of the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. And so his day in Edinburgh will leave him with a confused impression of a long squalid street full of draggled women and barefooted children, of groups of soldiers from the Castle, of carts and cries, of open “fore-stairs” and street wells, of ancient gabled roofs and of flapping garments hung out of windows on poles to dry, of pious legends and obliterated carvings, of an appalling number of drunken men, and of dark entries giving glimpses of tortuous obscurities, or leading steeply down some narrow tunnel with a flashing vista of the New Town in a blaze of sunshine at the end of it.

But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood, the tourist drives right through the history of Old Edinburgh, through centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots go by, with music and the tramp of feet; or a prisoner driven to his death; or, most familiar sight of all in ancient Edinburgh, to watch a “tulzie,” a quarrel settled “À la mode d’Edimbourg,” as they said on the Continent,—a duel to the death, or a street fight between armed men, followers of great rival houses, the popular side ably assisted by the fighting burghers with their spears. In the month of August 1503 the ladies of Edinburgh gathered on the decorated fore-stairs, “gay as beds of flowers,” to see King James IV. ride into the town with his Tudor bride on her palfrey. During the minority of James V. the windows were crowded with excited faces, whilst the terrific “Cleanse the Causeway” raged below, and the townspeople handed out spears to the Douglases, and the dead Hamiltons blocked the entries to the closes. Here Queen Mary rode, a dishevelled prisoner, after the battle of Carberry Hill, after she had parted with Bothwell, and “as she came through the town the common people cried out against Her Majesty at the windows and stairs, which it was a pity to hear. Her Majesty again cried out to all gentlemen and others that passed up and down the causeway, declaring how that she was their native princess, and doubted not but all honest subjects would respect her as they ought to do, and not suffer her to be mishandled.”[36]

When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas! are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it recalling a hundred memories,—but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to modern buildings. But some closes remain; and, as one makes one’s way down from the Castle to the Canongate one can turn aside here and there, crossing and recrossing the street to dive down some steep entry, and, standing within it, where the broken plaster shows the bare oaken rafters overhead, may read half-obliterated Latin, or trace armorial bearings over doorways, or gaze through the open doors up spiral wooden stairs, or—over the heads of the swarming little children playing in the courts—at ancient gabled roofs and rounded turrets and beautiful old windows, whence once fair ladies peeped, and where now the ever-present “washings” hang suspended on poles, and add impressionist touches of colour to the scene.

Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take several volumes to tell all there is to be told. And so that invidious and vexing thing, a selection, must be made, and a few of the thousand crowding names taken haphazard.

Off the Lawnmarket there is a wide quadrangle called, after its architect, Mylne’s Court. There was a long line of royal master masons of that name, descending from father to son, from the reign of James III. This close, built in 1690 by Robert Mylne, the seventh royal master mason, whose handiwork is to be seen in many of the beautiful bits of Old Town architecture, had a graceful doorway with a peaked arch over it, grateful to the eye of the old master who designed it, but now broken and defaced. When the close was built it enclosed some building of earlier date, for another doorway had 1580 engraved over it, with the legend “Blissit be God in al his Giftis”—the most popular of all the numberless pious mottoes, Latin and English, that embellish the homes of the Old Town. This building is now gone.

James’s Court, close by, is connected with the names of David Hume and of James Boswell, and Boswell’s two guests, Paoli the Corsican, and Dr. Johnson; but the buildings in it where they lived were burnt down in the middle of the nineteenth century. Next to it—leading from it—is Lady Stair’s Close, quite recently restored by Lord Rosebery, after whose ancestress it is named. Originally it was called Lady Gray’s Close, and the coat-of-arms and the initials W G and G S carved under the words “Feare the Lord and depart from evill” are those of the original owners, Sir William (afterwards Lord) Gray of Pittendrum and his wife Egidia Smith, and the date 1622 is the date when they built it.[37] This Lord Gray was a wealthy Scottish merchant in Charles I.’s time, and was one of those who were ruined by their adherence to Montrose. He lost all his wealth by heavy fines, and, after imprisonment in the Castle and in the Tolbooth, died in 1648. Three years before his death, his daughter had died of the plague in this close. Lady Gray survived her husband, but apparently left the house “they had built to be so happy in,” and it then became the residence of the Dowager Lady Stair. It must have been a stately home in those days, with the Lawnmarket in front, and terraced gardens behind, stretching down to the Nor’ Loch. The romantic story of Lady Stair (born Lady Eleanor Campbell, grand-daughter of the Earl of Loudoun, the Covenanting Chancellor of Charles I.’s time, and married first to James, Viscount Primrose, and afterwards to the Earl of Stair) forms the plot of Scott’s Aunt Margaret’s Mirror. Scott used to own that he liked to “put a cocked hat” on to a story; and the cocked hat on this one is very evident. Lord Stair died in 1647—the year before Lord Gray; so it was probably just after she became a widow for the second time that Lady Stair came to live in the close that now bears her name; and here she lived for about twelve years, till her death in 1659. She had long reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society; in her old age she was noted and much envied for that luxury, a black servant—the only one in Edinburgh; and whatever truth there is in Sir Walter’s story, her troubles had not taken the colour from her life or from her speech. When the Earl of Dundonald accused Lady Stair of libelling Lady Jane Douglas (whose case was then before the Court of Session), and further gave the world leave to call him “a damned villain” if he did not speak the truth, the high-spirited old gentlewoman, Lady Stair, went off straight to Holyrood, where the Duke and Duchess of Douglas were, and there, before them and their attendants, said she had lived to a good old age and never till now got entangled in any “clatters,”[38] and struck the floor thrice with her stick, each time calling the Earl of Dundonald “a damned villain,”—and then retired.

Baxter’s Close, where Burns stayed in 1786, is now part of Lady Stair’s Close, and from the moment the tourist enters James’s Court he is surrounded to-day by a mob of intelligent small Scots, with bare feet and eager eyes, and told by a chorus of voices that “Robbie Burrrns lived in yon hoose”—“It was yonder Robbie Burrrns stoppit”; and, if the tourist linger to read the carvings, he is hastily helped: “Fear the Lorrrd and depairt frae evil—but it’s over yonder Robbie Burrrns’s hoose is!”

On the other side of the street is Brodie’s Close, where Deacon Brodie, the daring burglar, one of Edinburgh’s picturesque criminals, lived. There is a fine old archway inside the close, and a pleasant and innocent odour of burnt treacle from a bakery near by. Riddle’s Close has also been lately renovated, and was

used as a settlement for students. It has a story of sudden death to tell—probably several, were all known, for the enclosed court was evidently intended for defence. Here was the house of Bailie Macmorran, a rich merchant of James VI.’s reign, when rich merchants were held in great repute by a needy king: this special one had more than once banqueted the King and Queen Anne of Denmark in this very house. The High School boys had a “barring out,” and actually held the High School in a state of siege, and Bailie Macmorran was sent to settle the matter, ordered the door to be forced open, and was then and there shot dead by one of the boys. It is said that the boy who fired was the son of the Chancellor of Caithness, and thus the ancestor of the earls of Caithness, and that his gentle blood saved him from his ever being discovered or brought to justice. Another thing to remember of Riddle’s Close is that, two centuries later, David Hume lived up a spiral stair on the east side of it, and there began to write his history of England.

Byers’ Close[39] brings one back from tragedy to comedy. In the old house overhanging this close on the east, with three richly carved windows at its polygonal end, there once lived that Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, who married Mary, Queen of Scots to Bothwell “with preachings.” A bit of old stair leading to a garden terrace that once overlooked the Nor’ Loch, can be seen from Advocates’ Close. But in Byers’ Close Lord Coalstoun’s wig, to any one who has read the inimitable story in Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh, still remains, like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in mid-air. The author tells how in that day (1757) it was the general custom for judges and advocates to don their wigs and gowns in their own houses, and proceed in state, with their cocked hats in their hands, when St. Giles’s bell sounded a quarter to nine, to the Parliament House. Earlier hours must have prevailed then than now, for we are led to understand that, though the legal brethren assembled at nine o’clock instead of at ten, they yet found time to lean over their windows after breakfasting, “enjoying the morning air, and perhaps discussing the news of the day, or the convivialities of the preceding evening, with a neighbouring advocate on the opposite side of the alley.” It so happened that one morning two very young women in the window immediately above that of Lord Coalstoun, were killing time by the somewhat cruel sport of swinging a kitten, suspended by a cord secured round it, up and down out of their window. As the kitten came down, the learned judge popped out his head. In a moment the maidens above saw it, and drew the kitten rapidly up,—but the judge’s wig came with it, firmly fixed in the little angry claws. Imagine the mirth tempered by dread at the upper window! But also imagine the feelings of the senator below,—his wig lifted as by magic from his head, and the morning air blowing “caller” on his exposed cranium! A wild glance upward, and behold, his wig ascending heaven-ward without any visible means of support! The laugh, so to speak, was now on the cat’s side. “The perpetrators did afterwards get many injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window, with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs”; and the incident was pardoned by Lord Coalstoun,—if not by the kitten.

In Advocates’ Close there existed in the seventeenth century, in an upper storey of the house of John Scougall the artist, a picture-gallery,—the first public exhibition of works of art, it is said, in Scotland; and preceding any such attempt of the same kind, either in England or France.[40]

On the south side of the street the Old Assembly Close and Bell’s Wynd are connected with another phase of polite society in bygone Edinburgh. It was in the Old Assembly Close that those rigid and awe-inspiring functions were held, presided over by some lady of rank and mistress of the unwritten laws of etiquette, of which Goldsmith and Captain Topham have both left such graphic accounts, and which form the theme of one of the chapters in Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh.

Miss Nicky Murray was indeed famed. She was a sister of the Earl of Mansfield, and lived in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, and there “finished” young lady cousins from the country, and introduced them into society. She presided over the Assemblies, seated on a raised throne, and a wave of her fan silenced the musicians. “It is said that Miss Murray,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers, “on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the first time, would say: ‘Miss ——, of what?’ If no territorial addition could be made, she manifestly cooled.”

After 1758 the Assemblies were held in Bell’s Wynd, until the building of the New Town, and in 1824 the Assembly rooms, where Miss Nicky Murray had ruled, were burnt down.

Niddry Street stands nearly on the site of Niddry’s Wynd, of many memories, two of which throw light on the Æsthetic side of the social life of Edinburgh. It was here that Lord Grange, a Lord of Session, lived. He had spirited his wife away to the wilds of the Hebrides, where he kept her in captivity till she lost her reason and died; but none the less was he deeply shocked at the immorality of the joyous Jacobite, Allan Ramsay, when he began the first circulating library in Edinburgh. Here St. Cecilia’s Hall still stands. This once beautiful oval concert room was built by Robert Mylne the Master Mason in 1762,[42] after the model of the Theatre Farnese at Parma, and here the music-loving Élite of Edinburgh gathered weekly, to listen and criticise. You were lost in Edinburgh, an English visitor complained, unless you were competent to talk about music all night, not only as an art, but as a science.

In Anchor Close,[43] on the opposite side of the High Street, was “Dawney Douglas’s Tavern,” where Burns drank and jested among the “Crochallan Fencibles.” Old Stamp Office Close,[43] almost next to it, has had a varied career. The first scene in its history is the brightest: “a long procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters, devolve from the Close, and proceed to the Assembly rooms ... eight beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at once with the dignity of birth and the consciousness of beauty.”[3] The next scene in the Stamp Office Close is when it was the meeting-place of the famous Poker Club, whose members included all the literati of Edinburgh. In its early days this Club—a Jacobite institution—had an entrance fee of half-a-crown, and its members supped at fourpence-halfpenny per head; but in its Stamp Office Close period it became more showy and less select. Stamp Office Close, like other closes in the Old Town, was once the scene of mock-royal state, when the Earl of Leven was Lord High Commissioner, and held his levÉes at this same tavern—Fortune’s Tavern—where the Poker Club had been wont to meet. And the last scene of all is one of squalid ghastliness; for it was at the head of Old Stamp Office Close that, in April 1812, a band of young hooligans, who had spent a night in riot and murder, were hanged on a gallows on the scene of their crimes.

On the south side of the High Street a fine old “fore-stair” remains, outside Cant’s Close; and between this and World’s End Close, where the High Street ends and the Canongate begins, and where formerly stood the Nether Bow Port, there are several interesting closes. First comes Strichen’s Close, where the Abbots of Melrose had their dwellings, and where, later on, Sir George Mackenzie lived. Next it is Blackfriars Street which once was Blackfriars Wynd, where was the palace of Cardinal Beaton, and where Queen Mary passed afoot with “licht torches” the night of Darnley’s murder. Next Blackfriars Street is South Gray’s Close, where the Scottish Mint, or “Cunyie House” was, after its removal from Holyrood in Queen Mary’s time until the Union; and here, therefore, were the Scottish coins struck, of native Scottish gold. Next to South Gray’s Close is Hyndford’s Close, where Lady Maxwell of Monreith lived, and her daughters (one of whom was afterwards Duchess of Gordon) used gaily to ride up and down the High Street mounted on the pigs which had their humble dwellings under the fore-stairs. In Hyndford’s Close also lived the Countess of Balcarres, whose eldest daughter was Lady Anne Barnard (nÉe Lindsay), the author of “Young Jamie lo’ed me weel,” and whose letters to Lord Melville from South Africa were lately published. Tweeddale Close, a door or two farther on, once the stately town residence of the Marquises of Tweeddale, is now indissolubly connected with the story of a mysterious crime,—the Begbie murder; for it was just within this close that a bank porter was stabbed to death on a dark November afternoon in 1806. The murderer, in spite of all the hue and cry and horror that followed on his crime, died undiscovered.

On the north side of the High Street, on either side of John Knox’s manse, are two edifices whose outside decorations usually excite the wonder of the stranger. One of these, Bailie Fyfe’s Close (where Miss Nicky Murray “finished” her country cousins in all the airs and graces of the eighteenth century), is the “Heave awa’ Tavern,” and bears the head of a young lad carved in stone, and the words “Heave awa’ chaps, I’m no dead yet!” It was here that, on Sunday morning, 24th November 1861, a fine old dwelling, dating from 1612, sank suddenly, and buried thirty-five people in its ruins. This is the event of which Stevenson speaks in his Picturesque Notes,—enveloping it in a haze of gloom and rhetoric, and somehow conveying the impression that the fall was a judgment from Heaven on the city for some sin unknown, but grimly hinted—possibly its climate. But Stevenson omits the touch of heroism that crowns the tragedy: the boy whose brave young voice was heard under the beams and masonry that the rescuers were digging at—“Heave awa’ chaps, I’m no deid yet!” A building on the Canongate side of John Knox’s manse, a little way farther on, bears the enormous figure of what might be thought to be an Ethiopian, did not the name “Morocco Close” prove it intended for a Moor. There are several legends to account for this effigy; but all agree in giving an Edinburgh maiden (some make her the daughter of the Provost) to reign over the harem of the Sultan of Morocco. Some versions say that it was her brother who, having gained wealth by merchant dealings with his Morocco connexions, proudly decorated his house with an imaginary portrait of his brother-in-law, whom he has dressed in a necklace and a turban.

A little farther on is a close commonly called “Bible Close,” from the fact that it has a large open book carved over its entrance, on the pages of which is engraved a verse from the metrical version of the 133rd Psalm:—

This is Shoemakers’ Land; and the sentiment was evidently a favourite one, for the Cordiners’ land in West Port, and a court-house in Potterrow, also bore it.

It is in the Canongate that the most stately buildings remain, a fact not wonderful when one learns that in the eighteenth century, before the Scottish nobles “left their hame,” the Canongate included among its residents no less than two Dukes, sixteen Earls, two Countesses, seven Barons of the Realm, thirteen Baronets, four Commanders-in-Chief, seven Lords of Session, and five “eminent men”; not to mention a bank, a ladies’ school, and two inns. What material for romance! Some of the background remains, though the actors are gone.

On the south side of the Canongate are the three great houses: Moray House; a House “wi’oot a name” or a history, but with three carved Latin mottoes, and the date 1570 right across its frontage; and Queensberry House. Between these are several wonderfully interesting old buildings with rounded turrets containing turnpike stairs, lit by strongly barred windows.

On the north side of the Canongate, besides innumerable closes, all with interesting stories, are the Canongate Tolbooth, Whitehorse Inn, and the Canongate Parish Church.

Moray House was built in the reign of Charles I. by Lady Home (sister of the Countess of Moray), and is beautiful architecturally as well as interesting historically. Here Cromwell stayed during his first visit to Edinburgh in the summer of 1648; and the Cavalier party “talked very loud that he did communicate,” in Moray House, to the Marquis of Argyle and other disloyal peers and clergy, “his design in reference to the King.” But Moray House is chiefly notorious for its Balcony Scene. On Saturday, 15th May 1650, the Marquis of Argyle was attending the marriage festivities of his son, Lord Lorn, and the Earl of Moray’s daughter; and on that day the great Montrose was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of Edinburgh to the Tolbooth, amid all the insults that the cruelty of the Covenanting rabble could devise.

As the procession passed Moray House, the entire wedding party stepped out on to the balcony to exult over the fallen hero. It was an incident worthy of the French Revolution—the narrow street packed with a yelling and execrating populace, and in the midst of them that pale, proud, beautiful face of the vanquished royalist, and in the balcony above the gaily dressed group of wedding guests. The enemies looked at each other, and before the steady dignity of Montrose’s gaze Argyle turned away.

It was in a summer-house in the garden of Moray House that some of the signatures were affixed to the Treaty of Union in 1707, though others were signed in the greater secrecy of a cellar in the High Street.

In Queensberry House a horrible tragedy took place

the day the Treaty of the Union was passed. All Edinburgh had gathered at the Parliament House, many in order to mob the promoters of the hated measure, and the Canongate was left silent and deserted. The Marquis of Queensberry was prominent among those who had brought about the Union; and, when he returned home in triumph with his family and household, it was to find that in their absence the gigantic idiot son, Lord Drumlanrig, had escaped from his darkened prison-room, had wandered through the empty house till he came to the kitchen, and had there found the little turnspit turning the joint roasting for dinner. He had taken the joint from the fire, killed and spitted the child, and was devouring the half-roasted body. “This horrid act of his child was, according to the common sort of people, the judgment of God upon him for his wicked concern in the Union.”[45]

A pleasanter memory of Queensberry House is of

who was the patroness of the poet Gay.

The Canongate Tolbooth, with its barred windows, square tower, and turrets, forms to-day a picturesque and noticeable feature just where the Canongate ends.

Close to it is the gem of all the Edinburgh closes,—Whitehorse Close,—with its famous old inn with overhanging timber porches and its flight of steps branching to left and right.[46] This very fine old close is still intact,—has indeed been lately renovated. There is a story told that it was here that the fourteen Covenanting lords gathered to ride to Berwick in obedience to King Charles’s summons, and the Edinburgh citizens filled the court and prevented them, lest evil communications should corrupt good manners, and Montrose was the only one who got through the press and rode to his King. But, as a matter of fact, Loudon and Lothian also went to Berwick; and it is probable that Argyle and the other ten were inspired by other motives than fear of a street crowd for their refusal to go. The palace of John Paterson, the fifth of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh, a stately old mansion with a stone turnpike stair, is within Whitehorse Close. It is still called “the Bishop’s palace,” though many who call it so are unaware what manner of Bishop had his home in it.

Almost the last building, before the street widens out in front of the palace, is the old Canongate Parish Church, where in Catholic days all the ancient Guilds had each its pew, and in whose “God’s acre” so many of Edinburgh’s most famous and worthy citizens lie at rest, at the foot of the town where they spent their days.

CHAPTER V
SOME NOTABLE INHABITANTS, AND THEIR DWELLINGS

THE cosmopolitan view is nowadays the fashionable one, and no man stoops to own to a national prejudice, a national accent, or even a national pride. It may be as well. Trafalgar might have been won had Nelson never advised his men to hate a Frenchman as they would the devil. Perhaps, and perhaps not. It sounds a trifle harsh that King Robert the Bruce, on the mere suspicion that Sir Piers de Lombard had “ane English hart,” “made him to be hangit and drawen.” Perhaps, and perhaps not. At any rate, our stay-at-home ancestors bore the stamp of their nationality on character, thought, physiognomy, and speech. There were strong feelings in those days, that often found strong expression, and there were racy eccentricities and unsuppressed play of individuality; and all this gave colour and zest to local society. Before centralisation robbed Edinburgh of so many of her best citizens, her society was full of intellectual chiefs, of notabilities, and of “characters.” After all that has been said and sung of the beauty and romance of the grey metropolis, it is in great part due to the number and variety of remarkable persons who have been citizens of Edinburgh, or are in some way associated with it, that it wields so great a fascination and inspires so deep an interest.

The history of Edinburgh to the end of the eighteenth century is the history of the Old Town; and all the inhabitants till then were Old Town citizens. Few cities can enumerate so varied and brilliant a series. In the first place, of the unbroken line of Stuart sovereigns of Scotland, all, from the poet King James I. to Queen Mary, are famed alike for their beauty and their intellect. Their Edinburgh dwellings were the Castle and Holyrood. Then there is a long train of great Scottish nobles and clergy who lived in Edinburgh and helped to rule Scotland. There is a goodly company of learned men—prose writers, politicians, historians, “humanists,” mathematicians. In the earlier centuries they were mostly Catholic Churchmen; but, after the Reformation, they were Catholics, Presbyterian divines, or Episcopalians, or they were clustered about the University in unsectarian pasturages. There is a splendid procession

of “makars,”[47] men and women, who were Edinburgh citizens. There is a bevy of Scottish queens of society, each in her generation; clever and brilliant women, who, if they did not contribute to literature themselves, were the patrons and inspirers of those who did. James V. enlivened Edinburgh by the foundation of the Court of Session, since which time her society has been dominated by lawyers, and many a Scottish judge has left his name for wit and oddity among the glories of the Parliament House. James VI. enriched Edinburgh by the foundation of a University; and thence onwards she counted among her citizens many a learned scholar of eccentric dress and speech. Edinburgh has had her architects, her philanthropists, her great soldiers, and her explorers; and she has always been especially noted for her printers and her publishers. Nor is Edinburgh, with her love for romance, likely to forget her illustrious criminals. To enumerate merely the names of the notable citizens of all sorts would form a small volume in itself: it must suffice to hurry through the centuries, picking out a name at random here and there, and especially those connected with houses still standing in the Old Town of Edinburgh. So-called “improvements” have swept away many of Edinburgh’s historic possessions, among them Sandilands’ Close, with the old mansion said to have been the residence of Bishop Kennedy.[48] This name carries one back to the days of James II. and the early part of James III.’s reign, when Bishop Kennedy, one of the most important figures in Scottish history, was the great man in Scotland, and he and the Earl of Angus were struggling against Mary of Gueldres, the Queen-Mother, for supremacy. Scotland was then a fighting nation; and bale-fires were erected on hill-tops, in sight of one another, from the Borders to Stirling and the North, and were watched day and night, ready to bring Scotland under arms within two hours of any hostile movement of the English. Edinburgh was thronged with citizens clad according to James II.’s arbitrary regulations: its women of humbler class muffled, as they went to kirk or market, “under penalty of escheat of their kerchiefs”; its Bailies’ wives in “clothes of silk and costly scarlet and the fur of martens”; its labourers in grey or white, and on “hailie daies” in light-blue or green or red. A gay little town it must have been,—a gay little town, safe inside its encircling wall, with the bells of St. Giles’s telling every one the hour, and the Royal Standard waving on the Castle. Law, so omnipresent in Edinburgh nowadays, was then represented by nine persons meeting twice a year to administer justice. Education was going on in divers ways; was not the royal child learning the love of peaceable arts and crafts, and that respect for artists and craftsmen that was to prove his undoing with his warlike nobles? The upper windows of many of the city homes must have commanded a prospect of trees and broom growing on the hillsides beyond the city, where the landowners were bidden by law to plant and to preserve the game, where wolves prowled by night, where any Englishman was lawfully the captive of his captor, and where a sturdy beggar or a wandering bard might be nailed by his ear to any convenient tree. A pleasant prospect from one’s back windows!

Through the reigns of James IV. and James V. Edinburgh possessed many brilliant citizens. There was the poet William Dunbar, James IV.’s friar of St. Francis, and his “King’s Messenger.” With Flodden, Dunbar totally disappears,—all his poetic fire, his droll humour, his Scottish force,—buried in obscurity and silence. It will never be known whether “the auld grey horse, Dunbar” was patriotically amongst those who followed their royal master and—

or whether he survived and got his benefice at last, from the hands of the widowed Queen, or whether he died in broken-hearted poverty. Gavin Douglas, when he was Provost of St. Giles’s, lived in the Provost’s lodging beside the Church. Afterwards, when he became Bishop of Dunkeld, he lived in the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, in the Cowgate. The Cowgate was then a fashionable and but half-built suburb, lying below the main ridge of the city to the south, and communicating with the main city above it by numerous wynds and closes. The Flodden wall included the Cowgate, which the earlier wall had not done. Here were the palaces of many great Church dignitaries and many nobles,—the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, the town mansion of the Earl of Angus, (who in James III.’s reign was Gavin Douglas’s nephew); and in Blackfriars Wynd, which leads from the Cowgate up to the High Street, was the palace of the Archbishops of Glasgow (in Gavin Douglas’s day occupied by the famous Archbishop James Beaton). The memory of the great street fight known as “Cleanse the Causeway” clings round the sites of those three houses. This was the most famous of all the many fights that have taken place in the streets of Edinburgh, and was a political contest between the Douglases and the Hamiltons. From a conference held in the house of the Earl of Angus, the head of the Douglases, there hurried forth Bishop Gavin Douglas, his uncle, bearing a message from his nephew to the Earl of Arran, head of the Hamiltons, “to caution them against violence.” Finding them intent on violence, he appealed to his fellow-cleric, the Archbishop of Glasgow, who was with them. “On my conscience, I know nothing of the matter!” Archbishop Beaton assured Bishop Douglas, and struck his breast in emphasis. But the blow returned a rattling sound, betraying that the reverend Prelate was wearing armour below his rochet. “Your conscience clatters,[49] my Lord!” answered Gavin Douglas. So the peace mission failed, and the Hamiltons streamed through all the narrow wynds leading from the Cowgate into the High Street, and there found the Douglases awaiting them in a compact mass, and amid cries of “A Douglas! A Douglas!” and “A Hamilton! A Hamilton!” the slaughter began. When the causeways and the closes were piled with the dead, and the battle had been won by the Douglases, the Earl of Arran cut his way through his enemies and escaped by swimming the Nor’ Loch on a collier’s horse. Archbishop Beaton sought sanctuary in Blackfriars, and was dragged out from behind the Altar, and was saved, not by his clattering armour, but by the timely intercession of Gavin Douglas.

The next Scottish poet after Gavin Douglas was Lindsay, who was Lyon-King-at-Arms to James V. He also was a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh, and, like Gavin, has left poems addressed to it:—

James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, for six years Queen Regent of Scotland, had her palace and her oratory on the north side of the Castle Hill, where she was well protected by the guns of the Castle. It was accessible through narrow closes until 1846, with some remains of its former grandeur to be seen in lofty ceilings, in mouldings and carvings, the words “Laus et Honor Deo” and a monogram of the Virgin on the residence, and “Nosce Teipsum” and the date 1557 on the oratory. Now, its place knoweth it no more, and the United Free Assembly Hall reigns in its stead.

But, though the palace of the Frenchwoman, who struggled so hard against the wave of the Reformation as it swept over Scotland, is gone, the manse of the Reformer, her enemy, John Knox, remains,—not only preserved from destruction, but turned into a species of museum, with a custodian to click on the electric light. John Knox’s house[50] forms one of the popular sights of Edinburgh, and is a conspicuous and picturesque object, standing half-way down the High Street, with its angle of wooden frontage jutting out into the street, and its “fore-stair” and its gables. Over the door is the half-obliterated legend “Lufe God abufe al and yi nychtbour as yi self,” and there is a small effigy of Knox preaching, his hand pointing to a sun on which is engraved the name of God in English, in Greek, and in Latin. The house is three-storeyed. It is supposed that the Reformer occupied the first storey, where are shown the window from which he is said to have preached to the populace below, and his tiny study, with the old Scottish pin or risp on the door.

In James VI.’s reign there was many a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh; though James carried off some of them to England, to enliven the English Court, as he carried off the most valuable of the Holyrood pictures, and everything else he could lay his hands on. There was George Heriot, “Jingling Geordie”; and there was “Tam o’ the Cowgate,” the first Earl of

Haddington; and there was George Buchanan. George Heriot’s shop, said to have been but seven feet square, was the centre one of three small shops in a narrow passage leading from the door of the old Tolbooth to the “Laigh Council House,” where the Signet Library now stands. It remained in existence until 1809. His name was carved on the architrave of the door, and in the booth were found his forge and bellows, and the hollow stone of the furnace, with the stone cover to extinguish it at night. These were presented to the governors of Heriot’s Hospital. It was in this tiny booth, the story goes, that the goldsmith entertained the King with a “costly fire.” Heriot had been to Holyrood, and had found the King sitting by a fire of cedar wood, and had commented on the pleasant odour the burning of it made. Sordid King Jamie replied that it was as costly as it was pleasant. Heriot immediately answered that if the King would come and visit him he would show him a costlier fire. The King went, only to find a fire of ordinary fuel burning merrily in the little booth. But Jingling Geordie took from his press a bond for two thousand pounds he had lent the King, and laid it on the flames, and then inquired whether the Holyrood cedar or this formed the more costly fuel.

“Yours, most certainly, Master Heriot,” said his monarch.

The first Earl of Haddington lived, as King James’s nickname tells, in the Cowgate, and the house stood there till about 1829. Tam o’ the Cowgate was a learned judge, and, according to the ideas of that time, a man of such enormous wealth that it was popularly thought he had found the philosopher’s stone. One evening, when he was sitting with friend and flask, tired after a hard day, clad in an easy undress of nightgown, cap, and slippers, he heard a sudden uproar in the street. The students of the newly founded University and the boys of the High School were indulging in a “bicker”; and the University was winning. The Earl of Haddington had been a High School boy, and, as an old hunter becomes restive in his cart when he hears the distant chase, so the learned Privy Councillor leapt up, rushed forth, rallied his old school, and, in his nightgown, cap, and slippers, led the charge and pursued the routed students through the town and out at the West Port, locked the city gate on them, and then returned home to his unfinished flask and his waiting crony.

Another friend of King James was the Earl of Mar, who had been his fellow-pupil with George Buchanan. Him the King dubbed a “Jock o’ Sklates”; and when a marriage between the two powerful families of Mar and Haddington was contemplated, King James cried out, “The Lord haud grup o’ me! If Tam o’ the Cowgate’s son marry Jock o’ Sklates’s daughter, what’s to come o’ me?”

George Buchanan, the humanist and reformer, was a citizen of Edinburgh for many years. He was not one of those whom his royal pupil took with him across the Border. It was in a first-floor room in Kennedy’s Close,—a close no longer existing,—that George Buchanan died, in his seventy-sixth year. When he was dying, he was visited by Andrew Melville and his nephew, and was discovered giving a first reading lesson to a small boy—“a, b, ab; b, a, ba.” When his visitors expressed mild wonder at his occupation, the dying scholar, perhaps with some gleam of remembrance of his own boyhood in Dumbartonshire, replied, “Better this than stealin’ nowts.” Andrew Melville had brought with him some of the proof sheets of Buchanan’s Latin history, and—the small boy having probably slipped willingly off to play—these were discussed. They contained some allusions to his former pupil, the absent King James, now so alienated from the doctrines of Buchanan; and Andrew Melville hinted gently that these might be indiscreet, and productive of trouble. “Are they true?” demanded the historian. To Melville’s mind they had this quality. “Then I’ll bide his dreid and a’ his kin’s!”

In 1550 there was born at Merchiston Castle, on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, John Napier, the great mathematician, the inventor of logarithms, the chief representative of science in Scotland in his generation, and the correspondent of Kepler. He died in 1617 in the castle where he had been born; and this castle still remains, and none can pass the gateway in the wall, and glance through across the green sward to the old stone battlements, without remembering Napier of Merchiston.

During the reigns of James VI. and Charles I. an eminent Scotsman, of another, but equally patriotic, kind was living within a few miles of Edinburgh. This was Drummond of Hawthornden, Episcopalian and royalist, scholar and gentleman, who spent his meditative hours, wrote his poems, loved books and music and the Æsthetic possibilities of existence and every form of ennobling beauty,—“all great arts and all good philosophies,” in his—

And “all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most familiar ride or walk? Every other week must he not have been actually in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church, and known to have his favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite the Cross?”[51]

Another notable citizen of this reign was Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate. He was the grandson of that John de Hope, of the family of Des Houblons in Picardy, who had come over with Madeleine, James V.’s first queen, from France, in 1537, and from whom are descended, either directly or indirectly, many of the good old Scottish families,—the Hopes, the Hopetouns, some of the Erskines, the Bruces of Kinross, and others. John de Hope had been a staunch Catholic; but his son, Edward, was “chairged to waird in the Castell” for his usage of the priests; and the grandson, Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate, was one of the two lawyers who drew up the National League and Covenant. He lived in a big mansion in the Cowgate, which he built in 1616, with a wide arched entrance, a central stair, oak-panelled rooms, and decorated ceilings. The house was pulled down and the Public Library was built in 1890 on its site; but the carved inscription, TECVM. HABITA (from the fourth satire of Persius) which was above the lintel in the dwelling of the old Covenanting Advocate, is now preserved above an inner doorway of the Public Library. This Sir Thomas Hope had several sons, three of whom were judges; and there is an interesting portrait of him, in the possession of one of his descendants, representing him as wearing his legal robe and a kind of laurel wreath,—for it was not considered fitting, in those days of parental dignity, for a father to plead bareheaded before his sons.

Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh was King’s Advocate later on in the century, in the reigns of Charles II. and James VII., and his house, which had formerly been the “lodging” of the Abbots of Melrose, stood in Strichen’s Close, then called Rosehaugh Close, off the High Street, and had a large garden down to the Cowgate, and up part of the opposite slope. Sir George Mackenzie was a man of letters, and the friend and correspondent of Dryden, and the founder of the Advocates’ Library; but, ex officio, he was the prosecutor of the Covenanters,—and this is all that is known of him in the popular local mind. He is buried in Greyfriars’ Churchyard,—where the Covenant was signed on the flat tombstones,—and in old days little boys used to prove their daring by calling out at the door of his mausoleum—

But they never waited so see if their invitation were to be accepted.

It was in this gloomy refuge that James Hay, a youth of sixteen, under sentence of death for robbery, hid for six weeks after escaping from the Tolbooth. He was an old Heriot Hospital boy, and the other Herioters loyally braved Mackenzie’s ghost, and fed their schoolmate till the hue and cry was passed.

One other Edinburgh figure of the seventeenth century must be mentioned, the notorious Major Weir, whose story is said to have suggested the character of Manfred to Byron. He lived in “the sanctified bends of the Bow,” which was, at the end of the seventeenth century, a nest of pharisaical fanatics known as “Bow-head saints.” Of these Major Weir was one. He had “a grim countenance and a big nose”; he wore a black

cloak and carried a black staff; he was “notoriously regarded among the Presbyterian strict sect”; and “at private meetings he prayed to admiration.” In short, he was a pattern of sanctity, and was known among the “Holy sisters” of the Bow as “Angelical Thomas.” Alas! Angelical Thomas was not what he seemed. He never broke the Sabbath, but then he broke every other commandment in the Decalogue. When he was nearly seventy a severe illness led him to confess a long list of peculiarly horrible crimes. Perhaps, in this more prosaic age, the Major’s form of religion, his illness, his crimes and his confessions would all have been attributed to the same cause, and have landed him comfortably in an asylum for the insane. As he lived in the good old times, he was strangled and burnt between Edinburgh and Leith; whilst his sister Grizel, in deference to her sex, was gently hanged in the Grassmarket. Round the names of Major Weir and his sister a hundred gruesome legends sprang up, and “fearsome sichts were seen” in the West Bow; and the house that he had occupied there remained uninhabited and haunted until 1878, when it was pulled down.

The eighteenth century in Edinburgh, like the seventeenth, teems with so many names that it is hardly possible to mention all of even the most notable. There was Edinburgh’s Horace, Allan Ramsay, the poet and wig-maker, who scandalised the “unco guid” by bravely aiding and abetting in all that made for innocent joyousness, setting up a circulating library, doing his best to provide the town with a theatre, and losing money thereby, and encouraging the Assemblies and writing verses in their praise. His shop, where all the literati gathered, was beside the city Cross; but his quaint round house was on the Castle hill, and was long known in Edinburgh as “the Goose Pie.” It is still standing, but is incorporated in a large mass of new building, so that its characteristic shape is lost. Allan Ramsay’s son was another Allan Ramsay, and was portrait-painter to George III., and his son was General John Ramsay; so that the Goose Pie was owned in turn by three generations, all notable Edinburgh citizens.

Those were the days of Jacobite Edinburgh, when Jacobite sentiments were breathed in every close, and Jacobite sympathies were cherished in many old families. When the King’s health was drunk the goblet was silently passed over the caraffe of water to signify which King was meant, and portraits of the young Chevalier hung in many secret places of honour. The story of one of these Jacobite queens of society, who were generally also either authors themselves or patrons of art and letters, is told in Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh. Susanna, Countess of Eglintoun, was the daughter of Sir Archibald Kennedy, and the grand-daughter of Lord Newark, the Covenanting General. She became, when a very beautiful girl, the third wife of the ancient Lord Eglintoun, whose previous wives had left him without a male heir. She had been wooed by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who had sent her love-verses concealed in a flute, discoverable only to herself when she put her lips to it. But Sir Archibald, when asked for his daughter’s hand, consulted his old friend Lord Eglintoun on the subject. “Bide a wee, Sir Archie, my wife’s very sickly,” was the advice given—and taken. The daughter’s own feelings are matters of conjecture, not of history. Susanna Kennedy became Countess of Eglintoun about the time of the Union, and lived in Stamp Office Close, where seven daughters (who were afterwards to form one of the sights of Edinburgh as they were carried in sedan-chairs to the Assemblies) only decided the old peer to divorce his wife. The intention was diverted by the birth of a son. Having reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society for over a quarter of a century, and the death of her ancient lord in 1729 having made her a widow, Lady Eglintoun carried her social triumphs to London in 1730, where she was “much satisfied with the honour and civilities shewn her ladyship by the Queen and all the royal family.” In her old age Lady Eglintoun retained her loyalty to the house of Stuart, for it was told of her that a portrait of Prince Charlie was hung in her room so that it should be the first thing that met her sight in the mornings. And the only request she ever refused her son (10th Lord Eglintoun) was when he wished her to walk as a peeress in the Coronation of George III. She was a patroness of poets—if they were Tories (did she ever remember those verses inside a flute?); and to her Allan Ramsay, as Jacobite at heart as ever she was, dedicated his Gentle Shepherd. It was not in Stamp Office Close, but at her dower house, Auchans Castle, near Irvine, that she received Boswell and Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. She was then in her eighty-fifth year, and she and the lexicographer found their Church and State principles congenial, and the old lady told him she might have been his mother, and now adopted him. She kissed him at parting, which, it is said, made a lasting impression on him. The next curiosity the old Countess adopted was a large collection of rats, which she also succeeded in taming.

To the Jacobite gentlewomen of Edinburgh we owe many of our best-known Scottish songs. Baroness Nairne was of the old Jacobite and Episcopalian family of the Oliphants of Gask, and lived at Duddingston. Her house still stands, and is called Nairne Lodge. Mrs. Cockburn, the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” lived at one time in a close on the Castle Hill, and then on the first floor of a house at the end of Crichton Street, with windows looking along Potterrow. She, it may be remembered, was a friend of Scott’s mother, and wrote a prophetic letter about him when he was a child of six.

Adam Smith, after he came to Edinburgh in 1778 as Commissioner of Customs, lived for twelve years, till he died in 1790, in Panmure’s Close at the foot of the Canongate, and he is buried in Canongate Churchyard.

David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, was one of her notable inhabitants through nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. He was a rolling stone, for from 1751 to 1753 his home was in Riddle’s Land; thence he flitted to Jack’s Land, Canongate, was there for nine years, and deserted that for James’s Court. After this, like every one else, he joined in the rush to the New Town.

CHAPTER VI
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS

WHEN James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his—as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle, and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.

Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that Macbeth is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them. The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the freedom of the city.

Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh of that day,—the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]

Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the Edinburgh Courant. This must have been after his release from the State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street (so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere, and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere else,—especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it. Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his Walks in Edinburgh. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of one vast castle.”

Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.”

Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came in the cortÈge of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr. Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr. Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of “Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburgh literati. Here, during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of—

who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of ideas with the author of—

And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”

In the middle of the eighteenth century Goldsmith was a medical student in Edinburgh, living, it is said, in College Wynd, and writing amusing accounts of the dulness and formality and drollery of the Assemblies. An Edinburgh tailor’s account for the year 1753, found by the late Mr. David Laing in the pages of an old ledger, allows one to imagine Goldie gracing Edinburgh in a suit of sky-blue satin and black velvet, and a “superfine small hatt” which bore “8s. worth of silver hatt lace.” Mr. Filby the tailor charged the modest sum of £3:6:6 for a “superfine high claret-coloured” cloth suit; but possibly he might have charged double that amount or half that amount with equal profit to himself, for the account was “carried over,” and no ledger remains to tell the tale.[54]

Tobias Smollett paid two visits to Edinburgh, the last in 1766, when he stayed with his sister, Mrs. Telfer of Scotstoun, in St. John Street. This street, then inhabited by some of the aristocracy of Edinburgh, still retains a distinguished look; and much of the fine old architecture remains, including Mrs. Telfer’s home, which was in the first floor of the house over the great archway through which the street is entered. This house, which was previously the residence of the Earl of Hopetoun, attracts the eye immediately by its turnpike stair, occupying the corner of the street, beside the arched entrance. Smollett was introduced by Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk to Edinburgh literary celebrities, among them Home, who had so scandalised his brother clergy by writing a play,—“The Douglas”; and, like Gay thirty years before, he haunted Allan Ramsay’s library,—in Smollett’s day the property of Alexander Kincaid the publisher. Humphrey Clinker contains all Smollett’s comments on Edinburgh society, men, and manners.

Three years later, in 1769, Benjamin Franklin visited Edinburgh. He was given the freedom of the city, and was accorded the usual hospitable welcome from all the chief people of the town.

On a Saturday evening in August 1773, Dr. Johnson’s huge figure filled the doorway of the old Whitehorse Inn in Boyd’s Close, and presently Boswell, in his house in James’s Court, received the following note:—

Boswell hurried off to welcome the traveller, and found him roaring passionately at the waiter, who had put sugar into the lemonade with his fingers. Out into the hot August evening the two friends went, and walked up the High Street arm-in-arm to James’s Court, where Mrs. Boswell waited to administer tea to her ponderous rival. “Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms,” Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale, “level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other, four stories high.” Here Mr. and Mrs. Boswell invited all the people of brilliant achievement in the city to meet him,—Dr. Robertson, Dr. Blair, Mrs. Murray of Henderland, Allan Ramsay the artist, Beattie the poet, Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, and many others; but among them was the Duchess of Douglas, “talking broad Scotch with a paralytic voice,” and Dr. Johnson showed open preference for her society. What all these people thought of Dr. Johnson is suggested by the wit of Henry Erskine, the well-known Edinburgh advocate, brother of the Earl of Buchan. After much inimitable politeness and good-humour during his presentation to Johnson, he slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand for the sight of “your English bear.” Mrs. Boswell (nÉe Montgomery, one of the Eglintoun family) was equally

witty and even more frank. She had certainly some provocation, because, as Boswell himself tells, Dr. Johnson had, among other habits, one of turning the candles upside down when they did not burn brightly enough. “I have often seen a bear led by a man,” the much-tried hostess told her infatuated lord, “but I never before saw a man led by a bear.”

Boswell not only invited all Edinburgh to meet Dr. Johnson, but took Dr. Johnson to all the sights of the city. On Sunday, after they had attended service in the Episcopal chapel in Blackfriars Wynd, Johnson saw Holyrood; and, under the guidance of Principal Robertson, he and Boswell went over the University. Boswell also took his guest to the island of Inchkeith, and to stay with Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield for a few days, and they dined and drank tea at the old inn at Roslin, and

Many of Dr. Johnson’s comments on things Scottish were quite genial; but two terse ones expressed decided disapproval. “No, Sir!” he bellowed, when some one proposed to introduce him to David Hume. And again, “I can smell you in the dark!” he grumbled to Boswell, no doubt most truthfully, as they walked through the city.

A year after Dr. Johnson’s visit there came to Edinburgh and its hospitalities another Englishman. Captain Topham cannot be called a famous visitor, but he deserves mention, both because of his charming little book, Letters from Edinburgh, written in the Years 1774 and 1775, and because of the artistic contrast he forms to Dr. Johnson. Captain Topham must have re-established his country’s character for good manners in the opinion of Edinburgh citizens. He had not compiled a dictionary; neither had he “kept a school and ca’d it an academy,” as old Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, said of Johnson; but he was a wide-minded man of good breeding, had been educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, had travelled, and held a commission in the Guards, and seems to have been equipped for enjoying social existence, and adding to its enjoyment by others. He was by no means sparing in his comments; his humour would make that impossible. Amid all his graphic descriptions it is difficult to choose what comments to quote. Of the city itself he says, “The situation of Edinburgh is probably as extraordinary as one can well imagine for a metropolis. The immense hills, on which great part of it is built, though they make the views uncommonly magnificent, not only in many places render it impassable for carriages, but very fatiguing for walking.” He tells of the bad inns, and here again his good-humour saves him. No swearing at the waiter without sugar-tongs, but—“Well, said I to my friend (for you must know that I have more patience on these occasions than wit on any other) there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be able to repose ourselves at some coffeehouse.” He describes the amusements,—the theatre, the assemblies and dances, the oyster cellars, the funerals, and the executions. The Kirk and devotion, the University and education, trade and the booksellers, all are spoken of. He gives a warm picture of a very friendly and hospitable town, simple in its ways and hours and incomes and requirements, but brimful of intellect and cultured love of letters and music, and peopled by a kindly, couthy race, with very strongly marked characters, dwelling together in unity at very close quarters.

The only social error Captain Topham seems to have made was when a lady invited him to an oyster supper in a cellar. He “agreed immediately,” but complains pathetically to his correspondent, “You will not think it very odd that I should expect, from the place where the appointment was made, to have had a partie tÊte-À-tÊte. I thought I was bound in honour to keep it a secret, and waited with great impatience till the hour arrived. When the clock struck the hour fixed on, away I went, and inquired if the lady were there. ‘Oh yes,’ cried the woman, ‘she has been here an hour or more.’ I had just time to curse my want of punctuality when the door opened, and I had the pleasure of being ushered in, not to one lady as I had expected, but to a large and brilliant company of both sexes, most of whom I had the honour of being acquainted with.”

But even Captain Topham’s amiable temper has its limits. Of two things he speaks evil,—of his predecessor, Dr. Johnson, and of a haggis.

In November 1786 Burns paid his first and famous visit to Edinburgh. He came, dejected, unknown, his mind hovering on the thoughts of intended exile; and in a moment, as it were, Edinburgh recognised him, and flashed on all her lights to welcome him and do his genius honour. There followed the most brilliant and triumphant period of all his short life. He was fÊted and lionised by all ranks of society; the magnates and the celebrities, the literary and the learned, the high-born and the low-born, the fashionable and the gay, beautiful women and great men, vied with each other in entertaining this wonderful poet with the rustic garb and the dark eyes. Burns was the honoured and petted guest of every man and woman of note in Edinburgh—of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, of Sir John Whiteford, of the Ferriers at 15 George Street, of the eccentric Lord Monboddo and his “angel” daughter at 13 St. John Street, and of a hundred more. He rollicked in Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd, or, among the “Crochallan Fencibles,” listened to Dawney Douglas quavering the minor pathos of his Gaelic song, “Cro Chalien.” He stood bareheaded beside the unmarked grave of Fergusson in the Canongate Churchyard, and knelt and kissed the spot, and sent to ask if the “Ayrshire ploughman” might erect a stone to the memory of the poet to whom he owed so much. He read aloud his “Cottar’s Saturday Night” before the young Duchess of Gordon and the lovely Miss Burnet, and bewildered them with his fascination and his genius. He published his Edinburgh edition of his poems, and dedicated them to the Caledonian Hunt; and the names of all his admirers and hosts are still there—a long list of good, well-known Scottish names.

In 1786 there occurred the memorable meeting, at the house of Professor Adam Fergusson, between Burns and Scott. There was a gathering of “several gentlemen of literary reputation,” and Scott, a boy of fifteen, was present. Scott “had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him,” but, with the better manners of that period, “of course we youngsters sat silent and listened.” Burns was affected by one of the pictures on the wall, and the lines printed beneath it. He “actually shed tears,” and asked whose the lines were. None of the “gentlemen of literary reputation” volunteering the information, Scott whispered to a friend that they were Langhorne’s, and the friend told Burns, who turned to the boy with a “look and a word.” “You’ll be a man yet!” is what Burns said: and those words and that look are all the link between these two great Scottish poets, who “spoke each other in passing.”

It was not until December 1787 that Burns met “Clarinda,” the very lovely Mrs. M‘Lehose, a cousin-german of Lord Craig’s. She, forsaken by her husband, lived in a house of three rooms in General’s Entry, between Bristo Street and Potterrow. Burns had met her only once, at a tea-party gathering, before—he having met with a carriage accident and being unable to leave his lodgings—their famous “Clarinda and Sylvander” correspondence began. Clarinda possessed more than beauty, as her letters and verses show. There were many beautiful faces in Edinburgh, and Burns has immortalised them in his eulogies—Miss Burnet, Miss Ferrier, Miss Whiteford; but poor Clarinda’s verses he has mingled with his own. It is said that it was these two marvellous lines of hers that first struck him:—

Clarinda continued to live on in Edinburgh, and died there when nearly eighty, with a picture of the long-dead Sylvander beside her.

Of all comments on Edinburgh the best-known is Burns’s passionate salutation to the venerable city:—