BOOK OF EDINBURGH ANECDOTE

CHAPTER ONE

PARLIAMENT HOUSE & LAWYERS

The Parliament House has always had a reputation for good anecdote.

There are solid reasons for this. It is the haunt of men, clever, highly

educated, well off, and the majority of them with an all too abundant

leisure. The tyranny of custom forces them to pace day after day that

ancient hall, remarkable even in Edinburgh for august memories, as their

predecessors have done for generations. There are statues such as those

of Blair of Avontoun and Forbes of Culloden, and portraits like those of

“Bluidy Mackenzie” and Braxfield,—all men who lived and laboured in the

precincts,—to recall and revivify the past, while there is also the

Athenian desire to hear some new thing, to retail the last good story

about Lord this or Sheriff that.

So there is a great mass of material. Let me present some morsels for

amusement or edification. Most are stories of judges, though it may be

of them before they were judges. A successful counsel usually ends on

the bench, and at the Scots bar the exceptions are rare indeed. The two

most prominent that occur to one are Sir George Mackenzie and Henry

Erskine. Now, Scots law lords at one time invariably, and still

frequently, take a title from landed estate. This was natural. A judge

was a person with some landed property, which was in early times the

only property considered as such, and in Scotland, as everybody knows,

the man was called after his estate. Monkbarns of the _Antiquary_ is a

classic instance, and it was only giving legal confirmation to this, to

make the title a fixed one in the case of the judges. They never signed

their names this way, and were sometimes sneered at as paper lords.

To-day, when the relative value of things is altered, they would

probably prefer their paper title. According to tradition their wives

laid claim to a corresponding dignity, but James V., the founder of the

College of Justice, sternly repelled the presumptuous dames, with a

remark out of keeping with his traditional reputation for gallantry. “He

had made the carles lords, but wha the deil made the carlines leddies?”

Popular custom was kinder than the King, and they got to be called

ladies, till a newer fashion deprived them of the honour. It was

sometimes awkward. A judge and his wife went furth of Scotland, and the

exact relations between Lord A. and Mrs. B. gravelled the wits of many

an honest landlord. The gentleman and lady were evidently on the most

intimate terms, yet how to explain their different names? Of late the

powers that be have intervened in the lady’s favour, and she has now her

title assured her by royal mandate.

Once or twice the territorial designation bore an ugly purport. Jeffrey

kept, it is said, his own name, for Lord Craigcrook would never have

done. Craig is Scots for neck, and why should a man name himself a

hanging judge to start with? This was perhaps too great a concession to

the cheap wits of the Parliament House, and perhaps it is not true, for

in Jeffrey’s days territorial titles for paper lords were at a discount,

so that Lord Cockburn thought they would never revive, but the same

thing is said of a much earlier judge. Fountainhall’s _Decisions_ is one

of those books that every Scots advocate knows in name, and surely no

Scots practising advocate knows in fact. Its author, Sir John Lauder,

was a highly successful lawyer of the Restoration, and when his time

came to go up there was one fly in the ointment of success. His compact

little estate in East Lothian was called Woodhead. Lauder feared not

unduly the easy sarcasms of fools, or the evil tongues of an evil time.

Territorial title he must have, and he rather neatly solved the

difficulty by changing Woodhead to Fountainhall, a euphonious name,

which the place still retains.

When James VI. and I. came to his great estate in England, he was much

impressed by the splendid robes of the English judges. His mighty Lord

Chancellor would have told him that such things were but “toys,” though

even he would have admitted, they influenced the vulgar. At any rate

Solomon presently sent word to his old kingdom, that his judges and

advocates there were to attire themselves in decent fashion. If you

stroll into the Parliament House to-day and view the twin groups of the

Inner House, you will say they went one better than their English

brothers.

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS HAMILTON, FIRST EARL OF HADDINGTON,

From the Portrait at Tynninghame]

A Scots judge in those times had not seldom a plurality of offices: thus

the first Earl of Haddington was both President of the Court of Session

and Secretary of State. He played many parts in his time, and he played

them all well, for Tam o’ the Coogate was nothing if not acute. There

are various stories of this old-time statesman. This shows forth the man

and the age. A highland chief was at law, and had led his men into the

witness-box just as he would have led them to the tented field. The Lord

President had taken one of them in hand, and sternly kept him to the

point, and so wrung the facts out of him. When Donald escaped he was

asked by his fellow-clansman whose turn was to follow, how he had done?

With every mark of sincere contrition and remorse, Donald groaned out,

that he was afraid he had spoken the truth, and “Oh,” he said, “beware

of the man with the partridge eye!” How the phrase brings the old judge,

alert, keen, searching, before us! By the time of the Restoration things

were more specialised, and the lawyers of the day could give more

attention to their own subject. They were very talented, quite

unscrupulous, terribly cruel; Court of Justice and Privy Council alike

are as the house of death. We shudder rather than laugh at the

anecdotes. Warriston, Dirleton, Mackenzie, Lockhart, the great Stair

himself, were remarkable men who at once attract and repel. Nisbet of

Dirleton, like Lauder of Fountainhall, took his title from East

Lothian—in both cases so tenacious is the legal grip, the properties

are still in their families—and Dirleton’s _Doubts_ are still better

known, and are less read, if that be possible, than Fountainhall’s

_Decisions_. You can even to-day look on Dirleton’s big house on the

south side of the Canongate, and Dirleton, if not “the pleasantest

dwelling in Scotland,” is a very delightful place, and within easy reach

of the capital. But the original Nisbet was, I fear, a worse rascal than

any of his fellows, a treacherous, greedy knave. You might bribe his

predecessor to spare blood, it was said, “but Nisbet was always so sore

afraid of losing his own great estate, he could never in his own opinion

be officious enough to serve his cruel masters.” Here is _the_ Nisbet

story. In July 1668, Mitchell shot at Archbishop Sharp in the High

Street, but, missing him, wounded Honeyman, Bishop of Orkney, who sat in

the coach beside him. With an almost humorous cynicism some one

remarked, it is only a bishop, and the crowd immediately discovered a

complete lack of interest in the matter and in the track of the would-be

assassin. Not so the Privy Council, which proceeded to a searching

inquiry in the course whereof one Gray was examined, but for some time

to little purpose. Nisbet as Lord Advocate took an active part, and

bethought him of a trick worthy of a private inquiry agent. He pretended

to admire a ring on the man’s finger, and asked to look at it; the

prisoner was only too pleased. Nisbet sent it off by a messenger to

Gray’s wife with a feigned message from her husband. She stopped not to

reflect, but at once told all she knew! this led to further arrests and

further examinations during which Nisbet suggested torture as a means of

extracting information from some taciturn ladies! Even his colleagues

were abashed. “Thow rotten old devil,” said Primrose, the Lord Clerk

Register, “thow wilt get thyself stabbed some day.” Even in friendly

talk and counsel these old Scots, you will observe, were given to plain

language. Fate was kinder to Dirleton than he deserved, he died in

quiet, rich, if not honoured, for his conduct in office was scandalous

even for those times, yet his name is not remembered with the especial

detestation allotted to that of “the bluidy advocate Mackenzie,” really

a much higher type of man. Why the unsavoury epithet has stuck so

closely to him is a curious caprice of fate or history. Perhaps it is

that ponderous tomb in Old Greyfriars, insolently flaunting within a

stone-throw of the Martyrs’ Monument, perhaps it is that jingle which

(you suspect half mythical) Edinburgh callants used to occupy their

spare time in shouting in at the keyhole, that made the thing stick.

However, the dead-and-gone advocate preserves the stony silence of the

tomb, and is still the most baffling and elusive personality in Scots

history. The anecdotes of him are not of much account. One tells how the

Marquis of Tweeddale, anxious for his opinion, rode over to his country

house at Shank at an hour so unconscionably early that Sir George was

still abed. The case admitted of no delay, and the Marquis was taken to

his room. The matter was stated and the opinion given from behind the

curtains, and then a _woman’s hand_ was stretched forth to receive the

fee! The advocate was not the most careful of men, so Lady Mackenzie

deemed it advisable to take control of the financial department. Of this

dame the gossips hinted too intimate relations with Claverhouse, but

there was no open scandal. Another brings us nearer the man. Sir George,

by his famous entail act, tied up the whole land of the country in a

settlement so strict that various measures through the succeeding

centuries only gradually and partially released it. Now the Earl of Bute

was the favoured lover of his only daughter, but Mackenzie did not

approve of the proposed union. The wooer, however ardent, was prudent;

he speculated how the estate would go if they made a runaway match of

it. Who so fit to advise him as the expert on the law of entail? Having

disguised himself—in those old Edinburgh houses the light was never of

the clearest—he sought my lord’s opinion on a feigned case, which was

in truth his own. The opinion was quite plain, and fell pat with his

wishes; the marriage was duly celebrated, and Sir George needs must

submit. All his professional life Mackenzie was in the front of the

battle, he was counsel for one side or the other in every great trial,

and not seldom these were marked by most dramatic incidents. When he

defended Argyll in 1661 before the Estates, on a charge of treason, the

judges were already pondering their verdict when “one who came fast from

London knocked most rudely at the Parliament door.” He gave his name as

Campbell, and produced what he said were important papers. Mackenzie and

his fellows possibly thought his testimony might turn the wavering

balance in their favour—alas! they were letters from Argyll proving

that he had actively supported the Protectorate, and so sealed the fate

of the accused. Again, at Baillie of Jerviswood’s trial in 1684 one

intensely dramatic incident was an account given by the accused with

bitter emphasis of a private interview between him and Mackenzie some

time before. The advocate was prosecuting with all his usual bluster,

but here he was taken completely aback, and stammered out some lame

excuse. This did not affect the verdict, however, and Jerviswood went

speedily to his death. The most remarkable story about Mackenzie is that

after the Estates had declared for the revolutionary cause in April

1689, and his public life was over, ere he fled southward, he spent a

great part of his last night in Edinburgh in the Greyfriars Churchyard.

The meditations among the tombs of the ruined statesmen were, you easily

divine, of a very bitter and piercing character. Sir George Lockhart,

his great rival at the bar and late Lord President of the Court of

Session, had a few days before been buried in the very spot selected by

Mackenzie for his own resting-place, where now rises that famous

mausoleum. Sir George was shot dead on the afternoon of Sunday 31st

March in that year by Chiesly of Dalry in revenge for some judicial

decision, apparently a perfectly just one, which he had given against

him. Even in that time of excessive violence and passion Chiesly was

noted as a man of extreme and ungovernable temper. He made little secret

of his intention; he was told the very imagination of it was a sin

before God. “Let God and me alone; we have many things to reckon betwixt

us, and we will reckon this too.” He did the deed as his victim was

returning from church; he said he “existed to learn the President to do

justice,” and received with open satisfaction the news that Lockhart was

dead. “He was not used to do things by halves.” He was tortured and

executed with no delay, his friends removed the body in the darkness of

night and buried it at Dalry, so it was rumoured, and the discovery of

some remains there a century afterwards was supposed to confirm the

story. The house at Dalry was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the

murderer; it was the fashion of the time to people every remarkable spot

with gruesome phantoms.

An anecdote, complimentary to both, connects the name of Lockhart with

that of Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees (pronounced Gutters, Moredun is

the modern name), who was Lord Advocate both to William III. and Queen

Anne. An imposing figure this, and a man of most adventurous life. In

his absence he was sentenced to death by the High Court of Justiciary.

This was in 1684. The Lord Advocate (Bluidy Mackenzie to wit), after

sentence, electrified the court by shouting out, that the whole family

was sailing under false colours, “these forefault Stewarts are damned

Macgregors” (the clan name was proscribed). And yet Mackenzie ought to

have felt kindly to Stewart, as perhaps he did, and possibly gave him a

hint when to make himself scarce. One curious story tells of Mackenzie

employing him in London with great success in a debate about the

position of the Scots Episcopal Church. Both Lockhart and Mackenzie

confessed him their master in the profound intricacies of the Scots law.

A W.S. once had to lay a case before Lockhart on some very difficult

question. Stewart was in hiding, but the agent tracked him out, and got

him to prepare the memorial. Sir George pondered the paper for some

time, then he started up and looked the W.S. broad in the face, “by God,

if James Stewart is in Scotland or alive, this is his draft; and why did

you not make him solve your difficulty?” The agent muttered that he

wanted both opinions. He then showed him what Stewart had prepared; this

Lockhart emphatically accepted as the deliverance of the oracle. Stewart

had a poor opinion of contemporary lawyers. Show me the man and I’ll

show you the law, quoth he. Decisions, he said, went by favour and not

by right. Stewart made his peace with James’s government, near the end,

and though he did so without any sacrifice of principle, men nicknamed

him Jamie Wilie. It seemed a little odd that through it all he managed

to keep his head on his shoulders. A staunch Presbyterian, he was yet

for the time a liberal and enlightened jurist, and introduced many

important reforms in Scots criminal law. That it fell to him to

prosecute Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy was one of fate’s little

ironies; Aikenhead went to his death on the 8th January 1697. The

Advocate’s Close, where Stewart lived, and which is called after him,

still reminds us of this learned citizen of old Edinburgh.

In the eighteenth century we are in a different atmosphere; those in

high place did not go in constant fear of their life, they were not so

savage, so suspicious, so revengful, they were witty and playful. On the

other hand, their ways were strangely different from the monotonous

propriety of to-day. Kames and Monboddo are prominent instances, they

were both literary lawyers and constant rivals. Once Kames asked

Monboddo if he had read his last book; the other saw his chance and took

it, “No, my lord, you write a great deal faster than I am able to read.”

Kames presently got _his_ chance. Monboddo had in some sense anticipated

the Darwinian theory, he was certain at any rate that everybody was born

with a tail. He believed that the sisterhood of midwives were pledged to

remove it, and it is said he watched many a birth as near as decency

permitted but always with disappointing results. At a party he politely

invited Kames to enter the room before him. “By no means,” said Kames,

“go first, my lord, that I may get a look at your tail.” Kames had a

grin between a sneer and a smile, probably here the sneer predominated.

But perhaps it was taken as a compliment. “Mony is as proud of his tail

as a squirrel,” said Dr. Johnson. He died when eighty-seven. He used to

ride to London every year, to the express admiration and delight of

George III. One wonders if he ever heard of the tradition that at

Strood, in Kent, all children are born with tails—a mediæval jape from

the legend of an insult to St. Thomas of Canterbury: he might have found

this some support to his theory! On the bench he was like a stuffed

monkey, but for years he sat at the clerks’ table. He had a lawsuit

about a horse, argued it in person before his colleagues and came

hopelessly to grief. You are bound to assume the decision was right,

though those old Scots worthies dearly loved a slap at one another, and

thus he would not sit with Lord President Dundas again; more likely,

being somewhat deaf, he wished to hear better. He was a great classical

scholar, and said that no man could write English who did not know

Greek, a very palpable hit at Lord Kames, who knew everything but Greek.

The suppers he gave at St. John Street, off the Canongate, are still

fragrant in the memory, “light and choice, of Attic taste,” no doubt;

but the basis you believe was Scots, solid and substantial. And they had

native dishes worth eating in quaint eighteenth-century Edinburgh! The

grotesque old man had a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth Burnet, whose

memory lives for ever in the pathetic lines of Burns. She died of

consumption in 1790, and to blunt, if possible, the father’s sorrow, his

son-in-law covered up her portrait. Monboddo’s look sought the place

when he entered the room. “Quite right, quite right,” he muttered, “and

now let us get on with our Herodotus.” For that day, perhaps, his

beloved Greek failed to charm. Kames was at least like Monboddo in one

thing—oddity. On the bench he had “the obstinacy of a mule and the

levity of a harlequin,” said a counsel; but his broad jokes with his

broad dialect found favour in an age when everything was forgiven to

pungency. He wrote much on many themes. If you want to know a subject

write a book on it, said he, a precept which may be excellent from the

author’s point of view, but what about the reader?—but who reads him

now? Yet it was his to be praised, or, at any rate, criticised. Adam

Smith said, we must all acknowledge him as our master. And Pitt and his

circle told this same Adam Smith that they were all his scholars.

Boswell once urged his merits on Johnson. “We have at least Lord Kames,”

he ruefully pleaded. The leviathan frame shook with ponderous mirth,

“Keep him, ha, ha, ha, we don’t envy you him.” In far-off Ferney,

Voltaire read the _Elements of Criticism_, and was mighty wroth over

some cutting remarks on the _Henriade_. He sneered at those rules of

taste from the far north “By Lord Mackames, a Justice of the Peace in

Scotland.” You suspect that “master of scoffing” had spelt name and

office right enough had he been so minded. Kames bid farewell to his

colleagues in December 1782 with, if the story be right, a quaintly

coarse expression. He died eight days after in a worthier frame of

mind—he wrote and studied to his last hour. “What,” he said, “am I to

sit idle with my tongue in my cheek till death comes for me?” He

expressed a stern satisfaction that he was not to survive his mental

powers, and he wished to be away. He was curious as to the next world,

and the tasks that he would have yet to do. There is something heroic

about this strange old man.

We come a little later down, and in Braxfield we are in a narrower

field, more local, more restricted, purely legal. Such as survive of the

Braxfield stories are excellent. The _locus classicus_ for the men of

that time is Lord Cockburn’s _Memorials_. Cockburn, as we have yet to

see, was himself a wit of the first water, and the anecdotes lost

nothing by the telling. Braxfield was brutal and vernacular. One of “The

Fifteen” had rambled on to little purpose, concluding,” Such is my

opinion.” “_Your_ opeenion” was Braxfield’s _sotto voce_ bitter comment,

better and briefer even than the hit of the English judge at his

brother, “what he calls his mind.” Two noted advocates (Charles Hay,

afterwards Lord Newton, was one of them) were pleading before him—they

had tarried at the wine cup the previous night, and they showed it.

Braxfield gave them but little rope. “Ye may just pack up your papers

and gang hame; the tane o’ ye’s riftin’ punch and the ither belchin’

claret” (a quaint and subtle distinction!) “and there’ll be nae guid got

out o’ ye the day.” As Lord Justice-Clerk, Braxfield was supreme

criminal judge; his maxims were thoroughgoing. “Hang a thief when he is

young, and he’ll no’ steal when he is auld.” He said of the political

reformers: “They would a’ be muckle the better o’ being hangit,” which

is probably the truer form of his alleged address to a prisoner: “Ye’re

a vera clever chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o’ a hanging.”

“The mob would be the better for losing a little blood.” But his most

famous remark, or rather aside, was at the trial of the reformer

Gerrald. The prisoner had urged that the Author of Christianity himself

was a reformer. “Muckle He made o’ that,” growled Braxfield, “He was

hangit.” I suspect this was an after-dinner story, at any rate it is not

in the report; but how could it be? It is really a philosophic argument

in the form of a blasphemous jest. He had not always his own way with

the reformers. He asked Margarot if he wished a counsel to defend him.

“No, I only wish an interpreter to make me understand what your Lordship

says.” The prisoner was convicted and, as Braxfield sentenced him to

fourteen years’ transportation, he may have reflected, that he had

secured the last and most emphatic word. Margarot had defended himself

very badly, but as conviction was a practical certainty it made no

difference. Of Braxfield’s private life there are various stories, which

you can accept or not as you please, for such things you cannot prove or

disprove. His butler gave him notice, he could not stand Mrs. Macqueen’s

temper; it was almost playing up to his master. “Man, ye’ve little to

complain o’; ye may be thankfu’ ye’re no married upon her.” As we all

know, R. L. Stevenson professedly drew his Weir of Hermiston from this

original. One of the stories he tells is how Mrs. Weir praised an

incompetent cook for her Christian character, when her husband burst

out, “I want Christian broth! Get me a lass that can plain-boil a

potato, if she was a whüre off the streets.” That story is more in the

true Braxfield manner than any of the authentic utterances recorded of

the judge himself, but now we look at Braxfield through Stevenson’s

spectacles. To this strong judge succeeded Sir David Rae, Lord Eskgrove.

The anecdotes about him are really farcical. He was grotesque, and

though alleged very learned was certainly very silly, but there was

something irresistibly comical about his silliness. Bell initiated a

careful series of law reports in his time. “He taks doun ma very words,”

said the judge in well-founded alarm. Here is his exhortation to a

female witness: “Lift up your veil, throw off all modesty and look me in

the face”; and here his formula in sentencing a prisoner to death:

“Whatever your religi-ous persua-sion may be, or even if, as I suppose,

you be of no persuasion at all, there are plenty of rever-end gentlemen

who will be most happy for to show you the way to yeternal life.” Or

best of all, in sentencing certain rascals who had broken into Sir James

Colquhoun’s house at Luss, he elaborately explained their crimes;

assault, robbery and hamesucken, of which last he gave them the

etymology; and then came this climax—“All this you did; and God

preserve us! joost when they were sitten doon to their denner.”

[Illustration: JOHN CLERK, LORD ELDIN]

The two most remarkable figures at the Scots bar in their own or any

time were the Hon. Henry Erskine and John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin.

Erskine was a consistent whig, and, though twice Lord Advocate, was

never raised to the bench; yet he was the leading practising lawyer of

his time, and the records of him that remain show him worthy of his

reputation. He was Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, but he presided at

a public meeting to protest against the war, and on the 12th January

1796 was turned out of office by a considerable majority. A personal

friend of Erskine, and supposed to be of his party, yielded to the storm

and voted against him. The clock just then struck three. “Ah,” murmured

John Clerk, in an intense whisper which echoed through the quiet room,

“when the cock crew thrice Peter denied his Master.” But most Erskine

stories are of a lighter touch. When Boswell trotted with Johnson round

Edinburgh, they met Erskine. He was too independent to adulate the sage

but before he passed on with a bow, he shoved a shilling into the

astonished Boswell’s hand, “for a sight of your bear,” he whispered.

George III. at Windsor once bluntly told him, that his income was small

compared with that of his brother, the Lord Chancellor. “Ah, your

Majesty,” said the wit, “he plays at the guinea table, and I only at the

shilling one.” In a brief interval of office he succeeded Henry Dundas,

afterwards Lord Melville. He told Dundas he was about to order the silk

gown. “For all the time you may want it,” said the other, “you had

better borrow mine.” “No doubt,” said Harry, “your gown is made to fit

any party, but it will never be said of Henry Erskine that he put on the

abandoned habits of his predecessor.” But he had soon to go, and this

time Ilay Campbell, afterwards Lord President, had the post, and again

the gown was tossed about in verbal pleasantries. “You must take nothing

off it, for I will soon need it again,” said the outgoer. “It will be

bare enough, Henry, before you get it,” was the neat reply. Rather tall,

a handsome man, a powerful voice, a graceful manner, and more than all,

a kindly, courteous gentleman, what figure so well known on that ancient

Edinburgh street, walking or driving his conspicuous yellow chariot with

its black horses? Everybody loved and praised Harry Erskine, friends and

foes, rich and poor alike. You remember Burns’s tribute: “Collected,

Harry stood awee.” Even the bench listened with delight. “I shall be

brief, my Lords,” he once began. “Hoots, man, Harry, dinna be

brief—dinna be brief,” said an all too complacent senator—a compliment

surely unique in the annals of legal oratory. And if this be unique,

almost as rare was the tribute of a humble nobody to his generous

courage. “There’s no a puir man in a’ Scotland need to want a friend or

fear an enemy, sae long as Harry Erskine’s to the fore.” Not every judge

was well disposed to the genial advocate. Commissary Balfour was a

pompous official who spoke always _ore rotundo_: he had occasion to

examine Erskine one day in his court, he did so with more than his usual

verbosity. Erskine in his answers parodied the style of the questions to

the great amusement of the audience; the commissary was beside himself

with anger. “The intimacy of the friend,” he thundered, “must yield to

the severity of the judge. Macer, forthwith conduct Mr. Erskine to the

Tolbooth.” “Hoots! Mr. Balfour,” was the crushing retort of the macer.

On another occasion the same judge said with great pomposity that he had

tripped over a stile on his brother’s property and hurt himself. “Had it

been your own style,” said Erskine, “you certainly would have broken

your neck.”

Alas! Harry was an incorrigible punster. When urged that it was the

lowest form of wit, he had the ready retort that therefore it must be

the foundation of all other kinds. Yet, frankly, some of those puns are

atrocious, and even a century’s keeping in Kay and other records has not

made them passable. Gross and palpable, they were yet too subtle for one

senator. Lord Balmuto, or tradition does him wrong, received them with

perplexed air and forthwith took them to _Avizandum_. Hours, or as some

aver, days after, a broad smile relieved those heavy features. “I hae ye

noo, Harry, I hae ye noo,” he gleefully shouted; he had seen the joke!

All were not so dull. A friend pretended to be in fits of laughter.

“Only one of your jokes, Harry,” he said. “Where did you get it?” said

the wit. “Oh, I have just bought ‘The New Complete Jester, or every man

his own Harry Erskine.’” The other looked grave. He felt that

pleasantries of the place or the moment might not wear well in print.

They don’t, and I refrain for the present from further record. When Lord

President Blair died suddenly on 27th November 1811, a meeting of the

Faculty of Advocates was hastily called. Blair was an ideal judge,

learned, patient, dignified, courteous. He is the subject of one of

those wonderful Raeburn portraits (it hangs in the library of the

Writers to the Signet), and as you gaze you understand how those who

knew him felt when they heard that he was gone forever. Erskine, as

Dean, rose to propose a resolution, but for once the eloquent tongue was

mute: after some broken sentences he sat down, but his hearers

understood and judged it “as good a speech as he ever made.” It was his

last. He was neither made Lord President nor Lord Justice-Clerk, though

both offices were open. He did not murmur or show ill-feeling, but

withdrew to the little estate of Almondell, where he spent six happy and

contented years ere the end.

Clerk was another type of man. In his last years Carlyle, then in his

early career, noted that “grim strong countenance, with its black, far

projecting brows.” He fought his way slowly into fame. His father had

half humorously complained, “I remember the time when people seeing John

limping on the street were told, that’s the son of Clerk of Eldin; but

now I hear them saying, ‘What auld grey-headed man is that?’ and the

answer is, ‘That is the father of John Clerk.’” He was a plain man,

badly dressed, with a lame leg. “There goes Johnny Clerk, the lame

lawyer.” “No, madam,” said Clerk, “the lame _man_, not the lame

_lawyer_.” Cockburn says that he gave his client his temper, his

perspiration, his nights, his reason, his whole body and soul, and very

often the whole fee to boot. He was known for his incessant quarrels

with the bench, and yet his practice was enormous. He lavished his fees

on anything from bric-à-brac to charity, and died almost a poor man. In

consultation at Picardy Place he sat in a room crowded with curiosities,

himself the oddest figure of all, his lame foot resting on a stool, a

huge cat perched at ease on his shoulder. When the oracle spoke, it was

in a few weighty Scots words, that went right to the root of the matter,

and admitted neither continuation nor reply. His Scots was the powerful

direct Scots of the able, highly-educated man, a speech faded now from

human memory. Perhaps Clerk was _princeps_ but not _facile_, for there

was Braxfield to reckon with. On one famous occasion, to wit, the trial

of Deacon Brodie, they went at it, hammer and tongs, and Clerk more than

held his own, though Braxfield as usual got the verdict. They took Clerk

to the bench as Lord Eldin, when he was sixty-five, which is not very

old for a judge. But perhaps he was worn out by his life of incessant

strife, or perhaps he had not the judicial temperament. At any rate his

record is as an advocate, and not as a senator. He had also some renown

as a toper. There is a ridiculous story of his inquiring early one

morning, as he staggered along the street, “Where is John Clerk’s

house?” of a servant girl, a-“cawming” her doorstep betimes. “Why,

_you_’re John Clerk,” said the astonished lass. “Yes, yes, but it’s his

house I want,” was the strange answer. I have neither space nor

inclination to repeat well-known stories of judicial topers. How this

one was seen by his friend coming from his house at what seemed an early

hour. “Done with dinner already?” queried the one. “Ay, but we sat down

yesterday,” retorted the other. How this luminary awakened in a cellar

among bags of soot, and that other in the guard-house; how this set

drank the whole night, claret, it is true, and sat bravely on the bench

the whole of next day; how most could not leave the bottle alone even

there; and biscuits and wine as regularly attended the judges on the

bench as did their clerks and macers. The pick of this form is Lord

Hermand’s reply to the exculpatory plea of intoxication: “Good Gad, my

Laards, if he did this when he was drunk, what would he not do when he’s

sober?” but imagination boggles at it all, and I pass to a more decorous

generation.

The names of two distinguished men serve to bridge the two periods. The

early days of Jeffrey and Cockburn have a delightful flavour of old

Edinburgh. The last years are within living memory. Jeffrey’s accent was

peculiar. It was rather the mode in old Edinburgh to despise the south,

the last kick, as it were, at the “auld enemy”; Jeffrey declared, “The

only part of a Scotsman I mean to abandon is the language, and language

is all I expect to learn in England.” The authorities affirm his

linguistic experience unfortunate. Lord Holland said that “though he had

lost the broad Scots at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English.”

Braxfield put it briefer and stronger. “He had clean tint his Scots, and

found nae English.” Thus his accent was emphatically his own; he spoke

with great rapidity, with great distinctness. In an action for libel,

the object of his rhetoric was in perplexed astonishment at the endless

flow of vituperation. “He has spoken the whole English language thrice

over in two hours.” This eloquence was inconvenient in a judge. He

forgot Bacon’s rule against anticipating counsel. Lord Moncreiff wittily

said of him, that the usual introductory phrase “the Lord Ordinary

having heard parties’ procurators” ought to be, in his judgment,

“parties’ procurators having heard the Lord Ordinary.” Jeffrey, on the

other hand, called Moncreiff “the whole duty of man,” from his

conscientious zeal. All the same, Jeffrey was an able and useful judge,

though his renown is greater as advocate and editor. Even he, though

justly considerate, did not quite free himself from the traditions of

his youth. He “kept a prisoner waiting twenty minutes after the jury

returned from the consideration of their verdict, whilst he and a lady

who had been accommodated with a seat on the bench discussed together a

glass of sherry.” Cockburn, his friend and biographer, the keenest of

wits, and a patron of progress, stuck to the accent. “When I was a boy

no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making

them stare and probably laugh; we looked upon an English boy at the High

School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster:” and then he goes on

to say that Burns is already a sealed book, and he would have it taught

in the school as a classic. “In losing it we lose ourselves,” says the

old judge emphatically. He writes this in 1844, nearly seventy years

ago. We do not teach the only Robin in the school. Looked at from the

dead-level of to-day his time seems picturesque and romantic: were he to

come here again he would have some very pointed utterances for us and

our ways, for he was given to pointed sayings. For instance, “Edinburgh

is as quiet as the grave, or even Peebles.” A tedious counsel had bored

him out of all reason. “He has taken up far too much of your Lordship’s

time,” sympathised a friend. “Time,” said Cockburn with bitter emphasis,

“Time! long ago he has exhaustit _Time_, and has encrotch’d

upon—Eternity.” A touch of Scots adds force to such remarks. This is a

good example.

[Illustration: JOHN INGLIS, LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COURT OF SESSION,

From a Painting in the Parliament House,

by permission of the Faculty of Advocates]

One day the judge, whilst rummaging in an old book shop, discovered some

penny treasure, but he found himself without the penny! He looked up and

there was the clerk of court staring at him through the window. “Lend me

a bawbee,” he screamed eagerly. He got the loan, and in the midst of a

judgment of the full court he recollected his debt; he scrambled across

the intervening senators, and pushed the coin over: “There’s your

bawbee, Maister M., with many thanks.”

At one time the possession of the correct “burr” was a positive hold on

the nation. Lord Melville, the friend and colleague of Pitt, ruled

Scotland under what was called the Dundas despotism for thirty years. He

filled all the places from his own side, for such is the method of party

government, and he can scarce be blamed, yet his rule was protracted and

endured, because he had something more than brute force behind him. For

one thing, he spoke a broad dialect, and so came home to the very hearts

of his countrymen. When he visited Scotland he went climbing the

interminable High Street stairs, visiting poor old ladies that he had

known in the days of his youth. Those returns of famous Scotsmen have

furnished a host of anecdotes. I will only give one for its dramatic

contrasts. Wedderburn was not thought a tender-hearted or

high-principled man, yet when he returned old, ill and famous he was

carried in a sedan chair to a dingy nook in old Edinburgh, the haunt of

early years, and there he picked out some holes in the paved court that

he had used in his childish sports, and was moved well-nigh to tears. He

first left Edinburgh in quite a different mood. He began as a Scots

advocate, and one day was reproved by Lockhart (afterwards Lord

Covington), the leader of the bar, for some pert remark. A terrible row

ensued, at which the President confessed “he felt his flesh creep on his

bones.” It was Wedderburn’s _Sturm und Drang_ period. He had all the

presumption of eager and gifted youth, he tore the gown from his back

declaring he would never wear it again in that court. We know that he

was presently off by the mail coach for London, where he began to climb,

climb, climb, till he became the first Scots Lord High Chancellor of

Great Britain.

And now a word as to modern times. One or two names call for notice. A.

S. Logan, Sheriff Logan, as he was popularly called, died early in 1862,

and with him, it was said, disappeared the only man able in wit and

laughter to rival the giants of an earlier epoch. He still remains the

centre of a mass of anecdote, much of it apocryphal. His enemies sneered

at him as a laboured wit, and averred a single joke cost him a solitary

walk round the Queen’s Drive. Once when pleading for a widow he spoke

eloquently of the cruelty of the relative whom she was suing. The judge

suggested a compromise. “Feel the pulse of the other side, Mr. Logan,”

said he, humorously. “Oh, my Lord,” was the answer, “there can be no

pulse where there is no heart.” This seems to me an example of the best

form of legal witticism, it is an argument conveyed as a jest. Of his

contemporary Robert Thomson (1790-1857), Sheriff of Caithness, there are

some droll memories. Here is one. He was a constant though a bad rider,

and as a bad rider will, he fell from his horse. Even in falling

practice makes perfect. The worthy sheriff did not fall on his

head—very much the opposite, in fact. As he remained sitting on the

ground, a witness of the scene asked if he had sustained any injury.

“Injury!” was the answer; “no injury at all I assure you! Indeed, sir,

quite the reverse, quite the reverse.” Inglis, like Blair, impressed his

contemporaries as a great judge; how far the reputation will subsist one

need not discuss, nor need we complain that the stories about him are

rather tame. This may be given. Once he ridiculed with evident sincerity

the argument of an opposite counsel, when that one retorted by producing

an opinion which Inglis had written in that very case, and which the

other had in fact paraphrased. Inglis looked at it. “I see, my lord,

that this opinion is dated from Blair Athol, and anybody that chooses to

follow me to Blair Athol for an opinion deserves what he gets.” The

moral apparently is, don’t disturb a lawyer in his vacation, when he is

away from his books and is “off the fang,” as the Scots phrase has it.

But this is a confession of weakness, and is only passable as a way of

escaping from a rather awkward position. In the same case counsel

proceeded to read a letter, and probably had not the presence of mind to

stop where he ought. It was from the country to the town agent, and

discussed the merits of various pleaders with the utmost frankness, and

then, “You may get old —— for half the money, but for God’s sake don’t

take him at any price.” In a limited society like the Parliament House,

such a letter has an effect like the bursting of a bombshell, and I note

the incident, though the humour be accidental. This other has a truer

tang of the place. No prisoner goes undefended at the High Court; young

counsel perform the duty without fee or reward. The system has called

forth the admiration of the greedier Southern, though an English judge

has declared that the worst service you can do your criminal is to

assign him an inexperienced counsel. One Scots convict, at least,

agreed. He had been accused and thus defended and convicted. As he was

being removed, he shook his fist in the face of his advocate: “Its a’

through you, you d—d ass.” The epithet was never forgotten. The

unfortunate orator was known ever afterwards as the “d—d ass.” Sir

George Deas was the last judge who talked anything like broad Scots on

the bench. Once he and Inglis took different sides on a point of law

which was being argued before them. Counsel urged that Inglis’s opinion

was contrary to a previous decision of his own. “I did not mean,” said

the President, “that the words should be taken in the sense in which you

are now taking them.” “Ah,” said Lord Deas, “your lordship sails vera

near the wind there.” This is quite in the early manner; Kames might

have said it to Monboddo.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CHURCH

There are many picturesque incidents in the history of the old Scots

Church in Edinburgh; chief of them are the legends that cling round the

memory of St. Margaret. Her husband, Malcolm Canmore, could not himself

read, but he took up the pious missals in which his wife delighted and

kissed them in a passion of homage and devotion. There is the dramatic

account of her last days, when the news was brought her of the defeat

and death of her husband and son at Alnwick, and she expired holding the

black rood of Scotland in her hand, whilst the wild yells of Donald

Bane’s kerns rent the air, as they pressed round the castle to destroy

her and hers. Then follows the story of the removal of her body to

Dunfermline in that miraculous mist in which modern criticism has seen

nothing but an easterly haar. Then we have her son King David’s hunting

in wild Drumsheugh forest on Holy-rood day, and the beast that nearly

killed him, his miraculous preservation, and the legend of the

foundation of Holyrood. In the dim centuries that slipped away there was

much else of quaint and homely and amusing and interesting in mediæval

church life in Edinburgh, but the monkish chroniclers never thought it

worth the telling, and it has long vanished beyond recall. This one

story is a gem of its kind. Scott, who never allowed such fruit to go

ungathered, has made it well known. It is one of the incidents in the

fight between the Douglases and the Hamiltons at Edinburgh on 30th April

1520, known to all time as _Cleanse the Causeway_, because the Hamiltons

were swept from the streets. Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, was a

supporter of Arran and the Hamiltons, who proposed to attack the

Douglases and seize Angus, their leader. Angus sent his uncle, Gawin

Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, whose “meek and thoughtful eye” Scott has

commemorated in one of his best known lines, to remonstrate with his

fellow-prelate. He found him sitting in episcopal state, and who was to

tell that this was but the husk of a coat of mail? His words were

honied, but Gawin let it be seen that he was far from convinced; whereat

the other in a fit of righteous indignation protested on his conscience

that he was innocent of evil intent, and for emphasis he lustily smote

his reverend breast, too lustily, alas! for the armour rang under the

blow. “I perceive, my lord, your conscience clatters,” was Gawin’s quick

comment, to appreciate which you must remember that “clatter” signifies

in Scots to tell tales as well as to rattle. Old Scotland was chary of

its speech, being given rather to deeds than words, but it had a few

like gems. Was it not another Douglas who said that he loved better to

hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep? Or one might quote that

delightful “I’ll mak’ siccar” of Kirkpatrick in the matter of the

slaughter of the Red Comyn at Dumfries in 1306; but this is a little

away from our subject.

At the Reformation, for good or for ill, the womb of time brought forth

a form of faith distinctively Scots. Here, at any rate, we have Knox’s

_History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realme of Scotland_

to borrow from. It is usually the writer, not the reader, who consults

such books, yet Knox was a master of the picturesque and the graphic. He

was great in scornful humour; now and again he has almost a Rabelaisian

touch. Take, for instance, his account of the riot on St. Giles’ Day,

the 1st September 1558. For centuries an image of St. Giles was carried

through the streets of Edinburgh and adored by succeeding generations of

the faithful, but when the fierce Edinburgh mob had the vigour of the

new faith to direct and stimulate their old-time recklessness, trouble

speedily ensued. The huge idol was raped from the hands of its keepers

and ducked in the Nor’ Loch. This was a punishment peculiarly reserved

for evil livers, and the crowd found a bitter pleasure in the insult.

Then there was a bonfire in the High Street in which the great image

vanished for ever amid a general saturnalia of good and evil passions.

The old church fell swiftly and surely, but some stubborn Scots were

also on that side, and Mary of Guise, widow of James V. and Queen

Regent, was a foe to be reckoned with. She had the preachers up before

her (Knox reproduces her broken Scots with quite comic effect), but

nothing came of the matter. The procession did not cease at once with

the destruction of the image. In 1558 a “marmouset idole was borrowed

fra the Greyfreires,” so Knox tells us, and he adds with a genuine

satirical touch, “A silver peise of James Carmichaell was laid in

pledge”—evidently the priests could not trust one another, so he

suggests. The image was nailed down upon a litter and the procession

began. “Thare assembled Preastis, Frearis, Channonis and rottin Papistes

with tabornes and trumpettis, banneris, and bage-pypes, and who was

thare to led the ring but the Queen Regent hir self with all hir

schavelings for honor of that feast.” The thing went orderly enough as

long as Mary was present, but she had an appointment to dinner, in a

burgher’s house betwixt “the Bowes,” and when she left the fun began.

Shouts of “Down with the idol! Down with it!” rent the air, and down it

went. “Some brag maid the Preastis patrons at the first, but when thei

saw the febilness of thare god (for one took him by the heillis, and

dadding his head to the calsey, left Dagon without head or hands, and

said: ‘Fie upon thee, thow young Sanct Geile, thy father wold haif

taryad four such’) this considered (we say) the Preastis and Freiris

fled faster than thei did at Pynckey Clewcht. Thare might have bein sein

so suddane a fray as seildome has been sein amonges that sorte of men

within this realme, for down goes the croses, of goes the surpleise,

round cappes cornar with the crounes. The Gray Freiris gapped, the Black

Freiris blew, the Preastis panted and fled, and happy was he that first

gate the house, for such ane suddan fray came never amonges the

generation of Antichrist within this realme befoir. By chance thare lay

upoun a stare a meary Englissman, and seeing the discomfiture to be

without blood, thought he wold add some mearynes to the mater, and so

cryed he ower a stayr and said: ‘Fy upoun you, hoorsones, why have ye

brokin ordour? Down the street ye passed in array and with great myrthe,

why flie ye, vilanes, now without ordour? Turne and stryk everie one a

strok for the honour of his God. Fy, cowardis, fy, ye shall never be

judged worthy of your wages agane!’ But exhortations war then

unprofitable, for after that Bell had brokin his neck thare was no

comfort to his confused army.” I pass over Knox’s interviews with Mary,

well known and for ever memorable, for they express the collision of the

deepest passions of human nature set in romantic and exciting

surroundings; but one little incident is here within my scope. It was

the fourth interview, when Mary fairly broke down. She wept so that

Knox, with what seems to us at any rate ungenerous and cruel glee,

notes, “skarslie could Marnock, hir secreat chalmerboy gett neapkynes to

hold hys eyes dry for the tearis: and the owling besydes womanlie

weaping, stayed hir speiche.” Then he is bidden to withdraw to the outer

chamber and wait her Majesty’s pleasure. No one will speak to him,

except the Lord Ochiltree, and he is there an hour. The Queen’s Maries

and the other court ladies are sitting in all their gorgeous apparel

talking, laughing, singing, flirting, what not? and all at once a

strange stern figure, the representative of everything that was new and

hostile, addresses them, nay, unbends as he does so, for he merrily

said: “O fayre Ladyes, how pleasing war this lyeff of youris yf it

should ever abyd, and then in the end that we myght passe to heavin with

all this gay gear. But fye upoun that knave Death, that will come

whither we will or not! And when he hes laid on his ariest, the foull

worms wil be busye with this flesche, be it never so fayr and so tender;

and the seally soull, I fear, shal be so feable that it can neather cary

with it gold, garnassing, targatting, pearle, nor pretious stanes.”

Were they awed, frightened, angry, scornful, contemptuous? Who can tell?

Knox takes care that nobody has the say but himself. You may believe him

honest—but impartial! We have no account on the other side. Mary did

not write memoirs; if she had, it is just possible that Knox had therein

occupied the smallest possible place, and the beautiful Queen’s Maries

vanished even as smoke. There _were_ writers on the other side, but they

mostly invented or retailed stupid vulgar calumnies. We have one picture

by Nicol Burne—not without point—of Knox and his second wife, Margaret

Stuart, the daughter of Lord Ochiltree and of the royal blood, whom he

married when he was sixty and she was sixteen. It tells how he went

a-wooing “with ane great court on ane trim gelding nocht lyke ane

prophet or ane auld decrepit priest as he was, bot lyke as he had bene

ane of the blud royal with his bendis of taffetie feschnit with golden

ringis and precious stanes.”

All that Knox did was characteristic. This, however, is amusing. On

Sunday 19th August 1565, a month after his marriage to Mary, Darnley

attended church at St. Giles’. Knox was, as usual, the preacher. He made

pointed references to Ahab and Jezebel, and indulged in a piquant

commentary upon passing events. The situation must have had in it, for

him, something fascinating. There was the unwilling and enraged Darnley,

and the excited and gratified congregation. Knox improved the occasion

to the very utmost. He preached an hour beyond the ordinary time.

Perhaps that additional hour was his chief offence in Darnley’s eyes. He

“was so moved at this sermon and being troubled with great fury he

passed in the afternoon to the Hawking.” You excuse the poor foolish

boy!

[Illustration: REV. JAMES GUTHRIE, From an old Engraving]

I hurry over the other picturesque incidents of the man and the time;

the last sermon with a voice that once shook the mighty church, now

scarce heard in the immediate circle; the moving account of his last

days; the elegy of Morton, or the brief epitaph that Morton set over his

grave. He was scarce in accord even with his own age; his best schemes

were sneered at as devout imagination. Secretary Maitland’s was the one

tongue whose pungent speech he could never tolerate or forgive, and he

had voiced with bitter irony the reply of the nobles to Knox’s demand

for material help for the church. “We mon now forget our selfis and beir

the barrow to buyld the housses of God.” And yet he never lost heart. In

1559, when the affairs of the congregation were at a low ebb, he spoke

words of courage and conviction. “Yea, whatsoever shall become of us and

of our mortall carcasses, I dowt not but that this caus (in dyspyte of

Sathan) shall prevail in the realme of Scotland. For as it is the

eternall trewth of the eternall God, so shall it ones prevaill howsoever

for a time it be impugned.” And so the strong, resolute man vanishes

from the stage of time, a figure as important, interesting, and fateful

as that of Mary herself.

I pass to the annals of the Covenant. It was signed on 1st March 1638,

in the Greyfriars Church. It is said, though this has been questioned,

that when the building could not hold the multitude, copies were laid on

two flat gravestones which are shown you to-day, and all ranks and ages

pressed round in the fervour of excitement; many added “till death”

after their names, others drew blood from their bodies wherewith to fill

their pens. The place was assuredly not chosen with a view to effect,

yet the theatre had a fitness which often marks the sacred spots of

Scots history. The graveyard was the resting-place of the most famous of

their ancestors; the Castle, the great centrepiece of the national

annals, rose in their view. The aged Earl of Sutherland signed first,

Henderson prayed, the Earl of Loudoun spoke to his fellow-countrymen,

and Johnston of Warriston read the scroll, which he had done so much to

frame. Endless sufferings were in store for those who adhered to the

national cause. After Bothwell Brig in 1679 a number were confined in

the south-west corner of the churchyard in the open air in the rigour of

the Scots climate, and just below in the Grassmarket a long succession

of sufferers glorified God in the mocking words of their oppressors.

Strange, gloomy figures those Covenanters appear to us, with their

narrow views and narrow creeds, lives lived under the shadow of the

gibbet and the scaffold: yet who would deny them the virtues of perfect

courage and unalterable determination? Let me gather one or two

anecdotes that still, as a garland, encircle “famous Guthrie’s head,” as

it is phrased on the Martyrs’ Monument. He journeyed to Edinburgh to

subscribe the Covenant, encountering the hangman as he was entering in

at the West Port; he accepted the omen as a clear intimation of his fate

if he signed. And then he went and signed! He was tried before the Scots

Parliament for treason. By an odd accident he had “Bluidy Mackenzie” as

one of his defending counsel. These admired his skill and law, and at

the end seemed more disturbed at the inevitable result than did the

condemned man himself. He suffered on the 1st June 1661 at the Cross.

One lighter touch strikes a strange gleam of humour. His physicians had

forbidden him to eat cheese, but at his last meal he freely partook of

it. “The Doctors may allow me a little cheese this night, for I think

there is no fear of the gravel now,” he said with grim cynicism. He

spoke for an hour to a surely attentive audience. These were the early

days of the persecution; a few years later and the drums had drowned his

voice. At the last moment he caused the face cloth to be lifted that he

might with his very last breath declare his adherence to the Covenants:

the loving nickname of Siccarfoot given him by his own party was well

deserved! His head was stuck on the Netherbow, his body was carried into

St. Giles’, where it was dressed for the grave by some Presbyterian

ladies who dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. One of the other

side condemned this as a piece of superstition and idolatry of the

Romish church. “No,” said one of them, “but to hold up the bloody napkin

to heaven in their addresses that the Lord might remember the innocent

blood that was spilt.” So Wodrow tells the story, and he goes on: “In

the time that the body was a-dressing there came in a pleasant young

gentleman and poured out a bottle of rich oyntment on the body, which

filled the whole church with a noble perfume. One of the ladys says,

‘God bless you, sir, for this labour of love which you have shown to the

slain body of a servant of Jesus Christ.’ He, without speaking to any,

giving them a bow, removed, not loving to be discovered.” A strange

legend presently went the round of Edinburgh and was accepted as certain

fact by the true-blue party. Commissioner the Earl of Middleton, an old

enemy of Guthrie’s, presided at his trial. Afterwards, as his coach was

passing under the Netherbow arch some drops of blood from the severed

head fell on the vehicle. All the art of man could not wash them out,

and a new leather covering had to be provided. Guthrie left a little son

who ran with his fellows about the streets of Edinburgh. He would often

come back and tell his mother that he had been looking at his father’s

head. This last may seem a very trivial anecdote, but to me, at least,

it always brings home with a certain direct force the horrors of the

time. The years rolled on and brought the Revolution of 1688. A divinity

student called Hamilton took down the head and gave it decent burial.

Richard Cameron fell desperately fighting on the 20th July 1680 at Airds

Moss, a desolate place near Auchinleck. Bruce of Earlshall marched to

Edinburgh with Cameron’s head and hands in a sack, while the prisoners

who were taken alive were also brought there. At Edinburgh the limbs

were put upon a halbert, and carried to the Council. I must let Patrick

Walker tell the rest of the story. “Robert Murray said, ‘There’s the

Head and Hands that lived praying and preaching and died praying and

fighting.’ The Council ordered the Hangman to fix them upon the

Netherbow Port. Mr. Cameron’s father being in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh

for his Principles, they carried them to him to add Grief to his Sorrow

and enquired if he knew them. He took his son’s Head and Hands and

kissed them. ‘They are my Son’s, my dear Son’s,’ and said: ‘It is the

Lord, good is the Will of the Lord who cannot wrong me nor mine, but has

made Goodness and Mercy to follow us all our Days.’ Mr. Cameron’s Head

was fixed upon the Port and his Hands close by his Head with his Fingers

upward.”

[Illustration: SIR ARCHIBALD JOHNSTON, LORD WARRISTON,

From a Painting by George Jamesone]

Of Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston, bishop Gilbert Burnet, his

relative, says: “Presbytery was to him more than all the world.” At the

Restoration he knew his case was hopeless and effected his escape to

France, but was brought back and suffered at the Cross. You would fancy

life was so risky and exciting in those days that study and meditation

were out of the question, but, on the contrary, Warriston was a great

student (it was an age of ponderous folios and spiritual reflection),

could seldom sleep above three hours out of the twenty-four, knew a

great deal of Scots Law, and many other things besides; and with it all

he and his fellows—Stewart of Goodtrees, for instance—spent untold

hours in meditation. Once he went to the fields or his garden in the

Sheens (now Sciennes) to spend a short time in prayer. He so remained

from six in the morning till six or eight at night, when he was

awakened, as it were, by the bells of the not distant city. He thought

they were the eight hours bells in the morning; in fact, they were those

of the evening.

Another class of stories deals with the stormy lives and unfortunate

ends of the persecutors, and there is no name among those more prominent

than that of the Archbishop of St. Andrews, him whom Presbyterian

Scotland held in horror as Sharp, the Judas, the Apostate. Years before

his life closed at Magus Muir he went in continual danger; he was

believed to be in direct league with the devil. Once he accused a

certain Janet Douglas before the Privy Council of sorcery and

witchcraft, and suggested that she should be packed off to the King’s

plantations in the West Indies. “My Lord,” said Janet, “who was you with

in your closet on Saturday night last betwixt twelve and one o’clock?”

The councillors pricked up their ears in delighted anticipation of a

peculiarly piquant piece of scandal about a Reverend Father in God.

Sharp turned all colours and put the question by. The Duke of Rothes

called Janet aside and, by promise of pardon and safety, unloosed

Janet’s probably not very reluctant lips. “My lord, it was the muckle

black Devil.”

Here is a strange episode of this troubled time. Patrick Walker in his

record of the life and death of Mr. Donald Cargill tells of a sect

called the sweet singers, “from their frequently meeting together and

singing those tearful Psalms over the mournful case of the Church.” To

many of the persecuted it seemed incredible that heaven should not

declare in some terrible manner vengeance on a community that was guilty

of the blood of the Saints, and as this little band sang and mused it

seemed ever clearer to them that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah must

fall on the wicked city of Edinburgh. They needs must flee from the

wrath to come, and so with one accord “they left their Houses, warm soft

Beds, covered Tables, some of them their Husbands and Children weeping

upon them to stay with them, some women taking the sucking Children in

their arms” (to leave _these_ behind were a counsel of perfection too

high even for a saint!) “to Desert places to be free of all Snares and

Sins and communion with others and mourn for their own sins, the Land’s

Tyranny and Defections, and there be safe from the Land’s utter ruin and

Desolations by Judgments. Some of them going to Pentland hills with a

Resolution to sit there to see the smoke and utter ruin of the sinful,

bloody City of Edinburgh.” The heavens made no sign; Edinburgh remained

unconsumed. A troop of dragoons were sent to seize the sweet singers;

the men were put in the Canongate Tolbooth, the women into the House of

Correction where they were soundly scourged. Their zeal thus being

quenched they were allowed to depart one by one, the matter settled. And

so let us pass on to a less tragic and heroic, a more peaceful and

prosaic time.

After the revolution reaction almost inevitably set in. Religious

zeal—fanaticism if you will—died rapidly down, and there came in

Edinburgh, of all places, the reign of the moderates, or as we should

now say, broad churchmen, learned, witty, not zealous or passionate,

“the just and tranquil age of Dr. Robertson.” Principal William

Robertson was a type of his class. We come across him in the University,

for he was Principal, and we meet him again as man of letters, for the

currents of our narrative are of necessity cross-currents. Here the

Robertson anecdotes are trivial. Young Cullen, son of the famous doctor,

was the bane of the Principal’s life; he was an excellent mimic, could

not merely imitate the reverend figure but could follow exactly his

train of thought. In 1765, some debate or other occupied Robertson in

the General Assembly; Cullen mimicked the doctor in a few remarks on the

occasion to some assembled wits. Presently in walks the Principal and

makes the very speech, a little astonished at the unaccountable hilarity

which presently prevailed. Soon the orator smelt a rat. “I perceive

somebody has been ploughing with my heifer before I came in,” so he

rather neatly turned the matter off. Certain young Englishmen of good

family were boarded with Robertson: one of them lay in bed recovering

from a youthful escapade, when a familiar step approached, for that too

could be imitated, and a familiar voice read the erring youth a solemn

lecture on the iniquities of his walk, talk, and conversation. He

promised amendment and addressed himself again to rest, when again the

step approached. Again the reproving voice was heard. He pulled aside

the curtain and protested that it was too bad to have the whole thing

twice over—it was Robertson this time, however, and not Cullen. The

Principal once went to the father of this remarkable young man for

medical advice. He was duly prescribed for, and as he was leaving the

doctor remarked that he had just been giving the same advice for the

same complaint to his own son. “What,” said Robertson, “has the young

rascal been imitating me here again?” The young rascal lived to sit on

the bench as Lord Cullen, a grave and courteous but not particularly

distinguished senator. The Principal was also minister of Old

Greyfriars’. His colleague here was Dr. John Erskine. The evangelical

school was not by any means dead in Scotland, and Erskine, a man of good

family and connections, was a devoted adherent. It is pleasant to think

that strong bonds of friendship united the colleagues whose habits of

thought were so different. You remember the charming account of Erskine

in _Guy Mannering_ where the colonel goes to hear him preach one Sunday.

He was noted for extraordinary absence of mind. Once he knocked up

against a cow in the meadows; in a moment his hat was off his head and

he humbly begged the lady’s pardon. The next she he came across was his

own wife, “Get off, you brute!” was the result of a conceivable but

ludicrous confusion of thought. His spouse observed that he invariably

returned from church without his handkerchief; she suspected one of the

old women who sat on the pulpit stairs that they might hear better, or

from the oddity of the thing, or from some other reason, and the

handkerchief was firmly sewed on. As the doctor mounted the stairs he

felt a tug at his pocket. “No the day, honest woman, no the day,” said

Erskine gently. Dr. Johnson was intimate with Robertson when he was in

Edinburgh and was tempted to go and hear him preach. He refrained. “He

could not give a sanction by his presence to a Presbyterian Assembly.”

Dr. Hugh Blair (1718-1800), Professor of Rhetoric in the University, was

another of the eminent moderates. Dr. Johnson said: “I have read over

Dr. Blair’s first sermon with more than approbation; to say it is good

is to say too little.” The King and indeed everybody else agreed with

Johnson, the after time did not, and surely no human being now-a-days

reads the once famous _Rhetoric_ and the once famous _Sermons_. Blair

was vain about everything. Finical about his dress, he was quite a sight

as he walked to service in the High Kirk. “His wig frizzed and powdered

so nicely, his gown so scrupulously arranged on his shoulders, his hands

so pure and clean, and everything about him in such exquisite taste and

neatness.” Once he had his portrait painted; he desired a pleasing smile

to mantle his expressive countenance, The model did _his_ best and the

artist did _his_ best; the resulting paint was hideous. Blair destroyed

the picture in a fit of passion. A new one followed, in which less

sublime results were aimed at, and the achievement did not sink below

the commonplace. An English visitor told him in company that his sermons

were not popular amongst the southern divines: Blair’s piteous

expression was reflected in the faces of those present. “Because,” said

the stranger, who was plainly a master in compliment, “they are so well

known that none dare preach them.” The flattered Doctor beamed with

pleasure. Blair’s colleague was the Rev. Robert Walker, and it was said

by the beadle that it took twenty-four of Walker’s hearers to equal one

of Blair’s, but then the beadle was measuring everything by the heap on

the plate. An old student of Blair’s with Aberdeen accent, boundless

confidence and nothing else, asked to be allowed to preach for him on

the depravity of man. Blair possibly thought that a rough discourse

would throw into sharp contrast his polished orations; at any rate he

consented, and the most cultured audience in Edinburgh were treated to

this gem: “It is well known that a sou has a’ the puddins o’ a man

except ane; and if _that_ doesna proove that man is fa’an there’s

naething will.”

Dr. Alexander Webster, on the other hand, was of the evangelical school,

though an odd specimen, since he preached and prayed, drank and feasted,

with the same whole-hearted fervour. The Edinburgh wits called him

Doctor Magnum Bonum, and swore that he had drunk as much claret at the

town’s expense as would float a 74-ton-gun ship. He died somewhat

suddenly, and just before the end spent one night in prayer at the house

of Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and on the next he supped in the tavern

with some of his old companions who found him very pleasant. He was

returning home one night in a very unsteady condition. “What would the

kirk-session say if they saw you noo?” said a horrified acquaintance.

“Deed, they wadna believe their een” was the gleeful and witty answer.

This bibulous divine was the founder of the Widows Fund of the Church of

Scotland, and you must accept him as a strange product of the strange

conditions of strange old Edinburgh.

The material prosperity of the Church, such as it was, did not meet with

universal favour. Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, a zealous

Presbyterian of the old stamp, declared that a poor clergy was ever a

pure clergy. In former times, he said, they had timmer communion cups

and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timmer

ministers.

It is alleged of one of the city ministers, though I know not of what

epoch, that he performed his pastoral ministrations in the most

wholesale fashion. He would go to the foot of each crowded close in his

district, raise his gloved right hand and pray unctuously if vaguely for

“all the inhabitants of this close.”

Some divines honestly recognise their own imperfections. Dr. Robert

Henry was minister of the Old Kirk: his colleague was Dr. James

M‘Knight. Both were able and even distinguished men, but not as

preachers. Dr. Henry wittily said, “fortunately they were incumbents of

the same church, or there would be twa toom kirks instead of one.” One

very wet Sunday M‘Knight arrived late and drenched. “Oh, I wish I was

dry, I wish I was dry,” he exclaimed; and then after some perfunctory

brushing, “Do you think I’m dry noo?” “Never mind, Doctor,” said the

other consolingly, “when ye get to the pulpit you’ll be dry enough.”

As the last century rolled on the moderate cause weakened and the

evangelical cause became stronger. The Rev. Sir Henry Moncreiff was one

of the great figures of that movement. Referring to his power in the

Assembly a country minister said: “It puts you in mind of Jupiter among

the lesser Gods.” Another was Dr. Andrew Thomson, minister of St.

George’s, who died in 1831. An easy-going divine once said to him that

“he wondered he took so much time with his discourses; for himself,

many’s the time he had written a sermon and killed a salmon before

breakfast.” “Sir,” was the emphatic answer, “I had rather have eaten

your salmon, than listened to your sermon.”

[Illustration: REV. SIR HENRY MONCRIEFF-WELLWOOD,

From an Engraving after Sir Henry Raeburn, R.A.]

The evangelical party were much against pluralities. The others upheld

them on the ground that only thus could the higher intellects of the

church be fostered and rewarded. Dr. Walker had been presented to

Colinton in the teeth of much popular opposition. He had obtained a

professorship at the same time, and this was urged in his favour. “Ah,”

said an old countryman, “that makes the thing far waur; he will just

make a bye job of our souls.”

Dr. Chalmers is the great figure of the Disruption controversy, but most

of his work lay away from Edinburgh. Well known as he was, there existed

a submerged mass to whom he was but a name. In 1845 he began social and

evangelical work in the West Port. An old woman of the locality, being

asked if she went to hear any one, said, “Ou ay, there’s a body Chalmers

preaches in the West Port, and I whiles gang to keep him in countenance,

honest man!”

Chalmers was the founder of the Free Church; its great popular preacher

for years afterwards was Thomas Guthrie. His fame might almost be

described as world-wide; his oratory was marked by a certain vivid

impressiveness that brought the scenes he described in actual fact

before his hearers. A naval officer hearing him picture the wreck of a

vessel, and the launching of the lifeboat to save the perishing crew,

sprang from one of the front seats of the gallery and began to tear off

his coat that he might rush to render aid. He was hardly pulled down by

his mother who sat next him. Guthrie had other than oratorical gifts, he

was genial and open-hearted. A servant from the country, amazed at the

coming and going and the hospitality of the manse, said to her mistress:

“Eh, mem, this house is just like a ‘public,’ only there’s nae siller

comes in!”

Another leader, second only to Chalmers, was Dr. Candlish, much larger

in mind than in body. “Ay,” said an Arran porter to one who was watching

the Doctor, “tak’ a gude look, there’s no muckle o’ him, but there’s a

deal in him!” Lord Cockburn’s words are to the like effect. “It requires

the bright eye and the capacious brow of Candlish to get the better of

the smallness of his person, which makes us sometimes wonder how it

contains its inward fire.” The eager spirit of this divine chafed and

fretted over many matters; his oratory aroused a feeling of sympathetic

indignation in its hearers; afterwards they had some difficulty in

finding adequate cause for their indignation. When the Prince Consort

died his sorrowing widow raised a monument to him on Deeside, whereon a

text from the Apocrypha was inscribed. Candlish declaimed against the

quotation with all the force of his eloquence. “I say this with the

deepest sorrow if it is the Queen who is responsible, I say it with the

deepest indignation whoever else it may be.” These words bring vividly

before us an almost extinct type of thought. And this, again, spoken

eight days before his death and in mortal sickness, has a touch of the

age of Knox: “If you were to set me up in the pulpit I still could make

you all hear on the deafest side of your heads.”

Times again change, the leaders of religious thought in Scotland are

again broad church, if I may use a non-committal term. They have often

moved in advance of their flocks. At a meeting in Professor Blackie’s

house in 1882 a number of Liberal divines were present. Among them Dr.

Macgregor and Dr. Walter C. Smith. They were discussing the personality

of the Evil One in what seemed to an old lady a very rationalistic

spirit. “What,” she said in pious horror, “would you deprive us of the

Devil?”

With this trivial anecdote may go that of another conservative old woman

more than a century earlier. The Rev. David Johnson, who died in 1824,

was minister of North Leith. In his time a new church was built, which

was crowned with a cross wherein lurked, to some, a suggestion of

prelacy if not popery. “But what are we to do?” said the minister to a

knot of objecting pious dames. “Do!” replied one of them, “what wad ye

do, but just put up the auld cock again!” (no doubt the weather-cock).

This cock, or one of its predecessors, crows in history centuries

before. On the 21st March 1567 the Castle of Edinburgh was given in

charge to Cockburn of Skirling. That day there was a great storm which,

among greater feats, blew the tail from the cock on the steeple at

Leith. An ancient prophecy ran the round of the town as miraculously

fulfilled.

“When Skirling sall be capitaine

The Cock sall want his tail.”

Thus the diary of Robert Birrell, at any rate.

The strictness of old-time Sabbath observance is well known. Lord George

Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll, was in command of a corps of

Fencibles in Edinburgh in the early years of last century. He was

skilled in whistling. He sat one Sunday morning at the open window of

his hotel in Princes Street, and exercised his favourite art. An old

woman passing by to church viewed him with holy horror and shook her

fist at him, “Eh! ye reprobate! ye reprobate!” she shouted.

It were easy to accumulate anecdotes of the church officers of

Edinburgh. I find space for two. In old days Mungo Watson was beadle of

Lady Yester’s Church under Dr. Davidson. His pastime was to mount the

pulpit and thunder forth what he believed to be a most excellent

discourse to an imaginary audience. Whilst thus engaged he was surprised

by Dr. Davidson, who shut him up very quickly: “Come down, Mungo, come

down, toom barrels mak’ most sound.” In _Jeems the Doorkeeper, a Lay

Sermon_, Dr. John Brown has drawn a charming picture of the officer of

his father’s church in Broughton Place. The building was crowded, and

part of the congregation consisted of servant girls, “husseys” as Jeems

contemptuously described them. Some were laced to the point of

suffocation, and were not rarely carried out fainting to the vestry.

Jeems stood over the patient with a sharp knife in his hand. “Will oo

rip her up noo?” he said as he looked at the young doctor; the signal

was given, the knife descended and a cracking as of canvas under a gale

followed, the girl opened her eyes, and closed them again in horror at

the sight of the ruined finery. But we are chronicling very small beer

indeed, and here must be an end of these strangely assorted scenes and

pictures.

CHAPTER THREE

TOWN’S COLLEGE AND SCHOOLS

The official title of the University of Edinburgh is _Academia Jacobi

Sexti_. So “our James,” as Ben Jonson calls him, gave a name to this

great seat of learning, and in the form of a charter he gave it his

blessing, and there he stopped! Bishop Reid, the last Roman Catholic

Bishop of Orkney, left eight thousand merks for a college in Edinburgh,

and though that sum sinks considerably when put into current coin of the

realm, it is not to be neglected. It was obtained and applied, but the

real patrons, authors, managers and supporters for centuries of the

University was the good town of Edinburgh through its Town Council. It

was _Oure Tounis Colledge_. They appointed its professors and ruled its

destinies until almost our own time. The Scottish University Act of 1858

greatly lessened, though it by no means destroyed, their influence.

In a country so much under ecclesiastical influence as Scotland of the

Reformation, the union between the College and the Kirk was close and

intimate; still it was a corporation of tradesmen that managed the

University, and though the professors kicked, there is no doubt they

managed it very well. There has ever been something homely and

unconventional about the college. It was opened on the 14th October

1583; the students were to wear gowns, they were to speak Latin, none

was to soil his mouth with common Scots, and none was to go to taverns,

or (it was later ordained) to funerals—a serious form of entertainment

for which old Scotland evinced a peculiar zest.

Ah, those counsels of perfection! how the years set them at naught! Why

they alone of all men in Edinburgh should not go to taverns or funerals

was not a question wherewith they troubled themselves; they simply went.

Gowns they never wore, and though half-hearted attempts were now and

again made to introduce them, these never succeeded. Sir Alexander

Grant, the late Principal, tells us that a working man, whose son was a

student, wrote to him, pointing out the advantage of gowns in covering

up a shabby dress. Sir Alexander seemed rather struck with this point of

view, though after all, the gown must cost something, which might have

been better applied to the cloak. The students, as now, lived anywhere.

[Illustration: ROBERT LEIGHTON, D.D., ARCHBISHOP OF GLASGOW,

From an Engraving by Sir Robert Strange]

The histories give many quaint details as to the manners of other days.

The classes began at five in summer and six in winter; the bursars rung

the bell and swept the rooms; the janitor was a student or even a

graduate. His it was to lock the door at eleven at night. The early

professors, who did not confine themselves to one subject but carried

their class right through, were called regents. One of them, James Reid,

had taken up the office in 1603; he was popular in the council, in the

town, and in the whole city, but after more than twenty years’ service

he came to grief on a quarrel with the all-powerful Kirk. In 1626,

William Struthers, Moderator of the Presbytery, spoke of philosophy as

the dish-clout of divinity. At a graduation ceremony, Reid quoted

Aristippus to the effect that he would rather be an unchristian

philosopher than an unphilosophical divine! for which innocent retort

the regent was forced to throw up his office. One wonders what would

have happened if Town Council and Kirk had come to loggerheads, but they

never did, and through a college committee and a college bailie they

directed the affairs of the University. Creech, best known to fame as

Burns’s publisher, and the subject of some kindly or some unkindly

half-humorous verse, was in his time college bailie; but Creech was a

great many things in his time, though the world has pretty well

forgotten him. The Lord Provost was the important figure in University

as well as City life. In 1665 he was declared by the council Rector of

the College, yet in the years that followed he did nothing in his

office. Long afterwards, in 1838, there was a trial of students before

the Sheriff, for the part these had taken in a great snowball bicker

with the citizens. Witty Patrick Robertson was their counsel, and was

clever enough to throw a farcical air over the whole proceedings. “You

are Rector of the University, are you not?” he asked the then Lord

Provost. “No! I may be, but I am not aware of it,” was the rather

foolish answer. A caricature was immediately circulated of the man who

does not know he is Rector! This office was not the present Lord

Rectorship, which only dates from the Act of 1858.

Edinburgh has never been a rich town. In the old days, it was as poor as

poor might be, and so was its college; they had nothing in the way of

plate to show visitors, or to parade on great occasions. Their only

exhibits were the college mace and George Buchanan’s skull! There was a

legend about the mace. In 1683 the tomb of Bishop Kennedy at St. Andrews

was opened: it contained five silver maces—quite a providential

arrangement, one for each of the Scots Universities, and one to spare!

But there was a mace in Edinburgh before this. We have note of it in

1640, and in 1651 the Town Council had it on loan for the use of the

public. In 1660 the macer of the Parliament needs must borrow it till

his masters get one of their own. There is a quaint, homely touch about

this passing on of the mace from one body to another. It had been a

valuable and interesting relic, but in the night between 29th and 30th

October 1787 the library was forced, and the mace stolen from the press

wherein it lay, and was never seen more. Ten guineas reward was offered,

but in vain. Every one presently suspected Deacon Brodie, himself a

member of the Council, and perhaps the most captivating and romantic

burglar on record. Ere a year was over, he was lying in the Tolbooth a

condemned felon, but he uttered no word as to the precious bauble. The

year after that, very shame induced the Council to procure an elegant

silver mace, with a fine Latin inscription, and the arms of James VI.,

the arms of the City, and the arms of the University itself, invented

for the special purpose. It was just in time to be used on the laying of

the foundation-stone of the new university buildings in 1789, and it has

been used ever since on great occasions only. The loan of it is not

asked for any more! every body corporate now has a mace of its own!

The Buchanan skull is still held by the college. That eminent scholar

died on the 28th September 1582, and was buried in the Greyfriars

Churchyard. John Adamson, Principal of the University between 1623 and

1651, got the skull by bribing the sexton, and bequeathed it to the

college. The story rather revolts the taste of to-day, but grim old

Scotland had a strange hankering after those elements of mortality. Its

remarkable thinness was noted, in fact the light could be seen through

it, and anatomists of later years dwelt on the fine breadth of forehead,

and remarkable contours. It was judged, moreover, a skull of a Celtic

type—Celtic was possibly enough Buchanan’s race. Long afterwards Sir

William Hamilton, at the Royal Society in Edinburgh, compared it with

the skull of a Malay robber and cut-throat, and showed that, according

to the principles of the phrenologists, the Malay had the finer head.

This was meant as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of phrenology, though, after

all, the evidence of identification could not be satisfactory. If the

sexton consented to be bribed he was not likely, in old Greyfriars, to

be at a loss for a skull, but it seems irreverent to pursue the subject

further.

Robert Leighton, Principal between 1653 and 1662, was afterwards Bishop

of Dunblane, and then Archbishop of Glasgow. In 1672 he was still living

in his rooms in the college, and was there waited upon one day by

Chorley, an English student studying divinity at Glasgow. He brought the

compliments of his college and tutor, and invited the prelate to his

approaching laureation. He next presented him with the laureation

thesis, which was gratefully received, but when the visitor produced a

pair of “fine fringed gloves” “he started back and with all

demonstrations of humility excused himself as unworthy of such a

present.” Chorley, however, whilst humble was persistent, and though the

Archbishop refused again and again and retreated backwards, Chorley

followed, and at the end fairly pinned Leighton against the wall! His

Grace needs must yield, “but it was amazing to see with what humble

gratitude, bowing to the very ground, this great man accepted them.” So

much for the author of the classic _Commentary on the 1st Epistle of St.

Peter_. Is it not a picture of the time when men were extreme in all

things, though Leighton alone was extreme in humility? Was there not

(you ask) something ironic in the self-depreciation? I do not think so,

for you look as “through a lattice on the soul” and recognise a spirit

ill at ease in an evil day, one who might have uttered Lord Bacon’s

pathetic complaint _multum incola fuit anima mea_ with far more point

and fitness than ever Bacon did.

Of a later Principal, Gilbert Rule (1690-1701), a less conspicuous but

very pleasing memory remains. His window was opposite that of Campbell,

Professor of Divinity. Now Dr. Rule was ever late at his books, whilst

Campbell was eager over them ere the late northern dawn was astir; so

the one candle was not out before the other was lighted. They were

called the evening and the morning star. Rule died first, and when

Campbell missed the familiar light, he said, “the evening star was now

gone down, and the morning star would soon disappear,” and ere long it

was noted that both windows were dark. Among his other gifts, Gilbert

Rule was a powerful preacher. In some ministerial wandering it was his

lot to pass a night in a solitary house in a nook of the wild Grampians.

At midnight enter a ghost, who would take no denial; Gilbert must out

through the night till a certain spot was reached; then the ghost

vanished and the Doctor got him back to bed, with, you imagine,

chattering teeth and dismal foreboding. Next day the ground was opened,

and the skeleton of a murdered man discovered. Gilbert preached on the

following Sunday from the parish pulpit, and reasoned so powerfully of

judgment and the wrath to come that an old man got up and confessed

himself the murderer. In due course he was executed and the ghost walked

no more.

William Carstares, Principal between 1703 and 1715, was a great figure

in Church and State. “Cardinal” Carstares they nicknamed him at Dutch

William’s Court, and both that astute monarch and Queen Anne, Stuart as

she was, gave him almost unbounded confidence. In tact and diplomacy he

excelled his contemporaries and in the valuable art of knowing what to

conceal even when forced to speak. He was put to it, for the most famous

anecdote about him tells of his suffering under the thumbikins in 1684.

They were applied for an hour with such savage force that the King’s

smith had to go for his tools to reverse the screws before it was

possible to set free the maimed and bruised thumbs. In Carstares’

picture the thumbs are very prominent, in fact or flattery they show

forth quite untouched. At the King’s special request he tried them on

the royal digits; His Majesty vowed he had confessed anything to be rid

of them. We have a pleasing picture of an annual fish dinner at Leith

whereat the Principal was entertained by his colleagues. Calamy the

English nonconformist was a guest, and was much delighted with the talk

and the fare, and especially “the freedom and harmony between the

Principal and the masters of the college,” they expressing a veneration

for him as a common father, and he a tenderness for them as if they had

all been his children.

Principal Robertson (1762-1793) is still a distinguished figure, but he

belongs to Letters in the first place, and the Church in the second; yet

even here he was eminent. A charming anecdote tells how as Principal he

visited the logic class where John Stevenson, his own old teacher, was

still prelecting. He addressed the students in Latin, urging them to

profit, as he hoped he had himself profited, by the teaching of

Stevenson, whereat “the aged Professor, unable any longer to suppress

his emotion, dissolved in tears of grateful affection, and fell on the

neck of his favourite pupil, his Principal.”

George Husband Baird (1793-1840) was a much more commonplace figure. His

middle name was thought felicitous; he was husband to the Lord Provost’s

daughter and there seemed no other sufficient reason to account for his

elevation. This play upon names, by the way, has always been a favourite

though puerile form of Edinburgh wit. The better part of a century

afterwards we had one of our little wars on the Gold Coast, and some

local jester asked for the difference between the folk of Ashantee and

those of Edinburgh. The first, it was said, took their law from Coffee

and the second their coffee from Law! The Ashantee war of the ’seventies

is already rather dim and ancient history, but Coffee, it may be

remembered, was the name of their king, and the other term referred to a

well-known Edinburgh house still to the fore. However, we return to our

Baird for a moment. He was Minister of the High Church as well as

Principal. Discoursing of the illness of George III., he wept copiously

and unreasonably; “from George Husband Baird to George III. _greeting_,”

said one of his hearers.

There is a mass of legendary stories about the ordinary professors, but

the figures are dim, and the notes of their lives mostly trivial. For

instance, there is Dr. John Meiklejohn, who was Professor of Church

History, 1739-1781: “He had a smooth round face, that never bore any

expression but good-humour and contentment,” he droned monotonously

through his lectures, glad to get away to his glebe at Abercorn, eight

miles off. He delighted to regale the students at his rural manse, and

pressed on them the produce of the soil, with a heartiness which he

never showed in inviting their attention to the fathers of the church.

“Take an egg, Mr. Smith,” he would genially insist, “_they are my own_

eggs, for the eggs of Edinburgh are not to be depended on.” Of like

kidney was David Ritchie, who was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and

Minister of St. Andrew’s Church, but “was more illustrious on the

curling pond, than in the Professor’s chair.” But, then, to him in 1836

succeeded Sir William Hamilton, and for twenty years the chair was _the_

philosophical chair of Britain. The records of his fame are not for this

page; his passionate devotion to study, his vast learning, are not

material for the anecdotist. He was fond of long walks with a friend

into the surrounding country, and in his day it was still very easy to

leave the town behind you. Though he started with a companion, he was

presently away in advance or on the other side of the road, muttering to

himself in Greek or Latin or English, forgetful of that external world

which occupied no small place in his philosophy. “Dear me, what did you

quarrel about?” asked a lady, to his no small amusement. The Council did

not always select the most eminent men. About a century before, in 1745

to wit, they had preferred for the chair of Moral Philosophy William

Cleghorn to David Hume. There was no other choice, it was said. A Deist

might possibly become a Christian, but a Jacobite could not become a

Whig. Ruddiman’s amanuensis, Adam Walker, was a student at this class,

where he had listened to a lecture on the doctrine of necessity. “Well,

does your Professor make us free agents or not?” said his employer. “He

gives us arguments on both sides and leaves us to judge,” was the reply.

“Indeed,” was Ruddiman’s caustic comment, “the fool hath said in his

heart, there is no God, and the Professor will not tell you whether the

fool is right or wrong.”

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL WILLIAM CARSTARES,

From the Engraving by Jeens]

Many of us remember Dunbar’s _Greek Lexicon_, so much in use till

superseded by Liddell and Scott’s. Its author was Professor of Greek in

the University from 1806 to 1852. He fell from a tree, it was said, into

the Greek chair. In fact, he commenced life as gardener; confined by an

accident he betook himself to study, with highly satisfactory results.

His predecessor in the chair had been Andrew Dalzel, an important figure

in his time, perhaps best remembered by the ineptitude of his criticism

of Scott, whom he entertained unawares in his class. Scott sent him in

an essay, “cracking up” Ariosto above Homer. Dalzel was naturally

furious: “Dunce he was and dunce he would remain.” You cannot blame the

professor, but _dîs_ _aliter visum_! Dunbar’s successor was John Stuart

Blackie (1852-1882), one of the best known Edinburgh figures of his

time. He had a creed of his own, ways of his own, and a humour of his

own. Even the orthodox loved and tolerated the genial individualist who

was never malicious. “Blackie’s neyther orthodox, heterodox, nor any

ither dox; he’s juist himsel’!” An ardent body of abstainers under some

mistaken idea asked him to preside at one of their meetings. He thus

addressed them: “I cannot understand why I am asked to be here, I am not

a teetotaler—far from it. If a man asks me to dine with him and does

not give me a good glass of wine, I say he is neither a Christian nor a

gentleman. Germans drink beer, Englishmen drink wine, ladies tea, and

fools water.” Blackie was an advocate as well as a professor. Possibly

he had in his mind a certain Act of 1716, to wit, the 3rd of Geo. I.

chap. 5, whereby a duty was imposed “of two pennies Scots, or one-sixth

of a penny sterling on every pint of ale and beer that shall be vended

and sold within the City of Edinburgh.” Among the objects to which the

duty was to be applied was the settling of a salary upon the Professor

of Law in the University of Edinburgh and his successor in office not

exceeding £100 per annum. Here is a portrait by himself which brings

vividly back, true to the life, that once familiar figure of the

Edinburgh pavement: “When I walk along Princes Street I go with a kingly

air, my head erect, my chest expanded, my hair flowing, my plaid flying,

my stick swinging. Do you know what makes me do that? Well, I’ll tell

you—just con-ceit.” Even those who knew him not will understand that

the Edinburgh ways never quite seemed the same when that picturesque

figure was seen no longer there. And yet the Blackie anecdotes are

disappointing. There is a futile story that he once put up a notice he

would meet his _classes_ at such an hour. A student with a very

elementary sense of humour cut off the _c_, and he retorted by deleting

the _l_. All this is poor enough. Alas! he was only of the silver or,

shall we say, of the iron age of Auld Reekie?

Aytoun in an address at the graduation of 1863, spoke of the professors

of his time as the instructors, and almost idols, of the rising

generation. He himself filled the chair of Rhetoric between 1845 and

1865. A quaint though scarcely characteristic story is preserved of his

early years. One night he was, or was believed to be, absent from home,

“late at een birling the wine.” An irate parent stood grimly behind the

door the while a hesitating hand fumbled at the latch, the dim light of

morn presently revealed a cloaked figure, upon whom swift blows

descended without stint or measure. It was not young Aytoun at all, but

a mighty Senator of the College of Justice who had mistaken the door for

his own, which was a little farther along the street!

One of the idols to whom Aytoun referred was no doubt his father-in-law,

John Wilson (1820-1853), the well-known Christopher North, described by

Sir R. Christison as “the grandest specimen I have ever seen of the

human form, tall, perfectly symmetrical, massive and majestic, yet

agile.” Even in old age he had many of his early characteristics. He

noted a coal carter brutally driving a heavily-laden horse up the steep

streets of Edinburgh; he remonstrated with the fellow, who raised his

whip in a threatening manner as if to strike. The spirit of the old man

swelled in righteous anger, he tore away the whip as if it had been

straw, loosened the harness, threw the coals into the street, then

clutching the whip in one hand and leading the horse by the other, he

marched through Moray Place, to deposit the unfortunate animal in more

kindly keeping.

There are stories of the library that merit attention. I will give the

name of Robert Henderson, appointed librarian in 1685, where he so

continued till 1747—sixty-two years altogether, the longest record of

University service extant. Physically of a lean and emaciated figure, he

had a very high opinion of his own erudition. Now in the old college

there was a certain ruinous wall to which was attached the legend, that

it would topple over on some great scholar. The librarian affected an

extreme anxiety when in the vicinity of the wall. At length it was taken

down. Boswell told the story to Johnson. The sage did not lose the

chance for a very palpable hit at Scots learning. “They were afraid it

never would fall!” he growled. There was a like tradition regarding that

precipitous part of Arthur’s Seat quaintly named Samson’s Ribs. An old

witch prophesied they would be sure to fall on the greatest philosopher

in Scotland. Sir John Leslie was afraid to pass that way.

The relations between the Town Council and the professors in the first

half of the nineteenth century were sometimes far from harmonious. The

days were past when the Academy of James VI. was merely the “Tounes

Colledge,” it was more and more a University with a European reputation.

A cultured scholar of the type of Sir William Hamilton, “spectator of

all time and of all existence,” in Plato’s striking phrase, was not like

to rest contented under the sway of the Town Council. Possibly the

Council sneered at him and his likes, as visionary, unpractical,

eccentric; possibly there was truth on both sides, so much _does_ depend

on your point of view. The University, somewhat unwisely, went to law

with the Council, and came down rather heavily; nor were the Council

generous victors. The Lord Provost of the time met Professor Dunbar one

day at dinner—“We have got you Professors under our thumb, and by ——

we will make you feel it,” said he rather coarsely. The professors

consoled each other with anecdotes of Town Council oddities in college

affairs. One councillor gave as a reason why he voted for a professorial

candidate that, “He was asked by a leddy who had lately given him a good

job.” “I don’t care that,” said another, snapping his fingers, “for the

chair of —— , but whoever the Provost votes for, I’ll vote for

somebody else.” An English scholar had come to Edinburgh as candidate

for a chair. He called on a worthy member of the Council to whom his

very accent suggested black prelacy, or worse. “Are ye a jined member?”

The stranger stared in hopeless bewilderment. “Are ye a jined member o’

onie boadie?” was the far from lucid explanation. However, the Act of

1858 has changed all this, and town and gown in Edinburgh fight no more.

Well, there is no gown, and the University has always been a good part

of the good town of Edinburgh, as much now as ever. Take a broad view

from first to last, and how to deny that the Council did their duty

well! Principal Sir Alexander Grant in his _Story of the University of

Edinburgh_ bears generous and emphatic testimony as to this, and here we

may well leave the matter.

I must now desert the groves of the Academy of James VI. to say a word

on a lesser school and its schoolmasters. Here we have the memorable and

illustrative story of the great barring out of September 1595 at the old

High School. The scholars had gone on the 15th of that month to ask the

Council for the week’s holiday of privilege as was usual. It was curtly

refused, whereupon some “gentlemen’s bairns” collected firearms and

swords, and in dead of night seized the schoolhouse, which they

fortified in some sort. Their Rector, Master Pollock, was refused

admittance next morning, and complained to the magistrates. Bailie John

Macmorran came to the spot with a posse of officers, but William

Sinclair, son of the Chancellor of Caithness, took his stand at a window

and threatened to pistol the first who approached. Bailie Macmorran was

a big man in his day—his house, now restored as University Hall, still

rises stately and impressive in Riddle’s Close, on the south side of the

Lawnmarket—and he was not to be put down by a schoolboy; he ordered his

satellites to crash in the door with the beam they were bringing

forward. It is not hard to reconstitute the scene: the bailie, full of

civic importance and wrath, the angry boy at the window, the pride of

youth and blood in his set, determined face. Presently the pistol shot

rang out, and Macmorran fell dead on the pavement with a bullet through

his brain. The whole town rushed to the spot, seized the frightened boys

and thrust them into the Tolbooth, but finally they were liberated

without hurt, after, it would seem, some form of a trial.

There are many quaint details as to the scholars. They used to go to the

fields in the summer to cut rushes or bent for the floor of the school,

but, you see, fighting was the work or the game of nearly every male in

Scotland, and even the children must needs have their share. On these

expeditions the boys fell to slashing one another with their hooks, and

they were stopped. The winter of 1716 was distinguished by furious

riots, though not of the same deadly nature. The pupils demolished every

window of the school and of the adjacent parish church of Lady Yester,

also the wall which fenced the playground.

I will not gather records of the various Rectors, not even of Dr.

Alexander Adam, the most famous of them all. You can see to-day his

portrait by Raeburn, and one of Raeburn’s best in the Gallery on the

Mound, and think of his striking utterance in the last hours of his

life, “Boys, it is growing dark, you may go home.” In his prime he had a

profound conviction of his own qualities and those of his school. “Come

away, sir,”—thus he would address a new scholar,—“you will see more

here in an hour than you will in any other school in Europe.” He had a

long series of eminent pupils, among them Scott, Horner, and Jeffrey,

and the manner in which they have spoken of him justifies his words and

his reputation.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SURGEONS & THE DOCTORS

The physicians, the surgeons, the medical schools of Edinburgh have long

and famous histories. A few facts may assist the reader to understand

the anecdotes which fill this chapter. The Guild of Surgeons and Barbers

received a charter of Incorporation from the Town Council on the 1st

July 1505, and to this in 1506 the sanction of James IV. was obtained.

On 26th February 1567 the surgeons and apothecaries were made into one

body; henceforth they ceased to act as barbers and, after 1722, save

that the surgeons kept a register of barbers’ apprentices, there was no

connection whatever between the profession and the trade. In 1778 a

charter was obtained from George III., and the corporation became the

Royal College of Surgeons of the City of Edinburgh. In early days they

had a place of meeting in Dixon’s Close, but in 1656 they acquired and

occupied Curriehill House, once the property of the Black Friars. In May

1775 the foundation-stone of a new hall was laid in Surgeons Square,

hard by the old High School. Here the Incorporation met till the opening

of the new Surgeons Hall in 1832 on the east side of Nicolson Street, a

little way south of the old University buildings. Just as the barbers

became separated from the surgeons, so in time a distinction was drawn

between these last and the physicians. In 1617, James VI. in the High

Court of Parliament decreed the establishment of a College of Physicians

for Edinburgh. In poverty-stricken Scotland a scheme often remained a

mere scheme for many long years. In 1656, Cromwell issued a patent

establishing a College of Physicians on the lines laid down by James

VI., but he passed away and his scheme with him, and it was not till

1681 that the charter was finally obtained. Their ancient place of

meeting was near the Cowgate Port, but in 1775 the foundation of a

splendid building was laid by Professor Cullen, their most eminent

member. It stood opposite St. Andrew’s Church, George Street, but in

1843 this was sold to the Commercial Bank for £20,000, and in 1844 the

foundation-stone was laid of the present hall in Queen Street.

The first botanical garden in Edinburgh was founded by Sir Andrew

Balfour (1630-1694), who commenced practice in the capital in 1670. He

obtained from the Town Council a small piece of land between the east

end of the Nor’ Loch and Trinity College, which had formed part of the

Trinity Garden. Here were the old Physic Gardens. About 1770 this was

completely abandoned in favour of new land on the west side of Leith

Walk, and in less than a hundred years, namely, in 1824, the new and

splendid Royal Botanical Gardens were established in Inverleith Row; to

this all the “plant” of the old gardens was transferred.

As to the medical faculty in the University, I note that the chair of

anatomy was founded in 1705, and that its most famous occupants were the

three Alexander Monro’s, known as _primus_, _secundus_, and _tertius_,

who held the professorship between them for 126 years, namely, from 1720

to 1846. The first Monro distinguished himself at the battle of

Prestonpans, not by slaying but by healing. He attended diligently to

the wounded on both sides and got them conveyed to Edinburgh. The second

was professor from 1754 to 1808, a remarkable period of fifty-four

years. His father made an odd bargain with the Town Council. If they

would appoint his son to succeed him he would carefully train him for

the post in the best schools both at home and abroad. They agreed, and

the experiment turned out a complete success. He had studied at London,

Leyden, Paris, and Berlin, and when he returned his father asked the

city notabilities to hear his first lecture. Monro had got it up by

heart, but he lost his presence of mind and forgot every word; he had to

speak extempore, yet he knew his subject and soon found his feet. He

lectured without notes ever after. The most popular Scots divines have

always done the same. Monro _tertius_ was not equal to his father or

grandfather. The memory of his great predecessors was too much for him,

“froze the genial current of his soul,” made him listless and apathetic.

He had as rival the famous Dr. John Barclay, extra-mural lecturer on

anatomy, 1797-1825. This last was very ready and self-possessed. Once he

had to lecture on some part of the human frame; the subject lay before

him covered with a sheet. He lifted the sheet, laid it down again, and

proceeded to give an excellent discourse on anatomy, but not quite

according to the programme; in fact, a mistake had been made, and there

was nothing under the sheet; but, again, the feat does not seem

altogether surprising. However, the mistake was not so dire as that of

one of his assistants, who after dinner one night hurried to the

dissecting room to prepare the subject for next day. He pulled off the

cloth, but it was at once pulled back again; he pulled it off again, the

same thing happened: the farthing dip that faintly illumined the room

almost fell from his nerveless hand, a low growl revealed the unexpected

presence of a dog whose teeth had supplied the opposing force! Barclay’s

lectures were flavoured with pungent doses of caustic old Edinburgh wit.

He warned his students to beware of discoveries of anatomy. “In a field

so well wrought, what remained to discover? As at harvest, first come

the reapers to the uncut grain and then the gleaners, and finally the

geese, idly poking among the rubbish. Gentlemen, _we are the geese_!” It

was not rarely the habit of professors in former times to give free

tickets for their courses. The kindness was sometimes abused. Barclay

applied a humorous but sufficient corrective. Once he had a note from

Mr. Laing, bookseller, father of Dr. David Laing the well-known

antiquary, requesting a free ticket for some sucking sawbones. Barclay

professed himself delighted to confer the favour, but invited his

proposed pupil to accompany him to Mr. Laing’s shop, where he selected

books on anatomy to the exact value of his ticket, and sagely remarking

that without text-books his lectures were useless, presented them to the

astonished youth as a gift from Mr. Laing! Taking no denial he bundled

the youth and the books out of the place. He did not again find it

necessary to repeat the lesson. In Sir Robert Christison’s _Life_ some

remarkable instances are given of this curious form of benevolence at

somebody else’s expense, but the subject need not be pursued. Barclay

had collected a considerable museum, of which a fine elephant, an early

Jumbo in fact, was the gem. His friends, who were numerous and powerful,

tried to get a chair of comparative anatomy founded for him in the

University. Various members of the medical faculty opposed it tooth and

nail, as poaching on their preserves. One of Kay’s most famous

caricatures represents Barclay seated on an elephant charging the

college gate, which is barred against him by a learned crowd. The

opposition succeeded and Barclay was never elected professor.

Barclay had been brought up for the church, and in his early days had,

during the absence of the Rev. Mr. Baird of Bo’ness, wagged his head in

the pulpit of that divine. “How did they like him?” asked Baird of

Sandy, the village sage or the village idiot or, perhaps, both. “Gey

weel, minister, gey weel, but everybody thought him daft.” “Why, Sandy?”

“Oh, for gude reasons, minister; Mr. Barclay was aye skinning puddocks”

(frogs). It was reported that dogs fled in terror at the sight of him;

the sagacious animals feared capture and dissection; he had incautiously

cut up a dog in the presence of its kind and thus had an ill name in the

canine world! Not that this implied any ill-will to dogs; quite the

contrary, as witness a story of John Goodsir (1814-1867), who succeeded

Monro _tertius_ as professor of anatomy in 1846. He had carefully

studied the anatomy of the horse. “I love the horse, I love the horse,”

he said with genuine fervour, “I have dissected him twice!”

Barclay possessed an uncle, a full-blown divine, and the founder of a

sect by some called after him. Nephew and uncle argued theological

points. The young man was so hard to convince that the elder sent a

heavy folio flying at his head; he dodged the missile, but if not

confuted, was at any rate silenced.

Many of the anecdotes of the surgeon’s life in old Edinburgh turn on

this question of anatomy. Until the Anatomy Act of 1832, that science

was terribly hampered by the want of subjects. The charter of 1505

provided an allowance of one body annually, which was almost ludicrously

insufficient, hence body snatching became almost a necessity, perhaps

among the surgeons themselves it was counted a virtue, but they dared

not say it openly. On 20th May 1711, the college solemnly protested

against body snatching. On the 24th of January 1721 a clause was ordered

to be inserted in indentures binding apprentices not to violate graves,

but the populace, rightly or wrongly, thought those rascal surgeons had

tongue in cheek all the time, and were ever inclined to put the worst

possible construction on every circumstance that seemed to point that

way. Lauder of Fountainhall commemorates an early case. On the 6th

February 1678 four gipsies, a father and three sons, were hanged

together at Edinburgh, for killing another gipsy called Faa at Romanno.

To the Edinburgh burghers of the day the gipsy and the cateran were mere

wild beasts of prey, and these four wretches were hung in haste, cut

down in haste, and forthwith huddled together with their clothes on—it

was not worth while to strip them of their rags—into a shallow hole in

Greyfriars Churchyard. Next morning the grave lay open, and the body of

the youngest son, aged sixteen, was missing. It was remembered he had

been the last thrown over, and the first cut down, and the last buried.

Perhaps he had revived, thrown aside a scanty covering of earth, and

fled to Highland hill or Border waste. Others opined that the body had

been stolen by some chirurgeon or his servant for the purpose of

dissection, on which possibility Fountainhall takes occasion to utter

some grave legal maxims; solemnly locks the door, as it were, in the

absence of the steed. In 1742 a rifled grave was noted in the West

Kirkyard, and a body, presumably its former tenant, was presently

discovered near the shop of one Martin Eccles, surgeon. Forthwith the

Portsburgh drum was beating a mad tattoo through the Cowgate, and the

mob proceeded to smash the surgeon’s shop. As for Martin, you may safely

assume _non est inventus_, else had he been smashed likewise. Again, a

sedan chair is discovered containing a dead body, apparently on its way

to the dissecting room. The chairman and his assistant were banished,

and the chair was burned by the common hangman. Again, one John Samuel,

a gardener, moved thereto, you guess, by an all too consuming thirst, is

taken at the Potterow Port trying to sell the dead body of a child,

which was recognised as having been buried at Pentland the week before.

He was soundly whipped through Edinburgh and banished Scotland for seven

years.

A still more sordid and more terrible tragedy is among the events of

1752. Two women, Ellen Torrence and Jean Waldy, meet in the street a

mother with her little boy, they ask her to drink, an invitation, it

seems, impossible to resist. Whilst one plied her with liquor, the other

enticed the boy to her own den, where she promptly suffocated him. The

body was sold for two shillings to the students, sixpence was given to

the one who carried it, and it was only after long haggling that an

additional ten pence was extorted “for a dram.” They were presently

discovered and executed. This almost incredible story, to which Gilbert

Glossin in _Guy Mannering_ makes a rather far-fetched reference in a

discussion with Mr. Pleydell, proves at any rate one thing, there was a

ready market for dead bodies in Edinburgh for purposes of dissection,

and as the buyer was not too inquisitive, indeed he could scarcely

afford to be, the bodies almost certainly were illegally procured;

though, whatever the populace might think and suspect, there was never

any case where there was the least evidence that the surgeon was a party

to the murder. Any surgeon who was such must have been a criminal

lunatic. The case of Dr. Knox, to be presently referred to, was the one

that excited most notice and suspicion. It was carefully inquired into,

and nothing was found against him. If there had been a _prima facie_

case, the popular feeling was so strong that the Crown authorities needs

must have taken action, but I anticipate a little.

From the latter half of the eighteenth century to the first part of the

nineteenth, the resurrectionist and the pressgang were two subjects on

which the popular imagination dwelt with a certain fascinated horror.

The resurrectionist was so much in evidence that graves were protected

with heavy iron frames (you still see one or two specimens in old

Greyfriars and elsewhere), and churchyards were regularly watched. There

is no need to set forth how the tenderest and deepest feelings of human

nature were outraged by the desecration of the last resting-place. On

the other hand, the doctors were mad for subjects. A certain enthusiasm

for humanity possessed them, too. Were they not working to relieve

suffering? There was something else: the love of daring adventure, the

romance and mystery of the unholy midnight raid had their attraction; it

was never difficult, you can believe, to collect a harum-scarum set of

medical students for an expedition. Some men, afterwards very eminent,

early distinguished themselves. Thus, the celebrated surgeon, Robert

Liston (1794-1847), was engaged in more than one of the following

adventures, the stories of which I here tell as samples of the bulk. One

Henderson, an innkeeper, had died in Leven, in Fifeshire. Two students

from Edinburgh had snatched the body and were conveying it away, when

one of them suddenly felt ill. They took refuge with their burden,

enclosed in a sack, in a convenient public-house. It happened to be the

one formerly kept by Henderson, and now in charge of his widow and

daughter. They were shown to an upper room, which contained a closed-in

box bed, so frequent a feature in old Scots houses. The sick man was

pulling himself together with brandy and what not, when a great hubbub

arose downstairs. The town officers were searching the house for stolen

property. The students were beside themselves with panic, though in fact

the officers do not seem to have searched the upstairs room at all.

However, “The thief doth fear each bush an officer.” The two lads

hastily took the body from the sack and put it in the bed, then they

bolted through the window, and were seen no more. The room as it turned

out was used by the widow as a bedroom, and it was only when she retired

for the night—I need not follow the narrative further, save to note

that the graveclothes had been made by herself!

When Liston was a student he heard from a country surgeon of an

interesting case where a post-mortem seemed desirable in the interests

of science. He and some others dressed as sailors and repaired to the

place by boat, for it was on the shore of the Firth. The surgeon’s

apprentice met them as arranged, and everything went off well. The

marauding party repaired for refreshment to a little change-house,

leaving their sack under a near hedge. Here they spent a happy time in

carousing and chaffing the country wench whom they found in charge. A

loud shout of “Ship ahoy!” startled them. The girl said it was only her

brother, and a drunken sailor presently staggered in with the sack on

his shoulders. Pitching it to the ground, he said with an oath, “Now if

that ain’t something good, rot them chaps who stole it.” Presently he

produced a knife. “Let’s see what it is,” said he as he ripped the sack

open. The sight of the contents worked a sudden change: the girl fled

through the door with hysterical screams, the sailor on the instant dead

sober followed, Liston seized the body, and all made for the boat, and

they were soon safe back in Edinburgh. Liston is the chief figure of

another adventure. He and his party had gone by boat to Rosyth to get

the body of a drowned sailor. His sweetheart, nearly distracted at her

recent loss, was scarce absent from the tomb night or day. They did

manage to get the body lifted and on board the boat, when the woman

discovered the violated grave. Her wild shrieks rang in their ears as

they pulled for the opposite shore as hard as they could, but they kept

secure hold of their prey. Another story tells of a party of tyros who

had raised the body of a farmer’s wife from Glencorse or some

neighbouring churchyard. As they dragged along it seemed to their

excited fancy that the body had recovered life and was hopping after

them! They fled with loud yells of terror, and left their burden by the

roadside. The widower was the first to discover it there next morning.

He thought it was a case of premature burial and made some frantic

efforts at resuscitation: the truth only gradually dawned upon him.

This, I venture to think, was the story that suggested to R. L.

Stevenson his gruesome tale of _The Body-snatcher_.