Chapter C: E. S. Chambers (1)

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CONTENTS.

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THE CHANGES OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS 1

THE CASTLE-HILL 11

Hugo Arnot—Allan Ramsay—House of the Gordon Family—Sir David
Baird—Dr Webster—House of Mary de Guise.

THE WEST BOW 26

The Bowhead—Weigh-house—Anderson’s Pills—Oratories—Colonel
Gardiner—‘Bowhead Saints’—‘The Seizers’—Story of a Jacobite
Canary—Major Weir—Tulzies—The Tinklarian Doctor—Old
Assembly Room—Paul Romieu—‘He that Tholes Overcomes’—Provost
Stewart—Donaldsons the Booksellers—Bowfoot—The Templars’
Lands—The Gallows Stone.

JAMES’S COURT 55

David Hume—James Boswell—Lord Fountainhall.

STORY OF THE COUNTESS OF STAIR 63

THE OLD BANK CLOSE 70

The Regent Morton—The Old Bank—Sir Thomas Hope—Chiesly of
Dalry—Rich Merchants of the Sixteenth Century—Sir William
Dick—The Birth of Lord Brougham.

THE OLD TOLBOOTH 82

SOME MEMORIES OF THE LUCKENBOOTHS 95

Lord Coalstoun and his Wig—Commendator Bothwell’s House—Lady
Anne Bothwell—Mahogany Lands and Fore-stairs—The
Krames—Creech’s Shop.

SOME MEMORANDA OF THE OLD KIRK OF ST GILES 105

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE 109

Ancient Churchyard—Booths attached to the High
Church—Goldsmiths—George Heriot—The Deid-Chack.

MEMORIALS OF THE NOR’ LOCH 117

THE PARLIAMENT HOUSE 119

Old Arrangements of the House—Justice in Bygone Times—_Court
of Session Garland_—Parliament House Worthies.

CONVIVIALIA 138

TAVERNS OF OLD TIMES 158

THE CROSS—CADDIES 174

THE TOWN-GUARD 179

EDINBURGH MOBS 183

The Blue Blanket—Mobs of the Seventeenth Century—Bowed Joseph.

BICKERS 189

SUSANNA, COUNTESS OF EGLINTOUNE 192

FEMALE DRESSES OF LAST CENTURY 199

THE LORD JUSTICE-CLERK ALVA 204

Ladies Sutherland and Glenorchy—The Pin or Risp.

MARLIN’S AND NIDDRY’S WYNDS 209

Tradition of Marlin the Pavier—House of Provost Edward—Story
of Lady Grange.

ABBOT OF MELROSE’S LODGING 223

Sir George Mackenzie—Lady Anne Dick.

BLACKFRIARS WYND 228

Palace of Archbishop Bethune—Boarding-Schools of the Last
Century—The Last of the Lorimers—Lady Lovat.

THE COWGATE 240

House of Gavin Douglas the Poet—Skirmish of Cleanse-the-Causeway
—College Wynd—Birthplace of Sir Walter Scott—The Horse
Wynd—Tam o’ the Cowgate—Magdalen Chapel.

ST CECILIA’S HALL 249

THE MURDER OF DARNLEY 256

MINT CLOSE 260

The Mint—Robert Cullen—Lord Chancellor Loughborough.

MISS NICKY MURRAY 265

THE BISHOP’S LAND 269

JOHN KNOX’S MANSE 271

HYNDFORD’S CLOSE 275

HOUSE OF THE MARQUISES OF TWEEDDALE—THE BEGBIE TRAGEDY 279

THE LADIES OF TRAQUAIR 286

GREYFRIARS CHURCHYARD 288

Signing of the Covenant—Henderson’s Monument—Bothwell Bridge
Prisoners—A Romance.

STORY OF MRS MACFARLANE 291

THE CANONGATE 295

Distinguished Inhabitants in Former Times—Story of a
Burning—Morocco’s Land—New Street.

ST JOHN STREET 302

Lord Monboddo’s Suppers—The Sister of Smollett—Anecdote of
Henry Dundas.

MORAY HOUSE 306

THE SPEAKING HOUSE 312

PANMURE HOUSE—ADAM SMITH 318

JOHN PATERSON THE GOLFER 320

LOTHIAN HUT 323

HENRY PRENTICE AND POTATOES 325

THE DUCHESS OF BUCCLEUCH AND MONMOUTH 327

CLAUDERO 330

QUEENSBERRY HOUSE 336

TENNIS COURT 344

Early Theatricals—The Canongate Theatre—Digges and Mrs
Bellamy—A Theatrical Riot.

MARIONVILLE—STORY OF CAPTAIN MACRAE 351

ALISON SQUARE 358

LEITH WALK 360

GABRIEL’S ROAD 366

INDEX 369

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

An Elegant Modern City _Frontispiece_

Map of Edinburgh, Old and New xxvi

A series of towers rising from a palace on the plain
to a castle in the air _Colour Drawing_ 1

White Hart Inn, Grassmarket ” ” 2

Newhaven Fishwife ” ” 4

Rouping-Wife ” ” 9

The Castle-Hill ” ” 11

Duke of Gordon’s House ” ” 18

The Bowhead ” ” 27

Grassmarket, from west end of Cowgate ” ” 50

Edinburgh, from the Calton Hill ” ” 83

St Giles, West Window ” ” 105

Heriot’s Hospital, from Greyfriars Churchyard ” ” 113

A Suggestion of the North Loch and St Cuthbert’s,
from Allan Ramsay’s Garden ” ” 117

The Parliament House ” ” 128

‘Auld Reekie,’ from Largo ” ” 152

Upper Baxter’s Close, where Burns first resided
in Edinburgh ” ” 164

White Horse Inn ” ” 170

Forenoon at the Cross ” ” 174

The Town-Guard ” ” 179

The Castle, from Princes Street ” ” 214

Blackfriars Wynd ” ” 228

The Cowgate ” ” 240

Old Houses, College Wynd (near here Sir Walter
Scott was born) ” ” 242

John Knox’s Manse ” ” 274

Greyfriars Churchyard ” ” 288

St John’s Close, Entrance to Canongate Kilwinning
Mason Lodge ” ” 305

* * * * *

The objects of interest between the Castle and Holyrood are grouped topographically in the following list, with references to the Map.

West Bow CC| LAWNMARKET D| Mylne’s Court 8 Angle of Bow Z| Tolbooth e| James’s Court 10 Riddel’s Close 7| Luckenbooths f| Lady Stair’s Close 12 Brodie’s Close 9| St Giles’ | Upper Baxter’s 14 Old Bank Close 11| {Haddo’s Hole Church g| Close Liberton’s Wynd 13| {Tolbooth Church h| Wardrop’s Court 16 | {Old Church | Paterson’s Court 18 | {New Church |

EDINBURGH OLD AND NEW.

In the map the streets and buildings printed in black represent the historic Old Town; those in red indicate not merely the ‘New Town’ to the north, specifically so called, but some part of the alterations, additions, and extensions round the ancient nucleus that have gone to constitute the Edinburgh of the present day.

KEY TO THE STREETS AND BUILDINGS NOT NAMED ON MAP.

Acheson House 67 Allan Ramsay’s House a Anchor Close 32 Angle of Bow Z Assembly Close 25 Back Stairs 21 Bailie Fife’s Close 44 Bank of Scotland red F Beith’s or Bess Wynd 17 Bell’s Wynd 27 Blackfriars Wynd 41 Blair’s or Baird’s Close 1 Blyth’s Close 2 Bristo N Bristo Port O Brodie’s Close 9 Brown’s Close 3 Byres’s Close 22 Calton Burying-Ground t Candlemaker Row T Canongate Church 58 Canongate Churchyard q Cant’s Close 37 Carrubber’s Close 42 Castlehill B Castlehill Walk or Esplanade A Castle Wynd 74 Chalmers’ Close 46 Chessels’s Court 53 College Wynd 71 Council Chambers red G County Buildings red I Court of Session red K Cowgate J J Cowgate Port L Cross x Dickson’s Close 35 Dunbar’s Close 20 Established Church Assembly Hall red h Fishmarket Close 23 Fleshmarket m Fleshmarket Close 88 Free Library red L General Post-Office red E Golfers’ Land 62 Gordon’s (Duke of) House b Greenmarket n Guard House i Halkerston’s Wynd 40 Heriot’s Hospital V Heriot-Watt College red n n High School Wynd 72 High Street E E Holyrood G Hope’s Close 15 Horse Wynd 70 Hyndford’s Close 47 Jack’s Land 54 Jackson’s Close 36 James’s Court 10 John Knox’s Manse p Lady Stair’s Close 12 Lauriston M M Lawnmarket D Leith Wynd 48 Liberton’s Wynd 13 Luckenbooths f Lyon Close 34 Magdalen Chapel 66 Marlin’s Wynd 31 Mary King’s Close 28 Mary of Guise’s House, Site of c Mint Close 45 Mint, The Old o Moray House 63 Morocco’s Land 50 Mutrie’s Hill u Mylne’s Court 8 Nairn’s Close 4 Nether Bow Port F New Street 52 Niddry’s Wynd 33 Old Bank Close 11 Old Playhouse Close 57 Panmure House 60 Parliament Close 19 Parliament House k Paterson’s Court 18 Peebles Wynd 29 Pleasance R Portsburgh H Post-Office Close 80 Potterrow P Potterrow Port Q Queensberry House 69 Register House red A Riddel’s Close 7 Royal Exchange 26 Royal Infirmary K Royal Scottish Academy Galleries red B St Cecilia’s Hall, Site of l St Giles’— Haddo’s Hole Church g Tolbooth Church h St John’s Close 59 St John’s Street 61 St Mary’s Wynd 51 Scottish National Gallery red C Scott’s (Sir Walter) Monument red D Sheriff Court House red M Speaking House 65 S.S.C. Library red J Strichen’s Close 39 Surgeons’ Hall red o Tailors’ Hall 68 Todrick’s Wynd 43 Tod’s Close 6 Tolbooth e Tolbooth Wynd 56 Trinity College Church S Tron Church j Tweeddale Court 49 Upper Baxter’s Close 14 Wardrop’s Court 16 Water Gate r Webster’s Close 5 Weigh-House d Weir’s Close 55 West Bow C C West Port I White Hart Inn 73 White Horse Inn 64 Writers’ Court 24

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PAGE 1.]

* * * * *

TRADITIONS OF EDINBURGH.

THE CHANGES OF THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS.

[1745-1845.]

Edinburgh was, at the beginning of George III.’s reign, a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town, of about seventy thousand inhabitants. It had no court, no factories, no commerce; but there was a nest of lawyers in it, attending upon the Court of Session; and a considerable number of the Scotch gentry—one of whom then passed as rich with a thousand a year—gave it the benefit of their presence during the winter. Thus the town had lived for some ages, during which political discontent and division had kept the country poor. A stranger approaching the city, seeing it piled ‘close and massy, deep and high’—a series of towers, rising from a palace on the plain to a castle in the air—would have thought it a truly romantic place; and the impression would not have subsided much on a near inspection, when he would have found himself admitted by a fortified gate through an ancient wall, still kept in repair. Even on entering the one old street of which the city chiefly consisted, he would have seen much to admire—houses of substantial architecture and lofty proportions, mingled with more lowly, but also more arresting wooden fabrics; a huge and irregular, but venerable Gothic church, surmounted by an aërial crown of masonry; finally, an esplanade towards the Castle, from which he could have looked abroad upon half a score of counties, upon firth and fell, yea, even to the blue Grampians. Everywhere he would have seen symptoms of denseness of population; the open street a universal market; a pell-mell of people everywhere. The eye would have been, upon the whole, gratified, whatever might be the effect of the _clangor strepitusque_ upon the ear, or whatever might have been the private meditations of the nose. It would have only been on coming to close quarters, or to quarters at all, that our stranger would have begun to think of serious drawbacks from the first impression. For an inn, he would have had the White Horse, in a close in the Canongate; or the White Hart, a house which now appears like a carrier’s inn, in the Grassmarket. Or, had he betaken himself to a private lodging, which he would have probably done under the conduct of a ragged varlet, speaking more of his native Gaelic than English, he would have had to ascend four or five stories of a common stair, into the narrow chambers of some Mrs Balgray or Luckie Fergusson, where a closet-bed in the sitting-room would have been displayed as the most comfortable place in the world; and he would have had, for amusement, a choice between an extensive view of house-tops from the window and the study of a series of prints of the four seasons, a sampler, and a portrait of the Marquis of Granby, upon the wall.

PAGE 2.]

On being introduced into society, our stranger might have discovered cause for content with his lodging on finding how poorly off were the first people with respect to domestic accommodations. I can imagine him going to tea at Mr Bruce of Kennet’s, in Forrester’s Wynd—a country gentleman and a lawyer (not long after raised to the bench), yet happy to live with his wife and children in a house of fifteen pounds of rent, in a region of profound darkness and mystery, now no more. Had he got into familiar terms with the worthy lady of the mansion, he might have ascertained that they had just three rooms and a kitchen; one room, ‘my lady’s’—that is, the kind of parlour he was sitting in; another, a consulting-room for the gentleman; the third, a bedroom. The children, with their maid, had beds laid down for them at night in their father’s room; the housemaid slept under the kitchen dresser; and the one man-servant was turned at night out of the house. Had our friend chanced to get amongst tradespeople, he might have found Mr Kerr, the eminent goldsmith in the Parliament Square, stowing his _ménage_ into a couple of small rooms above his booth-like shop, plastered against the wall of St Giles’s Church; the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.

But indeed everything was on a homely and narrow scale. The College—where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names—was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half-filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes and dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the _Poker Club_ in a tavern, the best of its day, but only a dark house in a close, to which our stranger could scarcely have made his way without a guide. In a similar situation across the way, he would have found, at the proper season, the _Assembly_; that is, a congregation of ladies met for dancing, and whom the gentlemen usually joined rather late, and rather merry. The only theatre was also a poor and obscure place in some indescribable part of the Canongate.

The town was, nevertheless, a funny, familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and semple living within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and took an interest in each other.[1] Acquaintances might not only be formed, Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, through party-walls, but from window to window across alleys, narrow enough in many cases to allow of hand coming to hand, and even lip to lip. There was little elegance, but a vast amount of cheap sociality. Provokingly comical clubs, founded each upon one joke, were abundant. The ladies had tea-drinkings at the primitive hour of six, from which they cruised home under the care of a lantern-bearing, patten-shod lass; or perhaps, if a bad night, in Saunders Macalpine’s sedan-chair. Every forenoon, for several hours, the only clear space which the town presented—that around the Cross—was crowded with loungers of all ranks, whom it had been an amusement to the poet Gay to survey from the neighbouring windows of Allan Ramsay’s shop. The jostle and huddlement was extreme everywhere. Gentlemen and ladies paraded along in the stately attire of the period; tradesmen chatted in groups, often bareheaded, at their shop-doors; caddies whisked about, bearing messages, or attending to the affairs of strangers; children filled the kennel with their noisy sports. Add to all this, corduroyed men from Gilmerton, bawling coals or yellow sand, and spending as much breath in a minute as could have served poor asthmatic Hugo Arnot for a month; fishwomen crying their caller haddies from Newhaven; whimsicals and idiots going along, each with his or her crowd of listeners or tormentors; sootymen with their bags; town-guardsmen with their antique Lochaber axes; water-carriers with their dripping barrels; barbers with their hair-dressing materials; and so forth—and our stranger would have been disposed to acknowledge that, though a coarse and confused, it was a perfectly unique scene, and one which, once contemplated, was not easily to be forgotten.

A change at length began. Our northern country had settled to sober courses in the reign of George II., and the usual results of industry were soon apparent. Edinburgh by-and-by felt much like a lady who, after long being content with a small and inconvenient house, is taught, by the money in her husband’s pockets, that such a place is no longer to be put up with. There was a wish to expatiate over some of the neighbouring grounds, so as to get more space and freer air; only it was difficult to do, considering the physical circumstances of the town, and the character of the existing outlets. Space, space!—air, air! was, however, a strong and a general cry, and the old romantic city did at length burst from its bounds, though not in a very regular way, or for a time to much good purpose.

PAGE 4.]

A project for a new street on the site of Halkerston’s Wynd, leading by a bridge to the grounds of Mutrie’s Hill, where a suburb might be erected, was formed before the end of the seventeenth century.[2] It was a subject of speculation to John, Earl of Mar, during his years of exile, as were many other schemes of national improvement which have since been realised—for example, the Forth and Clyde Canal. The grounds to the north lay so invitingly open that the early formation of such a project is not wonderful. Want of spirit and of means alone could delay its execution. After the Rebellion of 1745, when a general spirit of improvement began to be shown in Scotland, the scheme was taken up by a public-spirited provost, Mr George Drummond, but it had to struggle for years with local difficulties. Meanwhile, a sagacious builder, by name James Brown, resolved to take advantage of the growing taste; he purchased a field near the town for £1200, and _feued_ it out for a square. The speculation is said to have ended in something like giving him his own money as an annual return. This place (George Square) became the residence of several of the judges and gentry. I was amused a few years ago hearing an old gentleman in the country begin a story thus: ‘When I was in Edinburgh, in the year ’67, I went to George Square, to call for Mrs Scott of Sinton,’ &c. To this day some relics of gentry cling to its grass-green causeways, charmed, perhaps, by its propinquity to the Meadows and Bruntsfield Links. Another place sprang into being, a smaller quadrangle of neat houses, called Brown’s Square.[3] So much was thought of it at first that a correspondent of the _Edinburgh Advertiser_, in 1764, seriously counsels his fellow-citizens to erect in it an equestrian statue of the then popular young king, George III.! This place, too, had some distinguished inhabitants; till 1846, one of the houses continued to be nominally the town mansion of a venerable judge, Lord Glenlee. We pass willingly from these traits of grandeur to dwell on the fact of its having been the residence of Miss Jeanie Elliot of Minto, the authoress of the original song, _The Flowers of the Forest_; and even to bethink ourselves that here Scott placed the ideal abode of Saunders Fairford and the adventure of Green Mantle. Sir Walter has informed us, from his own recollections, that the inhabitants of these southern districts formed for a long time a distinct class of themselves, having even places of polite amusement for their own recreation, independent of the rest of Edinburgh. He tells us that the society was of the first description, including, for one thing, most of the gentlemen who wrote in the _Mirror_ and the _Lounger_. There was one venerable inhabitant who did not die till half the New Town was finished, yet he had never once seen it!

The exertions of Drummond at length procured an act (1767) for extending the royalty of the city over the northern fields; and a bridge was then erected to connect these with the elder city. The scheme was at first far from popular. The exposure to the north and east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered that a lover told a New-Town mistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that when he visited her, he felt as performing an adventure not much short of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers should forget them if they removed so far from the centre of things as Princes Street and St Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable, and behoved to be made.

It is curious to cast the eye over the beautiful city which now extends over this district, the residence of as refined a mass of people as could be found in any similar space of ground upon earth, and reflect on what the place was a hundred years ago. The bulk of it was a farm, usually called Wood’s Farm, from its tenant (the father of a clever surgeon, well known in Edinburgh in the last age under the familiar appellation of _Lang Sandy Wood_). Henry Mackenzie, author of the _Man of Feeling_, who died in 1831, remembered shooting snipes, hares, and partridges about that very spot to which he alludes at the beginning of the paper on Nancy Collins in the _Mirror_ (July 1779): ‘As I walked one evening, about a fortnight ago, _through St Andrew Square_, I observed a girl meanly dressed,’ &c. Nearly along the line now occupied by Princes Street was a rough enclosed road, called the _Lang Gait_ or _Lang Dykes_, the way along which Claverhouse went with his troopers in 1689, when he retired in disgust from the Convention, with the resolution of raising a rebellion in the Highlands. On the site of the present Register House was a hamlet or small group of houses called _Mutrie’s Hill_; and where the Royal Bank now stands was a cottage wherein ambulative citizens regaled themselves with fruit and curds and cream. Broughton, which latterly has been surprised and swamped by the spreading city, was then a village, considered as so far afield that people went to live in it for the summer months, under the pleasing idea that they had got into the country. It is related that Whitefield used to preach to vast multitudes on the spot which by-and-by became appropriated for the _Theatre Royal_. Coming back one year, and finding a playhouse on the site of his tub, he was extremely incensed. Could it be, as Burns suggests,

‘There was rivalry just in the job!’

James Craig, a nephew of the poet Thomson, was entrusted with the duty of planning the new city. In the engraved plan, he appropriately quotes from his uncle:

‘August, around, what PUBLIC WORKS I see!
Lo, stately streets! lo, squares that court the breeze!
See long canals and deepened rivers join
Each part with each, and with the circling main,
The whole entwined isle.’

The names of the streets and squares were taken from the royal family and the tutelary saints of the island. The honest citizens had originally intended to put their own local saint in the foreground; but when the plan was shown to the king for his approval, he cried: ‘Hey, hey—what, what—_St Giles Street!_—never do, never do!’ And so, to escape from an unpleasant association of ideas, this street was called _Princes Street_, in honour of the king’s two sons, afterwards George IV. and the Duke of York. So difficult was it at the very first to induce men to build that a premium of twenty pounds was offered by the magistrates to him who should raise the first house; it was awarded to Mr John Young, on account of a mansion erected by him in Rose Court, George Street. An exemption from burghal taxes was granted to the first house in the line of Princes Street, built by Mr John Neale, haberdasher (afterwards occupied by Archibald Constable, and then as the Crown Hotel), in consequence of a bargain made by Mr Graham, plumber, who sold this and the adjoining ground to the town.[4] Mr Shadrach Moyes, when having a house built for himself in Princes Street, in 1769, took the builder bound to rear another farther along besides his, to shield him from the west wind! Other quaint particulars are remembered; as, for instance: Mr Wight, an eminent lawyer, who had planted himself in St Andrew Square, finding he was in danger of having his view of St Giles’s clock shut up by the advancing line of Princes Street, built the intervening house himself, that he might have it in his power to keep the roof low for the sake of the view in question; important to him, he said, as enabling him to regulate his movements in the morning, when it was necessary that he should be punctual in his attendance at the Parliament House.

PAGE 9.]

The foundation was at length laid of that revolution which has ended in making Edinburgh a kind of double city—_first_, an ancient and picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes; and _second_, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect, and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of society. The New Town, keeping pace with the growing prosperity of the country, had, in 1790, been extended to Castle Street; in 1800 the necessity for a second plan of the same extent still farther to the north had been felt, and this was after acted upon. Forty years saw the Old Town thoroughly changed as respects population. One after another, its nobles and gentry, its men of the robe, its ‘writers,’ and even its substantial burghers, had during that time deserted their mansions in the High Street and Canongate, till few were left. Even those modern districts connected with it, as St John Street, New Street, George Square, &c., were beginning to be forsaken for the sake of more elegantly circumstanced habitations beyond the North Loch. Into the remote social consequences of this change it is not my purpose to enter, beyond the bare remark that it was only too accordant with that tendency of our present form of civilisation to separate the high from the low, the intelligent from the ignorant—that dissociation, in short, which would in itself run nigh to be a condemnation of all progress, if we were not allowed to suppose that better forms of civilisation are realisable. Enough that I mention the tangible consequences of the revolution—a flooding in of the humbler trading classes where gentles once had been; the houses of these classes, again, filled with the vile and miserable. Now were to be seen hundreds of instances of such changes as Provost Creech indicates in 1783: ‘The Lord Justice-Clerk Tinwald’s house possessed by a French teacher—Lord President Craigie’s house by a rouping-wife or salewoman of old furniture—and Lord Drummore’s house left by a chairman for want of accommodation.’ ‘The house of the Duke of Douglas at the Union, now possessed by a wheelwright!’ To one who, like myself, was young in the early part of the present century, it was scarcely possible, as he permeated the streets and closes of ancient Edinburgh, to realise the idea of a time when the great were housed therein. But many a gentleman in middle life, then living perhaps in Queen Street or Charlotte Square, could recollect the close or the common stair where he had been born and spent his earliest years, now altogether given up to a different portion of society. And when the younger perambulator inquired more narrowly, he could discover traces of this former population. Here and there a carved coat-armorial, with supporters, perhaps even a coronet, arrested attention amidst the obscurities of some _wynd_ or court. Did he ascend a stair and enter a floor, now subdivided perhaps into four or five distinct dwellings, he might readily perceive, in the massive wainscot of the lobby, a proof that the refinements of life had once been there. Still more would this idea be impressed upon him when, passing into one of the best rooms of the old house, he would find not only a continuation of such wainscoting, but perhaps a tolerable landscape by Norie on a panel above the fireplace, or a ceiling decorated by De la Cour, a French artist, who flourished in Edinburgh about 1740. Even yet he would discover a very few relics of gentry maintaining their ground in the Old Town, as if faintly to show what it had once been. These were generally old people, who did not think it worth while to make any change till the great one. There is a melancholy pleasure in recalling what I myself found about 1820, when my researches for this work were commenced. In that year I was in the house of Governor Fergusson, an ancient gentleman of the Pitfour family, in a floor, one stair up, in the Luckenbooths. About the same time I attended the book-sale of Dr Arrot, a physician of good figure, newly deceased, in the Mint Close. For several years later, any one ascending a now miserable-looking stair in Blackfriars Wynd would have seen a door-plate inscribed with the name MISS OLIPHANT, a member of the Gask family. Nay, so late as 1832, I had the pleasure of breakfasting with Sir William Macleod Bannatyne in Whiteford House, Canongate (afterwards a type-foundry), on which occasion the venerable old gentleman talked as familiarly of the levees of the _sous-ministre_ for Lord Bute in the old villa at the Abbey Hill as I could have talked of the affairs of the Canning administration; and even recalled, as a fresh picture of his memory, his father drawing on his boots to go to make interest in London in behalf of some of the men in trouble for the Forty-five, particularly his own brother-in-law, the Clanranald of that day. Such were the connections recently existing between the past system of things and the present. Now, alas! the sun of Old-Town glory has set for ever. Nothing is left but the decaying and rapidly diminishing masses of ancient masonry, and a handful of traditionary recollections, which be it my humble but not unworthy task to transmit to future generations.[5]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Mr W. B. Blaikie (_The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club_, vol. ii.) gives a list of the occupants of a first-class tenement some years subsequent to the ’45 Rebellion: ‘First-floor, Mrs Stirling, fishmonger; second, Mrs Urquhart, lodging-house keeper; third-floor, the Countess Dowager of Balcarres; fourth, Mrs Buchan of Kelloe; fifth, the Misses Elliot, milliners and mantua-makers; garrets, a variety of tailors and other tradesmen.’

[2] Pamphlet _circa_ 1700, Wodrow Collection, Adv. Lib.

[3] Brown Square finally disappeared with the making of Chambers Street.

[4] Mr William Cowan, in vol. i. of _The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club_, says this exemption applied to the three eastmost tenements in Princes Street.

[5] The late Bruce J. Home drew up in 1908 ‘A Provisional List of Old Houses Remaining in High Street and Canongate,’ which was printed, with accompanying map, in the first volume of _The Old Edinburgh Club Book_. The statement is therein made ‘that since 1860 two-thirds of the ancient buildings in the Old Town of Edinburgh have been demolished.’ The map showed, coloured in red, the remaining buildings of the Old Town which had survived until the beginning of the twentieth century.

THE CASTLE-HILL.

HUGO ARNOT—ALLAN RAMSAY—HOUSE OF THE GORDON FAMILY—SIR DAVID
BAIRD—DR WEBSTER—HOUSE OF MARY DE GUISE.

PAGE 11.]

The saunter which I contemplate through the streets and stories, the lanes and legends, of Old Edinburgh may properly commence at the Castle-hill, as it is a marked extremity of the city as well as its highest ground.

The Castle-hill is partly an esplanade, serving as a parade-ground for the garrison of the Castle, and partly a street, the upper portion of that vertebral line which, under the various names of Lawnmarket, High Street, and Canongate, extends to Holyrood Palace. The open ground—a scene of warfare during the sieges of the fortress, often a place of execution in rude times—the place, too, where, by a curious legal fiction, the Nova Scotia baronets were enfeoffed in their ideal estates on the other side of the Atlantic—was all that Edinburgh possessed as a readily accessible promenade before the extension of the city. We find the severe acts for a strict observance of the Sabbath, which appeared from time to time in the latter part of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century, denouncing the King’s Park, the Pier of Leith, and the _Castle-hill_ as the places chiefly resorted to for the profane sport of walking on ‘the Lord’s Day.’ Denounce as they might, human nature could never, I believe, be altogether kept off the Castle-hill; even the most respectable people walked there in multitudes during the intervals between morning and evening service. We have an allusion to the promenade character of the Castle-hill in Ramsay’s city pastoral, as it may be called, of _The Young Laird and Edinburgh Katy_—

‘Wat ye wha I met yestreen,
Coming down the street, my jo?
My mistress in her tartan screen,
Fu’ bonny, braw, and sweet, my jo.

“My dear,” quoth I, “thanks to the night,
That never wished a lover ill,
Since ye’re out o’ your mother’s sight,
Let’s tak’ a walk up to _the hill_.”’

A memory of these Sunday promenadings here calls me to introduce what I have to say regarding a man of whom there used to be a strong popular remembrance in Edinburgh.

HUGO ARNOT.

The cleverly executed _History of Edinburgh_, published by Arnot in 1779, and which to this day has not been superseded, gives some respectability to a name which tradition would have otherwise handed down to us as only that of an eccentric gentleman, of remarkably scarecrow figure, and the subject of a few _bon-mots_.

He was the son of a Leith shipmaster, named Pollock, and took the name of Arnot from a small inheritance in Fife. Many who have read his laborious work will be little prepared to hear that it was written when the author was between twenty and thirty; and that, antiquated as his meagre figure looks in Kay’s Portraits, he was at his death, in 1786, only thirty-seven. His body had been, in reality, made prematurely old by a confirmed asthma, accompanied by a cough, which he himself said would carry him off like a rocket some day, when a friend remarked, with reference to his known latitudinarianism: ‘Possibly, Hugo, in the contrary direction.’

Most of the jokes about poor Hugo’s person have been frequently printed—as Harry Erskine meeting him on the street when he was gnawing at a spelding or dried haddock, and congratulating him on _looking so like his meat_; and his offending the piety of an old woman who was cheapening a Bible in Creech’s shop, by some thoughtless remark, when she first burst out with: ‘Oh, you monster!’ and then turning round and seeing him, added: ‘And he’s an anatomy too!’ An epigram by Erskine is less known:

‘The Scriptures assure us that much is forgiven
_To flesh and to blood_ by the mercy of Heaven;
But I’ve searched the whole Bible, and texts can find none
That extend the assurance _to skin and to bone_.’

Arnot was afflicted by a constitutional irritability to an extent which can hardly be conceived. A printer’s boy, handing papers to him over his shoulder, happened to touch his ear with one of them, when he started up in a rage, and demanded of the trembling youth what he meant by insulting him in that manner! Probably from some quarrel arising out of this nervous weakness—for such it really was—the Edinburgh booksellers, to a man, refused to have anything to do with the prospectuses of his _Criminal Trials_, and Arnot had to advertise that they were to be seen in the coffee-houses, instead of the booksellers’ shops.

About the time when he entered at the bar (1772), he had a fancy for a young lady named Hay (afterwards Mrs Macdougall), sister of a gentleman who succeeded as Marquis of Tweeddale, and then a reigning toast. One Sunday, when he contemplated making up to his divinity on the Castle-hill, after forenoon service, he entertained two young friends at breakfast in his lodgings at the head of the Canongate. By-and-by the affairs of the toilet came to be considered. It was then found that Hugo’s washerwoman had played false, leaving him in a total destitution of clean linen, or at least of clean linen that was also _whole_. A dreadful storm took place, but at length, on its calming a little, love found out a way, by taking the hand-ruffles of one cast garment, in connection with the front of another, and adding both to the body of a third. In this eclectic form of shirt the meagre young philosopher marched forth with his friends, and was rewarded for his perseverance by being allowed a very pleasant chat with the young lady on ‘the hill.’ His friends standing by had their own enjoyment in reflecting what the beauteous Miss Hay would think if she knew the struggles which her admirer had had that morning in preparing to make his appearance before her.

Arnot latterly dwelt in a small house at the end of the Meuse Lane in St Andrew Street, with an old and very particular lady for a neighbour in the upper-floor. Disturbed by the enthusiastic way in which he sometimes rang his bell, the lady ventured to send a remonstrance, which, however, produced no effect. This led to a bad state of matters between them. At length a very pressing and petulant message being handed in one day, insisting that he should endeavour to call his servants _in a different manner_, what was the lady’s astonishment next morning to hear a pistol discharged in Arnot’s house! He was simply complying with the letter of his neighbour’s request, by firing, instead of ringing, as a signal for shaving-water.

ALLAN RAMSAY.

On the north side of the esplanade—enjoying a splendid view of the Firth of Forth, Fife and Stirling shires—is the neat little villa of Allan Ramsay, surrounded by its miniature pleasure-grounds. The sober, industrious life of this exception to the race of poets having resulted in a small competency, he built this odd-shaped house in his latter days, designing to enjoy in it the Horatian quiet which he had so often eulogised in his verse. The story goes that, showing it soon after to the clever Patrick, Lord Elibank, with much fussy interest in all its externals and accommodations, he remarked that the wags were already at work on the subject—they likened it to a goose-pie[6] (owing to the roundness of the shape). ‘Indeed, Allan,’ said his lordship, ‘now I see you in it, I think the wags are not far wrong.’

The splendid reputation of Burns has eclipsed that of Ramsay so effectually that this pleasing poet, and, upon the whole, amiable and worthy man, is now little regarded. Yet Ramsay can never be deprived of the credit of having written the best pastoral poem in the range of British literature—if even that be not too narrow a word—and many of his songs are of great merit.

Ramsay was secretly a Jacobite, openly a dissenter from the severe manners and feelings of his day, although a very decent and regular attender of the Old Church in St Giles’s. He delighted in music and theatricals, and, as we shall see, encouraged the Assembly. It was also no doubt his own taste which led him, in 1725, to set up a circulating library, whence he diffused plays and other works of fiction among the people of Edinburgh. It appears, from the private notes of the historian Wodrow, that, in 1728, the magistrates, moved by some meddling spirits, took alarm at the effect of this kind of reading on the minds of youth, and made an attempt to put it down, but without effect. One cannot but be amused to find amongst these self-constituted guardians of morality Lord Grange, who kept his wife in unauthorised restraint for several years, and whose own life was a scandal to his professions. Ramsay, as is well known, also attempted to establish a theatre in Edinburgh, but failed. The following advertisement on this subject appears in the _Caledonian Mercury_, September 1736: ‘The New Theatre in Carrubber’s Close being in great forwardness, will be opened the 1st of November. These are to advertise the gentlemen and ladies who incline to purchase annual tickets, to enter their names before the 20th of October next, on which day they shall receive their tickets from Allan Ramsay, on paying 30s.—no more than forty to be subscribed for; after which none will be disposed of under two guineas.’

The late Mrs Murray of Henderland knew Ramsay for the last ten years of his life, her sister having married his son, the celebrated painter. She spoke of him to me in 1825, with kindly enthusiasm, as one of the most amiable men she had ever known. His constant cheerfulness and lively conversational powers had made him a favourite amongst persons of rank, whose guest he frequently was. Being very fond of children, he encouraged his daughters in bringing troops of young ladies about the house, in whose sports he would mix with a patience and vivacity wonderful in an old man. He used to give these young friends a kind of ball once a year. From pure kindness for the young, he would help to make dolls for them, and cradles wherein to place these little effigies, with his own hands.[7] But here a fashion of the age must be held in view; for, however odd it may appear, it is undoubtedly true that to make and dispose of dolls, such as children now alone are interested in, was a practice in vogue amongst grown-up ladies who had little to do about a hundred years ago.

Ramsay died in 1757. An elderly female told a friend of mine that she remembered, when a girl, living as an apprentice with a milliner in the Grassmarket, being sent to Ramsay Garden to assist in making _dead-clothes_ for the poet. She could recall, however, no particulars of the scene but the roses blooming in at the window of the death-chamber.

The poet’s house passed to his son, of the same name, eminent as a painter—portrait-painter to King George III. and his queen—and a man of high mental culture; consequently much a favourite in the circles of Johnson and Boswell. The younger Allan enlarged the house, and built three additional houses to the eastward, bearing the title of Ramsay Garden. At his death, in 1784, the property went to his son, General John Ramsay, who, dying in 1845, left this mansion and a large fortune to Mr Murray of Henderland. So ended the line of the poet. His daughter Christian, an amiable, kind-hearted woman, said to possess a gift of verse, lived for many years in New Street. At seventy-four she had the misfortune to be thrown down by a hackney-coach, and had her leg broken; yet she recovered, and lived to the age of eighty-eight. Leading a solitary life, she took a great fancy for cats. Besides supporting many in her own house, curiously disposed in bandboxes, with doors to go in and out at, she caused food to be laid out for others on her stair and around her house. Not a word of obloquy would she listen to against the species, alleging, when any wickedness of a cat was spoken of, that the animal must have acted under provocation, for by nature, she asserted, cats are harmless. Often did her maid go with morning messages to her friends, inquiring, with her compliments, after their pet cats. Good Miss Ramsay was also a friend to horses, and indeed to all creatures. When she observed a carter ill-treating his horse, she would march up to him, tax him with cruelty, and, by the very earnestness of her remonstrances, arrest the barbarian’s hand. So also, when she saw one labouring on the street, with the appearance of defective diet, she would send rolls to its master, entreating him to feed the animal. These peculiarities, although a little eccentric, are not unpleasing; and I cannot be sorry to record them of the daughter of one whose heart and head were an honour to his country.

[1868.—It seems to have been unknown to the biographers of Allan Ramsay the painter that he made a romantic marriage. In his early days, while teaching the art of drawing in the family of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, one of the young ladies fell in love with him, captivated probably by the tongue which afterwards gave him the intimacy of princes, and was undoubtedly a great source of his success in life. The father of the enamoured girl was an old proud baronet; her mother, a sister of the Chief-Justice, Earl of Mansfield. A marriage with consent of parents was consequently impossible. The young people, nevertheless, contrived to get themselves united in wedlock.

The speedily developed talent of Ramsay, the illustrious patronage they secured to him, and the very considerable wealth which he acquired must have in time made him an acceptable relation to those proud people. A time came when their descendants held the connection even as an honour. The wealth of the painter ultimately, on the death of his son in 1845, became the property of Mr Murray of Henderland, a grandson of Sir Alexander Lindsay and nephew of Mrs Allan Ramsay; thence it not long after passed to Mr Murray’s brother, Sir John Archibald Murray, better known by his judicial name of Lord Murray. This gentleman admired the poet, and resolved to raise a statue to him beside his goose-pie house on the Castlehill; but the situation proved unsuitable, and since his own lamented death, in 1858, the marble full-length of worthy Allan, from the studio of John Steell, has found a noble place in the Princes Street Gardens, resting on a pedestal, containing on its principal side a medallion portrait of Lord Murray, on the reverse one of General Ramsay, on the west side one of the General’s lady, and on the east similar representations of the General’s two daughters, Lady Campbell and Mrs Malcolm. Thus we find—owing to the esteem which genius ever commands—the poet of the _Gentle Shepherd_ in the immortality of marble, surrounded by the figures of relatives and descendants who so acknowledged their aristocratic rank to be inferior to his, derived from mind alone.]

HOUSE OF THE GORDON FAMILY.

Tradition points out, as the residence of the Gordon family, a house, or rather range of buildings, situated between Blair’s and Brown’s Closes, being almost the first mass of building in the Castle-hill Street on the right-hand side. The southern portion is a structure of lofty and massive form, battlemented at top, and looking out upon a garden which formerly stretched down to the old town-wall near the Grassmarket, but is now crossed by the access from the King’s Bridge.[8] From the style of building, I should be disposed to assign it a date a little subsequent to the Restoration. There are, however, no authentic memorials respecting the alleged connection of the Gordon family with this house,[9] unless we are to consider as of that character a coronet resembling that of a marquis, flanked by two deer-hounds, the well-known supporters of this noble family, which figures over a finely moulded door in Blair’s Close.[10] The coronet will readily be supposed to point to the time when the _Marquis of Huntly_ was the principal honour of the family—that is, previous to 1684, when the title of Duke of Gordon was conferred.[11]

PAGE 18.]

In more recent times, this substantial mansion was the abode of Mr Baird of Newbyth; and here it was that the late gallant Sir David Baird, the hero of Seringapatam, was born and brought up. Returning in advanced life from long foreign service, this distinguished soldier came to see the home of his youth on the Castle-hill. The respectable individual whom I found occupying the house in 1824 received his visitor with due respect, and after showing him through the house, conducted him out to the garden. Here the boys of the existing tenant were found actively engaged in throwing cabbage-stalks at the tops of the chimneys of the houses of the Grassmarket, situated a little below the level of the garden. On making one plump down the vent, the youngsters set up a great shout of triumph. Sir David fell a-laughing at sight of this example of practical waggery, and entreated the father of the lads ‘not to be too angry; he and his brother, when living here at the same age, had indulged in precisely the same amiable amusement, the chimneys then, as now, being so provokingly open to such attacks that there was no resisting the temptation.’

The whole matter might have been put into an axiomatic form—Given a garden with cabbage-stalks, and a set of chimneys situated at an angle of forty-five degrees below the spot, any boys turned loose into the said garden will be sure to endeavour to bring the cabbage-stalks and the chimneys into acquaintance.

The Citadel seems to have been a little nest of aristocracy, of the Cavalier party. In 1745 one of its inhabitants was Dame Magdalen Bruce of Kinross, widow of the baronet who had assisted in the Restoration. Here lived with her the Rev. Robert Forbes, Episcopal minister of Leith [afterwards Bishop of Orkney], from whose collections regarding Charles Edward and his adventures a volume of extracts was published by me in 1834. [The _Lyon in Mourning_ is here referred to, from which Dr Chambers published a number of the narratives in his _Jacobite Memoirs_ (1834), and from which he also utilised some information of the Rebellion of 1745 in the preparation of his _History of the Rebellion_. At his death he bequeathed the work to the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, where it now remains. It consists of eight small octavo volumes of manuscript of about two hundred pages, each bound in black leather, with blackened edges, and around the title-page of each volume a deep black border. The collection was the work of the Rev. Robert Forbes, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, who became in 1762 Bishop of Ross and Caithness. It was treasured by his widow for thirty years, and then bought by Sir Henry Stewart of Allanton in 1806. Dr Robert Chambers unearthed it for historical purposes, and later purchased it from Sir Henry Stewart. Some relics which Forbes succeeded in obtaining from his correspondents—such as a piece of the Prince’s garter, a piece of the gown he wore as Betty Burke, and of the string of the apron he then had on, a fragment of a waistcoat worn by the Prince, and other things—were preserved on the inside of some of the boards of the volumes. The _Lyon in Mourning_ was edited by Mr Henry Paton from the manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, and published in three volumes by the Scottish History Society (1895).] Throughout those troublous days, a little Episcopal congregation was kept together in Leith; their place of worship being the _first floor_ of an old, dull-looking house in Queen Street (dated 1615), the lower floor of which was, in my recollection, a police-office.

DR WEBSTER.

An isolated house which formerly stood in Webster’s Close,[12] a little way down the Castle-hill, was the residence of the Rev. Dr Webster, a man eminent in his day on many accounts—a leading evangelical clergyman in Edinburgh, a statist and calculator of extraordinary talent, and a distinguished figure in festive scenes. The first population returns of Scotland were obtained by him in 1755; and he was the author of that fund for the widows of the clergy of the Established Church which has proved so great a blessing to many, and still exists in a flourishing state.[13] He was also deep in the consultations of the magistrates regarding the New Town.

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Traditions of EdinburghChapter C: E. S. Chambers (1)

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