Yet another story tells of a certain Miss Wilson of Bruntsfield Links

who was courted by two admirers. She showed a marked preference for one,

and when he died she seemed heart-broken. The other, not content with

having the field to himself, engaged the services of a professional

body-snatcher and proceeded to Buccleuch burying-ground. Miss Wilson was

mourning at the grave; they waited till she was gone and then set to

work, and the surviving rival soon had the cruel satisfaction of knowing

that the body of the other was on the anatomical table at the

University!

I have mentioned the professional body-snatcher, and the class certainly

existed. Obviously it was formed of men of a low type, however afraid

they might be to perpetrate actual murder. Among the best known was a

certain Andrew Lees, called “Merry Andrew” by the students. He had been

a carrier between a country town and Edinburgh, and his house was near

the churchyard, which he despoiled at leisure. In after days he used to

lament the times when he got subjects “as cheap as penny pies.” It was

said he drank sixteen glasses of raw whisky daily, and that on great

occasions the glasses became pints. Various ruffians were associated

with him, one nicknamed “Moudiewart,” or mole, from his skill in the

delving part of the operation. Perhaps a line from Shakespeare was in

the mind of the nicknamer:

“Well said, old mole, can’st work i’ the earth so fast?”

More probably it was all native wit. Another was a sham parson called

“Praying Howard,” who wept and supplicated with an unction hard to

distinguish from the real article. There is no doubt these rascals

thoroughly enjoyed their knavish pranks, and they were ever on the watch

to hear of some one dying, friendless and alone; then one appeared among

a household perplexed to know what to do with the remains of a person in

whom they had no special interest. The stranger was a dear friend or

near relative of the deceased, and was only anxious to bury him with all

possible honour, and in due course a mock funeral was arranged, with

parson, undertaker, and chief mourner. The procession started for some

place in the country, but of course the real destination of the departed

was one of the Edinburgh dissecting rooms. If things went well, Andrew

and his fellows spent a night in wild debauchery in some tavern of ill

odour in every sense of the word.

At least those pranks were comparatively harmless. The dead were gone

beyond the reach of hurt, and the feelings of the living were not

outraged. As regards the rifling of graveyards, you wonder how it was so

often successful. The watchers were, however, paid hirelings, they were

frozen with superstitious terror, they were usually paralysed with

drink, and they had watched hours and nights already, and nothing had

happened. The assailants were infinitely more active in mind and body;

they had full command of cash and of all necessary appliances, and they

selected the time of their attack; more than all, they seemed absolutely

free from superstitious feeling. Yet, with it all, it is curious that no

Edinburgh doctor or student seems ever to have been put in actual peril.

I turn now to the Burke and Hare murders, which had important effects in

various directions. The locus was Tanner’s Close in the West Port,

outside the city boundary. Here Burke kept a lodging-house, and here, on

the 29th of November 1827, Donald, an old pensioner, died in debt to

Burke. Thus a needy man found himself in possession of the body of his

dead-and-gone debtor, and it seemed to him quite justifiable to fill up

the coffin with rubbish, and sell the corpse to Dr. Knox of 10 Surgeon

Square at £7,10s., a sum which seemed for the moment a small fortune.

Then the notion occurred to him or his associate, Hare, how easy to

press the life out of some of the waifs and strays that floated about

the Grassmarket and its adjacent quarters, the very lowest in Edinburgh!

These were here to-day and gone to-morrow, and if they never turned up

again who was there to ask after them or mourn their loss? I shall not

tell here the story of “Daft Jamie” and handsome Mary Paterson and the

other victims, or of how the murderers were discovered, how Hare turned

King’s evidence, how Burke was convicted, whilst his associate, Helen

Macdougal, escaped. Burke was executed amidst impressive and even

terrible marks of popular indignation, and by a sort of poetic justice,

which appealed to the popular imagination, he himself was dissected.

For us Dr. Knox is a more interesting and important figure. The thing

cast a shadow over his brilliant career, and at last his life was lost

in flats and shallows, yet he was one of the most striking figures of

his time. Though a cruel attack of small-pox in his youth had left him

blind in the left eye, and plain to the verge, or over the verge, of

ugliness, he was a special favourite with women, by his talk, by his

manner, by you know not what. According to Shakespeare, Richard

Crookback, a more evil man, surely, in every way, had the same fatal

gift. Knox was widely read and of wide culture. In a city of brilliant

talkers he was, so his biographer would have us believe, among the very

best, nay, he ranks him equal or superior to De Quincey. We are told

that he was so tender-hearted that he hated to think of experiments on

living animals; he did not believe that any real advantage was to be

gained therefrom. He certainly was possessed of true enthusiasm for

science; he was by no means a rich man, yet he spent £300 on a whale

which he dissected, and whose skeleton he secured for the museum. It was

only an amiable weakness that he was very careful in his dress and

person. His friend, Dr. Macdonald, afterwards professor of natural

history at St. Andrews, calling upon him one day, found him with his

sister Mary. She had a pair of curling-tongs in her hand, with which she

was touching up her brother’s rather scanty locks. “Ah, ah! I see,” said

Macdonald, “the modern Apollo attired by the Graces.” Knox was not

unduly disturbed by remarks of this sort. Monro’s pupils considered

themselves in the opposite camp. One of them wagered that he would put

the anatomist out of countenance. He set himself right before him in the

street: “Well, by Jove, Dr. Knox, you are the ugliest fellow I ever saw

in my life!” Knox quietly patted the impudent student on the shoulder:

“Ah! then you cannot have seen my brother Fred!” As it happened, Fred

was much the handsomer of the two, but he had been rather a thorn in the

side of the anatomist, who had shown him much kindness, and maybe Knox

was not ill pleased at the chance to give him a sly dig. His own

students doted on him, they called him Robert for short. “Yes,” said an

enemy, “Robert le Diable”; as such the people regarded him. How he

escaped death, or at least bodily injury, is a little curious; even the

students were affrighted at the yells and howls of the mob outside his

evening classroom. The lecturer pointed out that he had never missed a

single lecture, and that he was not afraid. Once the rabble burned his

effigy and attacked his house. Knox escaped to his friend, Dr. Adams, in

St. Patrick Square. He was asked how he dare venture out. He said he

preferred to meet his fate, whatever it was, outside than die like a rat

in a hole, then he threw open the military cloak that he wore and

revealed a sword, pistols, and a Highland dirk. The brutes might kill

him, but he would account for at least twenty of them first. All sorts

of legends were told about him. He had many Kaffir skulls in his museum,

and he was alleged to have explained: “Why, sir, there was no difficulty

in Kaffraria. I had but to walk out of my tent and shoot as many as I

wanted for scientific and ethnological purposes.” Knox _had_ experiences

in South Africa, but they were not of this kind. In chap books and

popular ditties his name ever went with the West Port murderers—a verse

may be given:

“Burke an’ Hare

Fell doun the stair

Wi’ a leddy in a box

Gaun tae Doctor Knox.”

Once when walking in the Meadows with Dr. Adams, Knox gave a penny and

said some pleasant words to a pretty little girl of six who was playing

there. “Would she come and live with him,” he said jestingly, “if he

gave her a penny every day?” The child shook her head. “No; you’d maybe

sell me to Dr. Knox.” His biographer affirms he was more affected by

this childish thrust than by all the hostility of the mob. He could give

a shrewd thrust himself, however. Dr. John Reid, the physiologist, had

dissected two sharks, in which he could discover no sign of a brain; he

was much perplexed. “How on earth could the animals live without it?”

said he to Knox. “Not the least extraordinary,” was the answer. “If you

go over to the Parliament House any morning you will see a great number

of live sharks walking about without any brains whatever.”

[Illustration: DR. ARCHIBALD PITCAIRN,

From an Engraving after Sir John Medina]

I have gone somewhat out of my way to complete the story of the

resurrectionist times. I return to an earlier period with a note on the

Royal Infirmary. The great evil of the body-snatching incidents was that

it brought into disrepute and odium the profession towards which the

public felt kindly and to which they have been so greatly indebted for

unpaid, unselfish, and devoted service. During nearly two hundred years

the great Edinburgh hospital known as “The Royal Infirmary” has borne

witness to the labours in the public cause of the Edinburgh doctors. The

story of its inception is creditable to the whole community. It was

opened in 1729 on a very humble scale in a small house. A charter was

granted by George II. in 1736, and on the 2nd August 1738 the

foundation-stone of a great building was laid to the east of the college

near the old High School. The whole nation helped: the proprietors of

stone quarries sent stone and lime; timber merchants supplied wood; the

farmers carried materials; even day labourers gave the contribution of

their labour, all free of charge. Ladies collected money in assemblies,

and from every part of the world help was obtained from Scotsmen settled

in foreign parts. Such is the old Royal Infirmary. When it was unable

further to supply the wants of an ever-increasing population and the

requirements of modern science, the new Royal Infirmary was founded in

October 1870 and opened in October 1879 on the grounds of George

Watson’s Hospital, which had been acquired for the purpose. The place is

the western side of the Meadow Walk, and the same devoted service to the

cause of humanity has now been given for more than thirty years in those

newer walls. But for the present we are concerned with incidents in the

lives of old eighteenth-century doctors. Dr. Archibald Pitcairne

(1652-1713), scholar and Jacobite, perhaps better known as that than as

a physician, was a well-known figure. He was buried in Greyfriars’

Churchyard under a rectangular slab with four pillars, on which there

was an inscription by the learned Ruddiman, himself a Jacobite scholar

and much in sympathy with the deceased. Pitcairne, like the rest of

Edinburgh, set great store on his wine; with an almost sublime

confidence he collected certain precious bottles and decreed in his will

that these should not be uncorked until the King should enjoy his own

again, but when the nineteenth century dawned it seemed hardly worth

while to wait any longer. Pious souls were found to restore the tomb

which, like so many other tombs in Greyfriars, alas! had fallen into

decay and disorder. They were rewarded in a way which was surely after

the master’s own heart. The 25th of December 1800 was the anniversary of

the doctor’s birth. The consent of Lady Anne Erskine, his granddaughter,

having been obtained, the bottles were solemnly uncorked, and they were

found to contain Malmsey in excellent preservation. Each contributor to

the restoration received a large glass quaintly called a jeroboam. This,

you do not doubt, they quaffed with solemn satisfaction in memory of the

deceased.

Pitcairne was far from “sound,” according to the standard of the time;

he was deist or perhaps even atheist, it was opined, and one was as bad

as the other, but he must have his joke at whatever price. At a sale of

books a copy of Holy Writ could find no purchaser. “Was it not written,”

sniggered Pitcairne, “_Verbum Deimanetin æternum_?” The crowd had Latin

enough to see the point. There was a mighty pother, strong remarks were

freely interchanged, an action for defamation was the result, but it was

compromised. I tell elsewhere of a trick played by Pitcairne on the

tryers. Dr. Black, of the police establishment, played one even more

mischievous on Archibald Campbell, the city officer. Black had a shop in

the High Street, the taxes on which were much in arrear, and the

irascible Highlander threatened to seize his “cattinary (ipecacuanha)

pottles.” Black connected the handle of his door with an electric

battery and awaited developments. First came a clerk, who got nothing

more than a good fright. He appeared before his master, who asked him

what he meant by being “trunk like a peast” at that time of day? He set

off for the doctor’s himself, but when he seized the door handle he

received a shock that sent him reeling into the gutter. “Ah,” said one

of the bystanders, who no doubt was in the secret, “you sometimes accuse

me of liking a _glass_, but I think the doctor has given you a

_tumbler_!” “No, sir,” cried Archie as soon as he had recovered his

speech. “He shot me through the shoulder with a horse-pistol. I heard

the report by —— Laddie, do you see any plood?” An attempt was made to

communicate with the doctor next day through the clerk, but the latter

promptly refused. “You and the doctor may paith go to the tevil; do you

want me to be murdered, sir?”

Practical joking of the most pronounced description was much in favour

in old Edinburgh. One Dempster, a jeweller in the Parliament Close,

after a bout of hard drinking, was minded to cut his throat. A friend,

described by Kay as “a gentleman of very convivial habits,” remarked in

jest that he would save him the trouble, and proceeded to stick a knife

into him. It was at once seen that the joke—and the knife—if anything,

had been pushed too far, and John Bennet, surgeon, was summoned in

desperate haste; his treatment was so satisfactory that the wound was

cured and the matter hushed up. The delighted Hamilton, relieved from

dismal visions of the Tolbooth and worse, “presented Mr. Bennet with an

elegant chariot,” and from this time he was a made man. _His_ ideas of

humour were also a little peculiar. In payment of a bet he gave a dinner

at Leith at which, as usual, everybody drank a great deal too much. They

were to finish up the evening at the theatre, and there they were driven

in mourning coaches at a funereal pace. All this you may consider mere

tomfoolery, mad pranks of ridiculous schoolboys, but Bennet was a grave

and reputable citizen; he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons

in 1803, and died in 1805, and in the stories that I tell of him and

others you have for good or ill eighteenth-century Edinburgh. He was a

very thin man. He once asked a tailor if he could measure him for a suit

of small clothes? “Oh,” said the man of shears, “hold up your stick, it

will serve the purpose well enough.” You can only conjecture whether the

order was in fact given, for there the chronicle stops short. There are

certain “large and comfortable words” in the _Rhyming Epistle to a

Tailor_ that would have served excellent well for a reply. Bennet had

not the wit of Burns, and _his_ reply is not preserved. You believe,

however, it did not lack strength.

[Illustration: DR. ALEXANDER WOOD,

From an Engraving after Ailison]

One of the best known surgeons of old Edinburgh was Alexander Wood

(1725-1807), whose name still survives in a verse of Byron’s. Once he

“would a-wooing go,” and was asked by his proposed father-in-law as to

his means. He drew out his lancet case: “We have nothing but this,” he

said frankly. He got the lady, however. Sir James Stirling, the Provost,

was unpopular on account of his opposition to a scheme for the reform of

the Royal boroughs of Scotland. He was so like Wood that the one was not

seldom mistaken for the other, and a tragedy of errors was well-nigh

acted. An angry mob, under the mistaken impression that they had their

Lord Provost, were dragging Wood to the edge of the North Bridge with

the loudly expressed intention of throwing him over, but when he yelled

above the din, “I’m lang Sandy Wood; tak’ me to a lamp and ye’ll see,”

the crowd dissolved in shouts of laughter.

When the great Mrs. Siddons was at the theatre it was a point of fashion

with ladies to faint by the score. Wood’s services were much in

requisition, a good deal to his disgust. “This is glorious acting,” said

some one to him. “Yes, and a d—d deal o’t too,” growled Sandy, as he

sweated from one unconscious fair to the other. Almost as well known as

Sandy were his favourite sheep Willie and a raven, which followed him

about whenever they could.

The most conspicuous figure of the eighteenth-century Edinburgh doctors

was William Cullen (1710-1790), who in 1756 was made Professor of

Chemistry in the University. One charming thing about those Edinburgh

doctors is their breadth of culture: Cullen had the pleasure of reading

_Don Quixote_ in the original. When Dugald Stewart was a lad he fell

ill, and was attended by Cullen, who recommended the great Spaniard to

the ingenious youth. Doctor and patient had many a long talk over

favourite passages. Dr. John Brown, afterwards author of the Brunonian

system of medicine, was assistant to Cullen, but they quarrelled, and

Brown applied for a mastership in the High School. Cullen could scarcely

trust his ears. “Can this be oor Jock?” quoth he.

Plain speaking was a note of those old Edinburgh medicals. Dr. John

Clark was called in to consult as to the state of Lord Provost Drummond,

who was ill of a fever. Bleeding seemed his only chance, but they

thought him doomed, and it seemed useless to torture him. “None of your

idle pity,” said Clark, “but stick the lancet into him. I am sure he

would be of that opinion were he able to decide upon his case.” Drummond

survived because, or in spite, of the operation. Lord Huntington died

suddenly on the bench after having delivered an opinion. Clark was

hurried in from the Parliament Close. “The man is as dead as a herring,”

said he brutally. Every one was shocked, for even in old Edinburgh plain

speaking had its limits. He might have taken a lesson from queer old

Monboddo, who said to Dr. Gregory, “I know it is not in the power of man

to cure me; all I wish is euthanasia, viz. a happy death.” However, he

recovered. “Dr. Gregory, you have given me more than I asked—a happy

life.” This was the younger Gregory (1753-1821), Professor of Medicine

in the University, as his father had been earlier. He was an eminent

medical man, but a great deal more; his quick temper, his caustic wit,

his gift of style, made him a dangerous opponent. The public laughed

with him whether he was right or wrong. His _History of the Western

Islands and Highlands of Scotland_ showed that he had other than medical

interests. In 1793, when the Royal Edinburgh volunteers were formed, he

became one of them, and he disturbed the temper of Sergeant Gould, who

said, “He might be a good physician, but he was a very awkward soldier.”

He asked too many questions. “Sir,” said the instructor, “you are here

to obey orders and not to ask reasons; there is nothing in the King’s

orders about reasons,” and again, “Hold your tongue, sir. I would rather

drill ten clowns than one philosopher.”

He who professes universal knowledge is not in favour with the

specialist. Gregory visited Matthew Baillie in London, and the two

eminent medicos were in after talk not entirely laudatory of one

another. “Baillie,” said Gregory, “knows nothing but physic.” “Gregory,”

said the other, “seems to me to know everything but physic.” This

Matthew Baillie (1761-1823) was a well-known physician of his time who

had done well in Edinburgh and gone south to do better still. He worked

sixteen hours a day, and no wonder he was sometimes a little irritable.

A fashionable lady once troubled him with a long account of imaginary

ills, he managed to escape, but was recalled by an urgent message:

“Might she eat some oysters on her return from the opera?” “Yes, ma’m,”

said Baillie, “shells and all.”

Robert Liston (1794-1847) began as Barclay’s assistant. Like other

eminent surgeons stories are told of his presence of mind and fertility

of resource during an operation. In an amputation of the thigh by

Russell, Professor of Clinical Surgery at the University, an artery bled

profusely. From its position it could not be tied up or even got at.

Liston, with the amputating knife, chipped off a piece of wood from the

operating table, formed it into a cone, and inserted it so as at once to

stop the bleeding and so save the patient. In 1818 Liston left Barclay

and lectured with James Syme (1799-1870) as his assistant, but in 1822

Syme withdrew and commenced to lecture for himself. His old master was

jealous. “Don’t support quackery and humbug,” he wrote as late as 1830

in the subscription book of his rival’s hospital. However, the two made

it up before the end. This is not the place to speak of the skill of one

of the greatest surgeons of his time; it was emphatically said of him

“he never wasted a word, nor a drop of ink, nor a drop of blood.”

[Illustration: PROFESSOR JAMES SYME,

From a Drawing in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery]

A contemporary of Syme was Sir William Fergusson (1808-1877). He was one

of that brilliant Edinburgh band who did so well in London; he began as

a demonstrator to Knox. In London he became President of the Royal

College of Surgeons, and the best known stories are of his later period.

The speed and certainty of his work were remarkable. “Look out sharp,”

said a student, “for if you only even wink, you’ll miss the operation

altogether.” Once when operating on a large deep-seated tumour in the

neck, a severed artery gave forth an enormous quantity of blood; an

assistant stopped the wound with his finger. “Just get your finger out

of the way, and let’s see what it is,” and quick as lightning he had the

artery tied up. There must have been something magical in the very touch

of those great operators. A man afflicted with a tumour was perplexed as

to the operation and the operator. But as he himself said: “When

Fergusson put his hand upon me to examine my jaw, I felt that he was the

man who should do the operation for me, the contrast between his

examination and that of the others was so great.”

A little earlier than these last were the famous family of Bells. Sir

Charles Bell (1774-1842) is rather of London than of Edinburgh, though

to him is ascribed the saying that “London is the place to live in, but

not to die in.” John Bell (1763-1820), his brother, was an Edinburgh

surgeon of note, and a famous lecturer on surgery and anatomy. He had a

violent controversy with Professor James Gregory, who attacked him in a

_Review of the Writings of John Bell_ by Jonathan Dawplucker. This

malignant document was stuck up like a playbill on the door of the

lecture room, on the gates of the college, and of the infirmary, where

he operated; in short, everywhere, for such were the genial methods of

Edinburgh controversy. Bell was much occupied and had large fees for his

operations. A rich country laird once gave him a cheque for £50, which

the surgeon thought much below his deserts. As the butler opened the

door for him, he said to that functionary: “You have had considerable

trouble opening the door for me, here is a trifle for you,” and he

tossed him the bill. The laird took the hint and immediately forwarded a

cheque for £150. It is worth while to note that Joseph Bell (1837-1911),

who sprang from the same family, has a place in literary fiction as the

original Sherlock Holmes.

The great name among modern Edinburgh doctors is clearly that of Sir

James Young Simpson (1811-1870), an accomplished scholar and

antiquarian, as well as the discoverer of chloroform. His activity was

incessant. An apology was made to him because he had been kept waiting

for a ferry-boat. “Oh dear, no,” said he, “I was all the time busy

chloroforming the eels in the pool.” His pietistic tendencies by no

means quenched his sense of humour. Parting from a young doctor who had

started a carriage, “I have just been telling him I will pray for his

humility.” Some one propounded the not original view that the Bible and

Shakespeare were the greatest books in the world. “Ah,” said he, “the

Bible and Shakespeare—and Oliver and Boyd’s Edinburgh Almanac,” this

last huge collection of facts he no doubt judged indispensable for the

citizen. The final and solemn trial of chloroform was made on the 28th

November 1837. Simpson, Keith, and Duncan experimented on themselves.

Simpson went off, and was roused by the snores of Dr. Duncan and the

convulsive movements of Dr. Keith. “He saw that the great discovery had

been made, and that his long labours had come to a successful end.” Some

extreme clergymen protested. “It enabled women,” one urged, “to escape

part of the primeval curse; it was a scandalous interference with the

laws of Providence.” Simpson went on with his experiments. Once he

became insensible under the influence of some drug. As he came to

himself, he heard his butler, Clarke, shouting in anger and concern:

“He’ll kill himself yet wi’ thae experiments, an’ he’s a big fule, for

they’ll never find onything better than clory.” On another occasion,

Simpson and some friends were taking chloral ether in aerated water.

Clarke was much interested in the “new champagne chlory”; he took what

was left downstairs and administered it to the cook, who presently

became insensible. The butler in great alarm burst in upon the assembled

men of science: “For God’s sake, sir, come doun, I’ve pushioned the

cook.” Those personal experiments were indeed tricky things. Sir Robert

Christison (1797-1882) once nearly killed himself with Calabar bean. He

swallowed his shaving water, which acted promptly as an emetic, but he

was very ill for some time. One of the most beautiful things in

Simpson’s story was the devotion of his own family to him, specially the

care of his elder brother Alexander. “Oh, Sandie, Sandie,” said Simpson

again and again to the faithful brother, who stood by him even on his

death-bed. To the outside world he seemed the one Edinburgh figure of

first importance. A citizen was presented at the Court of Denmark to the

King of that country. “You come from Edinburgh,” said His Majesty. “Ah!

Sir Simpson was of Edinburgh.”

CHAPTER FIVE

ROYALTY

A difficulty meets you in making Kings the subject of anecdote; the

“fierce light” that beats about a throne distorts the vision, your

anecdote is perhaps grave history. Again, a monarch is sure to be a

centre of many untrustworthy myths. What credit is to be placed, for

instance, on engaging narratives like that of Howieson of Braehead and

James V.? Let us do the best we can. Here I pass over the legends of

Queen Margaret and her son David, but one story of the latter I may

properly give. Fergus, Prince of Galloway, was a timid if not repentant

rebel. He made friends with Abbot Alwyn of Holyrood, who dressed him as

a monk and presented him with the brethren on the next visit of the

King. The kiss of peace, words of general pardon for all past

transgressions, were matters of form, not to be omitted, but quite

efficacious. Fergus presently revealed himself, and everybody accepted

the dodge as quite legitimate. You recall the trick by which William of

Normandy got Harold to swear on the bones of the saints: the principle

evidently was, get your oath or your pardon by what dodge you choose,

but at all costs get it. Alexander, Lord of the Isles, played a more

seemly part in 1458 when he appeared before James I. at the High Altar

at Holyrood, and held out in token of submission his naked sword with

the hilt towards the King. A quaint story is chronicled of James II. As

a child he was held in Edinburgh Castle by Crichton, the Lord

Chancellor. The Queen Mother was minded to abduct him; she announced a

pilgrimage to Whitekirk, a famous shrine or shrines, for there was more

than one of the name. Now a Queen, even on pilgrimage and even in

old-time Scotland, must have a reasonable quantity of luggage, change of

dresses, and what not. Thus no particular attention was given to a

certain small box, though the Queen’s servants, you believe, looked

after it with considerable care. In fact it contained His Majesty _in

propria persona_. By means of a number of air-holes practised in the lid

he managed to survive the journey. It is said his consent was obtained

to his confinement, but those old Scots were used to carry their own

lives and the lives of others in their hands, and he had little choice.

This is the James who ended at Roxburgh by the bursting of a cannon. His

son had peculiar relations with Edinburgh. In 1482 he gave the city its

Golden Charter, exalting its civic rulers, and his Queen and her ladies

knit with their own hands for the craftsmen the banner of the Holy

Ghost, locally known for centuries as the “Blue Blanket,” that famous

ensign which it was ridiculously fabled the citizens carried with them

to the Holy Land. At this, or rather against the proud spirit of its

owners, James VI. girded in the _Basilicon Doron_. It made a last public

appearance when it waved, a strange anachronism, in 1745 from the

steeple of St. Giles to animate the spirits of the burghers against

Prince Charles and his Highlanders, then pressing on the city. There it

hung, limp, bedraggled, a mere hopeless rag! How unmeet, incongruous,

improper, to use it against a Stuart! At any rate it was speedily pulled

down, and stowed away for ever. James III. fell at Sauchieburn in 1488.

It was rumoured he had survived the battle and taken refuge on the

_Yellow Carvel_ which Sir Andrew Wood, his Admiral, had brought to the

Forth. The rebel lords sent for Sir Andrew, whom the Duke of Rothesay,

afterwards James IV., mistook for his dead parent. “Sir, are you my

father?” said the boy. “I am not your father, but his faithful servant,”

answered the brave sailor with angry tears. The lords after many

questions could make nothing of him, so they let him go back to his

ship, just in time to save the lives of the hostages whom his brothers,

truculent and impatient, were about to string up at the yard-arm.

[Illustration: MARGARET TUDOR, QUEEN OF JAMES IV.,

From the Painting by Mabuse]

The reign of James IV. is full of picturesque incident. There are

stories of brilliant tournaments at Edinburgh, where he sat on a ledge

of the Castle rock and presided over the sports of a glittering throng

gathered from far and near. There are the splendid records of his

marriage with Margaret, Henry VII.’s daughter, the marriage that a

hundred years afterwards was to unite the Crowns, the marriage whose

fateful import even then was clearly discerned; and there is the tragic

close at Flodden, of which, in the scanty remnants of the Flodden Wall,

Edinburgh still bears the tangible memorials.

I prefer to note here quainter and humbler memorials. James had a

curious, if fitful, interest in art and letters. The picturesque

Pitscottie boldly affirms him “ane singular guid chirurgione.” In the

book of the royal expenses we have some curious entries. A fine pair of

teeth had an unholy attraction for him. He would have them out, on any

or no pretext. “Item, ane fellow because the King pullit furtht his

teith, xviii shillings.” “Item, to Kynnard, ye barbour, for twa teith

drawn furtht of his hed be the King, xviii sh.” History does not record

what the “fellow” or the “barbour” said on the subject, or whether they

were contented with the valuation of their grinders, which was far from

excessive since the computation is in Scots money, wherein a shilling

only equalled an English penny. The barber, moreover, according to the

practice of the time, was a rival artist, but—speculation is vain;

though it will be observed that instead of the patients feeing the Royal

physician, they were themselves feed to submit to treatment. This same

Lindsay of Pitscottie is also our authority for another story to the

full as quaint. James desired to know the original language of mankind.

He procured him two children—human waifs and strays were plentiful in

old Scotland; provided them with a dumb woman for nurse, and plumped the

three down on Inchkeith, that tiny islet in the Forth a little way out

from Leith. Our chronicler is dubious as to the result. “Some say they

spak guid Hebrew, but I know not by authoris rehearse.” The “guid

Hebrew,” if it ever existed, died with them. Nor is there any trace of a

Scots Yiddish, a compound whereof you shudder at the bare conception.

Under James V. we have the popular legend of Howieson already referred

to. James, or all tradition errs, was given to wandering in disguise

through his kingdom to see how his subjects fared or to seek love

adventures, or perhaps for both. The King of the Commons, as his folk

called him, took things as they came and life as he found it. The story

goes that he was courting some rustic damsel in Cramond village when he

was set upon by a band of enraged rivals or relatives. He defended

himself on the narrow bridge that then crossed the Almond, but spite his

efficient swordplay was like to get the worst of it when a rustic, one

Jock Howieson, who was working near at hand, came to his aid and laid

about him so lustily with his flail that the assailants fled. There was

some talk of a reward, and Jock confessed that his dearest wish was to

own the land which he tilled. The stranger, without revealing his

identity, or, rather, concealing it under the title of the Gudeman of

Ballengiech (the traditional name adopted by James in his wanderings and

derived from a road or pass at Stirling Castle), made an appointment

with his preserver at Holyrood Palace. Jock turned up in due course, and

was promised an interview with the King, whom he would recognise as the

only man with his bonnet on. Jock, with rustic humour, replied that

either he himself or his friend must be the King since they were the

only two that were covered. A grant of the land, which conveniently

turned out to be Crown property, speedily followed on the condition that

when the King came that way Jock or his descendant should present him

with a vessel of water wherein to wash his hands. “Accordingly in the

year 1822 when George IV. came to Scotland the descendant of John

Howieson of Braehead, who still possesses the estate, which was given to

his ancestor, appeared at a solemn festival and offered His Majesty

water from a silver ewer that he might perform the service by which he

held his lands.” Thus Sir Walter Scott in the _Tales of a Grandfather_.

It seems that in 1822 the proprietor was William Howieson Crawford, Esq.

of Braehead and Crawfordland. One fancies that the good Sir Walter

jogged, if one may say so, Mr. Crawford’s memory, and possibly arranged

both “the solemn festival” and “the silver ewer.” This entertaining

legend has not escaped—how could it?—sceptical modern critics. It is

shown that not for centuries after James did the story take coherent

shape, and that as handed down it can scarce have happened. What can you

say but that in some form or other it may have had a foundation in fact?

That if it is not possible conclusively to prove, neither is it possible

clearly to disprove, and finally it is at least _ben trovato_.

In setting down one or two anecdotes of James V.’s Queens I am on surer

ground. In 1537, James was married to Magdalen, daughter of Francis I.,

in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. They reached Scotland on the

27th of May. As the Queen landed she knelt down and kissed the soil, a

pretty way of adopting her new fatherland that touched those hard Scots

as it still touches us, but on the 10th of July the poor child, she was

not complete seventeen, was lying dead at Holyrood. It was a cold

spring: the Castle was high and bleak, Holyrood was damp and low. She

was a fragile plant and she withered and faded away, for us the most

elusive and shadowy of memories, yet still with a touch of old-world

sweetness. All the land grieved for that perished blossom. It was the

first general mourning known in Scotland, and there was in due time “the

meed of some melodious tear” from George Buchanan and David Lindsay.

[Illustration: MARY OF GUISE, QUEEN OF JAMES V.,

From an old Engraving]

Before a year had passed away, to wit, in June 1538, James had brought

another mate to Scotland, a very different character, known in our

history as Mary of Guise, the famous mother of a still more famous

daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. James V.’s widow was Queen Regent during

most of the minority of her child, and she held her own with unfailing

courage and ability. If she tricked and dodged she was like everybody

else. In that bitter fight neither Catholic nor Protestant were

over-scrupulous; she was on the unpopular and finally on the losing

side, but she fought as steadfastly and stoutly for what gods she had as

Knox himself, and she was not one of the royal authors. Her story is

told for us mainly by her enemies, and chief of all by John Knox, the

most deadly among them.

In 1556 he addressed a letter to her, by desire of the Congregation,

exhorting her to renounce the errors of Rome; she handed this to Beaton,

Bishop of Glasgow. “Please you, my Lord, to read a pasquil.” Knox, a

humorist himself, was peculiarly sensitive to scornful irony, and of

that two of his contemporaries had a peculiar gift, the Queen Regent,

Mary of Guise, and the Secretary, Maitland of Lethington. He never

forgot nor forgave these thrusts, and he cordially hated both. This does

not justify his vicious and one-sided account of the death-bed of this

Royal lady in 1560: “God, for his greit mercyis saik, red us frome the

rest of the Guysiane blude. Amen. Amen.” Such were the folk of the time.

In 1560 the Congregation made an attack on Leith, which was held by the

French. They failed: the French, Knox tells us, stripped the slain and

laid them along the wall. When the Regent looked across the valley at

this strange decoration she could not contain herself for joy, and said,

“Yonder are the fairest tapestrie that ever I saw. I wald that the haill

feyldis that is betwix this place and yon war strowit with the same

stuffe.” I am quite ready to believe this story. On both sides death did

not extinguish hatred, not even then was the enemy safe from insult.

Does not Knox himself tell us with entire approval how his party refused

the dead Regent the rights of her church, and how the body was “lappit

in a cope of lead and keipit in the Castell” for long weary months till

it could be sent to France, where the poor ashes were at length laid to

rest in due form?

Whatever the creed of either side, both in practice firmly held that

Providence was on the side of big battalions. Almost of necessity the

Regent was continually scheming for troops and possession of castles and

so forth. Some quaint anecdotes are told of her dealings with Archibald,

sixth Earl of Angus, grandson of old “Bell the Cat,” and gifted like him

with power of emphatic utterance. Angus had married, in 1514, Margaret,

the widow of James IV. For some time he was supreme in Scotland and was

at the lowest a person to be reckoned with. In his passages of wit with

the Regent she comes off second best, but then again the account is by

Hume of Godscroft, historian and partisan of the house of Douglas. The

time had not yet come for Kings to subsidise letters. Once Mary told

Angus that she proposed to create the Earl of Huntly, his rival, a duke.

“By the might of God”—his oath when angry—“then I will be a drake.” He

was punning on duke, which is Scots for duck, and meant to say that he

would still be the greater, though possibly the Queen required a

surgical operation before she understood. Once he came to pay his

compliments to her in Edinburgh at the head of a thousand horsemen. She

angrily reproved him for breach of the proclamation against noblemen

being so attended; but Angus had his answer ready. “The knaves will

follow me. Gladly would I be rid of them, for they devour all my beef

and my bread, and much, Madam, should I be beholden to you, if you could

tell me how to get quit of them.” Again, when she unfolded to him a plan

for a standing army, he promptly said, “We will fight ourselves better

than any hired fellows,” she could hardly reply that it was against

disturbing forces like his own that she longed for a defence. She

proposed to garrison Tantallon, that strong fortress of the Douglas

which still rises, mere shell though it be, in impressive ruin on the

Lothian coast opposite the Bass Rock. Angus had his goshawk on his

wrist, and was feeding it as he talked with the Queen, and one notes

that it seemed quite proper for nobles to go about so accompanied. He

made as if he addressed the bird, “Greedy gled, greedy gled, thou hast

too much already, and yet desirest more”: the Queen chose not to take

the obvious hint, but persisted. Angus boldly faced the question. “Why

not, Madam? Ah yes, all is yours, but, Madam, I must be captain of your

muster and keeper of Tantallon.” Not that these epigrams altered the

situation, rather they expressed it. Even in the hostile narrative your

sympathies are sometimes on the side of Mary of Guise. In 1558 a calf

with two heads was shown to her, apparently as a portent of calamity,

like the _bos locutus est_ of Livy, but what it exactly meant no one

could say. “She scripped and said it was but a common thing,” in which,

at any rate, she has the entire approval of the modern world.

[Illustration: MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS,

From the Morton Portrait]

Her daughter Mary gave Edinburgh the most exciting, romantic,

interesting, and important time in the city’s annals. It was scarcely

six years in all (19th August 1561-16th June 1567), but those were

crowded years: the comparatively gay time at first; the marriage with

Darnley; the assassination of Rizzio; the murder of Darnley; her seizure

by Bothwell; her marriage to Bothwell; the surrender of Carberry, with

her departure for Loch Leven. I scarce know what to select. On 15th

April 1562 Randolph writes: “The Queen readeth daily after her dinner,

instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Livy.” You

wish it had been Virgil, because you are sure scholar and pupil had

tried the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ with results even more pregnant than

happed to Mary’s grandson Charles I., at Oxford, in the time of the

civil wars, and the mere mention of George Buchanan is fateful. He, at

any rate, was an earnest and high-minded man, and he employed all the

grace of his Latin muse to say delightful things about her on more than

one occasion, and he had, in after years, every term of invective to

hurl at her also in Latin, but prose this time, and he felt himself

justified in both. The modern point of view which would find her almost

certainly guilty of being an accessary before the fact to the slaughter

of Darnley, that would also find that the circumstances were so

peculiar, that she was by no means altogether blameworthy, was not the

conception of her own day. She was guilty, and therefore a monster of

wickedness; or she was innocent, and therefore a martyr: those are the

sharply opposed views. It was not an age of compromise or judicial

balance. Take another incident. Rizzio’s murder was on 9th March 1566.

Immediately after she won over Darnley, mixed up with the affair as he

had been. The pair escaped from Holyrood in the midnight hours, through

the burial vaults and tombs of the palace. Darnley made some sudden and

half-involuntary reference to the freshly-turned grave of Rizzio that

lay right in their path. Mary gripped his arm and vowed, in what must

have been a terrible whisper, that ere a year had passed “a fatter than

he should lie as low.” Kirk-o’-field was on 10th February 1567.

I prefer here to deal with trivialities, not tragedies. How curiously

from the first she occupied the thoughts of men: ere she was a month old

grave statesmen were busy match-making! In 1558 she married the Dauphin,

afterwards Francis II. When the news came to Edinburgh it was felt that

some celebration was necessary. “Mons Meg was raised forth from her

lair” and fired once. The bullet was found on Wardie Muir, two miles

off, and bought back by a careful Government to serve another occasion.

We are told the cost of the whole affair was ten shillings and eight

pence, no doubt Scots currency, and without any doubt at all the most

frugal merry-making in history. I will relate this other comic interlude

of the night of her arrival at Holyrood. Knox tells the story of her

landing with his never-failing graphic force: the thick and dark mist

that covered the earth, a portent of the evil days to come, “the fyres

of joy” that blazed through it all, “and a company of the most honest

with instruments of musick and with musitians gave their salutationis at

hir chamber wyndo. The melody (as she alledged) lyked hir weill and she

willed the same to be contineued some nightis after.” Knox is a little

doubtful as to the sincerity of her thanks. Brantôme was of the Queen’s

company, and the gay Frenchman gives us a very different account of the

proceedings. “There came under her window five or six hundred rascals of

that town, who gave her a concert of the vilest fiddles and little

rebecs, which are as bad as they can be in that country, and accompanied

them with singing Psalms, but so miserably out of time and concert that

nothing could be worse. Ah, what melody it was! What a lullaby for the

night!” One of the Queen’s Maries remembered and applied a favourite

text of Montlin, Bishop of Valence, on which they had heard more than

one sermon: “Is any merry, let him sing Psalms.” If she showed herself a

Scot by her Biblical quotation, you guess she revealed her French

upbringing in an infinitely expressive shrug and grimace; but for that

night even Mary’s spirit was broken. She found no place for mirth and

could scarce refrain from tears, yet she had the courage on that and

other mornings gracefully to thank the musicians; only she shifted her

bedroom to the floor above, and slept, you believe, none the worse for

the change. The drop in material comfort, not to speak of anything else,

must have been enormous, from gay, wealthy, joyous France to this

austere, poverty-stricken land and people. Did not some mad scheme for

instant return move through her brain? No, for after all she was a Queen

and a Stuart, and it is mere commonplace to say that she never failed to

confront her fate.

It were easy and useless to dwell on the glaring contrasts in character

between Mary and her son James, between the most tragically unfortunate

and the most prosaically fortunate of the Stuarts. Such contrasts

between the character and fate of parent and child are not uncommon in

daily life. The first day of James on earth was memorable for the

dramatic meeting of his father and mother. He was born in Edinburgh

Castle, in the little room that is shown you there, between nine and ten

on the morning of Wednesday, 19th June 1566. About two in the afternoon

Darnley came to see his child. Like everybody else in Edinburgh, he had

known of the event for hours, since a few minutes after the birth heavy

guns, almost at Mary’s bedside and without a word of protest from the

courageous woman, had roared out their signal to the capital that

well-nigh went mad on the instant with joy and pride. The nurse put the

child into Darnley’s arms. “My Lord,” said Mary simply and solemnly,

“God has given you and me a son.” Then she turned to Sir William

Stanley: “This is the son who I hope shall first unite the two kingdoms

of Scotland and England.” The Englishman said something courteous about

the prior rights of Mary and Darnley, and then Mary wandered off into

the Rizzio business only three months before. What would have happened

if they had then killed her? You fancy the colour went and came in

Darnley’s face. “These things are all past,” he muttered. “Then,” said

the Queen, “let them go.” As James grew up he became well-nigh the most

eminent of royal and noble authors, and that strange mixture of

erudition, folly, wisdom, and simplicity which marks him as one of the

oddest characters in history. He was great in nicknames and phrases, and

the nicknames stuck and the phrases are remembered. “Tam o’ the Coogate”

for the powerful Earl of Haddington; “Jock o’ the Sclates” for the Earl

of Mar, because he, when James’s fellow-pupil, had been entrusted by

George Buchanan with a slate thereon to note James’s little peccadilloes

in his tutor’s absence; better than all, “Jingling Geordie” for George

Heriot the goldsmith. What a word picture that gives you of the

prosperous merchant prince who possibly hinted more than once that he

could an he would buy up the whole Court! That well-known story of

ostentatious benevolence can hardly be false. George visited James at

Holyrood and found him over a fire of cedar wood, and the King had much

to say of the costly fuel; and then the other invited him to visit his

booth hard by St. Giles’, where he was shown a still more costly fire of

the Royal bonds or promissory notes, as we might call them in the

language of to-day. We know that the relations between the banker and

his Royal customer were of the very best; and how can we say anything

but good of Heriot when we think of that splendid and beautiful

foundation that to-day holds its own with anything that modern Edinburgh

can show? As for his colloquial epigrams, there is the famous account of

David I. as a “sair sanct” for the Crown; his humorous and not

altogether false statement, when the Presbyterian ministers came to

interview him, “Set twal chairs, there be twal kings coming”; his

description—at an earlier date, of course—of the service of the

Episcopal Church as “an evil said mass in English wanting nothing but

the liftings”; his happy simile apropos of his visit to Scotland in 1617

of his “salmon-lyke” instinct—a great and natural longing to see “our

native soil and place of our birth and breeding.” No wonder he got a

reputation for wisdom! A quaint anecdote dates his renown in that regard

from a very early period indeed. On the day after his birth the General

Assembly met, and were much concerned as to the religious education of

the infant. They sent Spottiswoode, “Superintendant of Lothian,” to

interview the Queen on the subject. He urged a Protestant baptism and

upbringing for the child. Mary gave no certain answer, but brought in

her son to show to the churchmen, and probably also as the means of

ending an embarrassing interview. Spottiswoode, however, repeated his

demand, and with pedantic humour asked the infant to signify his

consent. The child babbled something, which one of the hearers at least

took for “Amen,” and “Master Amen” was the Court-name for Spottiswoode

ever after.

James deserved to be called the British Solomon, but then how did it

happen that the man had such a knack of making himself ridiculous? On

the night of the 23rd July 1593 the madcap Francis Earl of Bothwell made

one of his wild raids on Holyrood. James came out of his chamber in

terror and disorder, “with his breeks in his hand”; trembling, he

implored the invaders to do him no harm. “No, my good bairn,” said

Bothwell with insolence (the King was twenty-seven at the time); and as

a matter of fact no harm was done him. Fate tried the mother of James

and the son of James far more severely than it ever tried James himself,

and Mary Stuart and Charles the First managed things so ill that each in

the end had to lay the head on the block, but no one ever spoke to them

like that, and they never made themselves ridiculous. Mary was never

less than Queen and Charles was never less than King, and each played

the last scene so superbly as to turn defeat and ruin into victory and

honour, and if you say it was birth and breeding and the heritage of

their race how are you to account for the odd figure in between? Here is

another trivial anecdote. On Tuesday, 5th April 1603 James set forth

southward to take possession of his English throne. As Robert Chambers

points out, here was the most remarkable illustration of Dr. Johnson’s

remark that the best prospect a Scotsman ever saw was the high road to

England. Not very far from Holyrood stood splendid Seton Palace, and as

James and his folk drew near they crossed another procession. It was the

funeral train of the first Earl of Winton, who had been an attached

adherent of James’s mother. One of the Queen’s Maries was a Seton, and

James, as was right and proper, made way and halted till the procession

of the mightier King Death had passed. He perched himself in the

meantime on the garden wall, and you think of him hunched up there

“glowering” at the proceedings. On his return to Scotland James spent at

Seton Palace his second night after crossing the Tweed, and it was here

he received Drummond of Hawthornden’s poem of _Forth Feasting_. There

was unbounded popular rejoicing, though not without an occasional

discordant note; for the Presbyterian Scot was terribly suspicious. It

happened that one of the royal guards died during the visit. He was

buried with the service of the English Church, read by a surpliced

clergyman; there was an unseemly riot, and the parson if he escaped hard

knocks got the hardest of words. He was William Laud, afterwards

Archbishop of Canterbury. Let me end those stories of James with one of

a lighter character. I have spoken of James’s schoolfellow, the Earl of

Mar. He was left a widower, his wife Ann Drummond having died after

giving birth to a son. An Italian magician had shown him, as in a glass

darkly, the face of his second spouse. He identified the figure as that

of Lady Mary Stuart of the Lennox family, who would have none of him;

for the Drummond baby would be Earl of Mar, whilst hers would only be

Mr. Erskine. Jock o’ the Sclates was so mortified at the refusal that he

took to his bed, and seemed like to make a mortal though ridiculous

exit; but the King came to encourage him. “By God, ye shanna dee, Jock,

for ony lass in a’ the land!” In due course James brought about the

marriage, which turned out well for all concerned.

The Kings after James had but a very remote and chance connection with

Edinburgh. There are golfing anecdotes of Charles I. and James II., and

there is not even that about Charles II. Charles I. when in Edinburgh

was fond of the Royal game on the links at Leith, then the favourite

ground for the sport. It was whilst so engaged he heard the news of the

massacre in Ireland, and not unnaturally he threw down his club and

hastily quitted the links. The anecdote of James II. is of a more

detailed character, for Golfer’s Land, grim and battered, still stands

in the Canongate. When James held court at Holyrood as Duke of York, he

was given to golfing on the links. He had a match with two English

noblemen, his fellow-player in the foursome being John Patterson, a poor

shoemaker in the Canongate, but a superb golfer. If you don’t know the

story, at least you anticipate the result. The Englishmen were

shamefully beaten, and the stake being too small game for Royalty,

Patterson netted the proceeds, with which he built Golfer’s Land. The

learned Dr. Pitcairne adorned it with a Latin inscription, and all you

can say is you hope the legend is true. Another story of James tells how

one of the soldiers on duty at Holyrood, mortal tired or perhaps mortal

drunk, was found asleep at his post. Grim old Tom Dalzell was in charge,

and he was not the man to overlook such an offence, but marked out the

culprit for instant execution. The Duke, however, intervened and saved

the man’s life. I am glad to tell those stories of James, who as a rule

fares so ill at the hands of the historians.

Although I have said nothing of Charles II., his statue perhaps deserves

a word. It stands in Parliament Square, between St. Giles’ and the

Parliament House. The local authorities were once minded to set up the

stone image of Cromwell in that same place, indeed the stone had been

got ready when the Restoration changed the current of their thoughts,

and after an interval of twenty-five years they put up one to Charles

II. instead, the only statue that old Edinburgh for many a long day

possessed.

Kings and Queens came and went for the better part of a century, but

none of them came to Edinburgh, or even to Scotland, for you cannot

count the fugitive visit of the Old Pretender as anything at all. It was

not till Prince Charles Edward Stuart made the memorable descent on the

capital in the ’45 that I can again take up the easy thread of my

narrative. Here anecdotes are abundant, but the most too well known for

quotation: they tell of the cowardice of the citizens and the daring

simplicity of the Highlanders. The capture of the city was without

opposition. A burgher taking a walk saw a Highlander astride a gun, and

said to him that surely he did not belong to the troops that were there

yesterday. “Och no,” quoth the Celt, “she pe relieved.” According to all

accounts, the invading army behaved well. An exception was the man who

presented a musket at the head of a respectable shopkeeper, and when the

trembling cit asked what he wanted, replied, “A bawbee.” This modest

request being instantly complied with, they parted the best of friends.

The demands of others did not rise beyond a pinch of snuff, and one

hopes it was not required in an equally heroic manner. The day of

Charles’s entry, his father as King and himself as Regent were

proclaimed at the Cross by the heralds in their antique garb and with

their antique rites, and conspicuous among the attendant throng was the

beautiful Mrs. Murray of Broughton on horseback with a drawn sword,

covered with white cockades, the conspicuous Stuart emblem. With her it

was the one supreme moment of a life that was presently obscured in

shadows. Her husband’s reputation as traitor still lay in the future.

You remember how Scott’s father, Whig as he was, dashed to pieces the

cup that Murray had touched, so that neither he nor any of his family

might ever use it? At that same Cross, not many months after, the

standards of the clans and of Charles were burnt by the hangman and Tron

men or sweeps by the order of Cumberland, the least generous of foes. In

the crowd there must have been many who had gazed on the other

ceremonial. What a complete circuit fortune’s wheel had made! Amidst the

festivities of Holyrood those things were not foreseen. Then came

Prestonpans, with many a legend grave or gay. I will not repeat in

detail those almost threadbare stories of the Highland estimation of the

plunder: how that chocolate was Johnny Cope’s salve, and the watch that

stopped was a beast that had died, and a pack-saddle was a fortune, and

so forth. Here is perhaps the quaintest anecdote of misadventure. Two

volunteers, one of them destined to the bench as Lord Gardenstone, were

detailed to watch the precincts of Musselburgh. They were both convivial

“cusses”: they knew every tavern in Edinburgh and every change-house in

the far and near suburbs: they remembered a little den noted for its

oysters and its sherry—possibly an odd combination, but the stomachs of

young Edinburgh were invincible. At any rate, they made themselves

merry. But there were limbs of the law, active or “stickit,” on the

other side, and one as he prowled about espied the pair, and seized them

without difficulty as they tried to negotiate that narrow bridge which

still crosses the Esk at Musselburgh. They were dragged to the camp at

Duddingston, and were about to be hanged as spies, but escaped through

the intercession of still another lawyer, Colquhoun Grant, an adherent

of the Prince. This same Colquhoun was a remarkable person, and

distinguished himself greatly at Preston. He seized the horse of an

English officer and pursued a great body of dragoons with awe-inspiring

Gaelic curses. On, on went the panic-stricken mob, with Grant at their

heels so close that he entered the Netherbow with them, and was just

behind them at the Castle. He stuck his dirk into the gate, rode slowly

down the High Street, ordered the Netherbow Port to be thrown open, and

the frightened attendants were only too glad to see the back of him. In

after years he beat his sword to a ploughshare, or rather a pen, and

became a highly prosperous Writer to the Signet of Auld Reekie. It is

related by Kay that Ross of Pitcarnie, a less fortunate Jacobite, used

to extract “loans” from him by artful references to his exploits at

Preston and Falkirk. The cowardice of the regular troops is difficult to

account for, but there was more excuse for the volunteers, of whom many

comical stories are told. The best is that of John Maclure the

writing-master, who wound a quire of writing-paper round his manly

bosom, on which he had written in his best hand, with all the

appropriate flourishes, “This is the body of John Maclure, pray give it

a Christian burial.” However, when once the Prince was in, the citizens

preserved a strict neutrality. Of sentimental Jacobites like Allan

Ramsay we hear not a word: they lay low and said nothing. What could

they do but wait upon time? One clergyman was bold enough, at any rate,

namely, the Rev. Neil M‘Vicar, incumbent of St. Cuthbert’s, who kept on

praying for King George during the whole time of the Jacobite

occupation: “As for this young man who has come among us seeking an

earthly crown, we beseech Thee that he may obtain what is far better, a

heavenly one.” Archibald Stewart was then Provost, and he was said to

have Jacobite leanings. His house was by the West Bow, and here, it was

rumoured, he gave a secret banquet to Charles and some of his chiefs.

The folk in the Castle heard of this, and sent down a party of soldiers

to seize the Prince. Just as they were entering the house the guests

disappeared into a cabinet, which was really an entrance to a trap

stair, and so got off. The story is obviously false. Stewart was

afterwards tried for neglect of duty during the Rebellion, and the

proceedings, which lasted an inordinate time—the longest then on

record—resulted in his triumphant acquittal. The Government had never

omitted a damning piece of evidence like this—if the thing had

happened. One comic and instructive touch will pave my way to the next

episode. A certain Mrs. Irvine died in Edinburgh in the year 1837 at the

age of ninety-nine years or so, if the story be true which makes her a

young child in the ’45. She was with her nurse in front of the Palace,

where a Highlander was on guard: she was much attracted by his kilt, she

advanced and seized it, and even pulled it up a little way. The nurse

was in a state of terror, but the soldier only smiled and said a few

kind words to the child. The moral of this story is that till the

Highlanders took the city the kilt was a practically unknown garment to

the folk in the capital. Six years before Mrs. Irvine died, to wit in

1831, she saw the setting up at the intersection of George Street and

Hanover Street of the imposing statue by Chantrey which commemorates the

visit of George IV. to Scotland. This visit was from 14th August to 29th

August 1822. Sir Walter Scott stage-managed the business, and Lockhart

has pointed out how odd the whole thing was. Scott was a Lowlander, and

surely better read than any other in the history of his country, and who

better knew that the history of Scotland is the history of the Lowlands,

that Edinburgh was a Lowland capital, that the Highlands were of no

account, save as disturbing forces? Yet, blinded by the picturesque

effect, he ran the show as if the Highlands and the Highlands alone were

Scotland. Chieftains were imported thence, Scott was dressed as a

Highlander, George was dressed as a Highlander, Sir William Curtis,

London alderman, was dressed as a Highlander: the whole thing trembled

on the verge of burlesque. The silver St. Andrew’s cross that Scott

presented to the King when he landed had a Gaelic inscription! The King,

not to be outdone, called for a bottle of Highland whisky and pledged

Sir Walter there and then, and Sir Walter begged the glass that had

touched the Royal lips, for an heirloom no doubt. He got it, thrust it

into his coat-tail pocket, and presently reduced it to fragments in a

moment of forgetfulness by sitting on it. There, fortunately, the thing

was left: they did not try to reconstitute it, after the fashion of the

Portland Vase in the British Museum. George IV. had a fine if somewhat

corpulent figure (Leigh Hunt wrote to Archibald Constable at an earlier

period that he had suffered imprisonment for not thinking the Prince

Regent slender and laudable), and no doubt in the Highland garb he made

a “very pretty man,” but the knight from London was even more corpulent,

Byron sings in _The Age of Bronze_:

“He caught Sir William Curtis in a kilt,

While thronged the Chiefs of every Highland clan

To hail their brother Vich Ian an Alderman.”

“Faar’s yer speen?” (Where’s your spoon?) said an envious and mocking

Aberdeen bailie, to the no small discomfiture of the London knight, as

he strutted to and fro, believing that his costume was accurate in every

detail. Lockhart hints that possibly Scott invented the story to soothe

the King’s wounded feelings. On the 24th of August the Provost and

Magistrates of Edinburgh entertained the King in Parliament House to a

great banquet. The King gave one toast, “The Chieftains and Clans of

Scotland, and prosperity to the Land of Cakes.” He also attended a

performance of _Rob Roy_ at the theatre. Carlyle was in Edinburgh at the

time, and fled in horror from what he called the “efflorescence of the

flunkeyisms,” but everybody else seemed pleased, and voted the thing a

great success. No doubt it gave official stamp to what is perhaps still

the ordinary English view of Scotland. The odd thing is that Scott

himself never grasped the Highland character—at least, where has he

drawn one for us? Rob Roy and Helen Macgregor and Fergus M‘Ivor and

Flora M‘Ivor are mere creatures of melodrama, but the Bailie and Mattie

and Jeanie Deans and Davie Deans and the Antiquary and Edie Ochiltree

and Andrew Fairservice and Mause and Cuddie Hedrigg are real beings of

flesh and blood. We have met them or their likes on the muir or at the

close fit, or on the High Street or in the kirk.

Twenty years passed, and a British Sovereign again comes to Scotland. On

the 1st of September in 1842 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived at

Granton. They duly proceeded towards Edinburgh. The Lord Provost and

Bailies ought to have met them at Canonmills to present the keys of the

city, but they were “conspicuous by their absence,” and the Royal party

had to go to Dalkeith (like George the Fourth, they put up for the time

in the Duke of Buccleuch’s huge palace there). The local wits waxed

merry; they swore that my Lord Provost and his fellows had over-slept

themselves, and a parody of a well-known song rang unpleasantly in civic

ears:

“Hey, Jamie Forrest,

Are ye waukin’ yet,

Or are yer byles

Snoring yet?”

However, the Royal party came specially from Dalkeith on a subsequent

day, and received the keys at the Cross, and nobody even whispered

“Anticlimax!”

CHAPTER SIX

MEN OF LETTERS. PART I.

George Buchanan is the first in time as he is one of the first in

eminence of Scots men of letters. Many wrote before him; among the

kings, James I. certainly, James V. possibly, and even yet they are

worth reading by others than students. There is Gawin Douglas, the

Bishop, there is Buchanan’s contemporary, Knox, the Reformer, whose work

is classic, but they are not men of letters in the modern sense of the

term. Buchanan is. Literature was his aim in life, and he lived by it

indirectly if not directly. He is always to me a perplexing figure. How

deep was his reforming zeal, how deep his beliefs, I cannot tell. I have

read, I trust not without profit, Mr. Hume Brown’s two careful volumes

upon this great Scot, but he has not solved my doubts. The old scholar

was too learned, too travelled, too cultured to be in harmony with the

Scotland of his day; a certain aloofness marks him, a stern and heroic

rather than a human and sympathetic figure. You remember how

consistently the British Solomon hated his sometime schoolmaster.

Certain quaint anecdotes remain of their relations, but they have not to

do with Edinburgh; yet he died in the capital, and in one or two

memories that linger round those last hours you seem just at the end to

get in real touch with the man, with the human figure under the cloak.

In 1581 James Melville, the diarist, with certain friends, visited him

in Edinburgh. They found him teaching the young man that served him: A,

b, ab, and so forth. “I see you are not idle,” said one of the visitors

in ironical astonishment, but he said it was better than idleness. They

mentioned his _magnum opus_, his History of Scotland, the literary

sensation of the day, if that day had literary sensations. He stopped

them. “I may da nae mair for thinking on another matter.” “What is

that?” says Mr. Andro. “To die,” quoth he.

They went to the printer’s to have a peep at the last sheets, just

passing through the press, where they presently spied some plain-spoken

words like to be highly unpalatable at Court. Again they sought the old

scholar and spoke to him about them. “Tell me, man,” says he, “giff I

have tould the truth.” His visitors were of the same views as himself,

and they could not shirk so plain an issue. “Yes, sir,” says one of

them, “I think sae.” Then says the old man sternly: “Let it remain, I

will byde it, whatever happen. Pray, pray to God for me and let Him

direct all.” A “Stoick” philosopher, says Melville, and so he proved to

the end, which came on the 28th of September 1582, in Kennedy’s Close,

the second close to the west of the Tron Kirk, and long since vanished.

The day before he died he found that he had not enough money to pay for

his funeral, but even this, he said, must be given to the poor, his body

could fare for itself. Wisely provident for its own renown Edinburgh

gave him a public funeral in the Greyfriars Churchyard. Tradition marked

the spot for some time, and then a blacksmith put up a tablet at his own

cost, but that too vanished, and one is not certain that the learned Dr.

David Laing succeeded in fixing the true place. As we have seen, the

University of Edinburgh possesses what is believed to be his skull. When

Deacon Brodie stole the mace, this trophy did not come under his hand,

or it had surely gone too.

[Illustration: WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN,

From the Painting by Cornelius Janson van Ceulen]

No one could be less like George Buchanan than William Drummond of

Hawthornden, born three years after the death of the other, save that he

also was a man of letters, and that he also had intimate connection with

Edinburgh. Hawthornden is one of the beauty spots near the capital. Here

Ben Jonson paid him, in 1618-19, one of the most famous visits in all

the history of letters. The story is that Drummond was seated under a

huge sycamore tree when Jonson’s huge form hove in sight. The meeting of

two poets needs must call forth a spark of poetry.

“Welcome! Welcome! royal Ben!

Thank ye kindly, Hawthornden!”

A little suspicious, you may think! Where did Ben Jonson learn to

address a Scots laird in this peculiarly Scots fashion? After all, Ben’s

forbears came from Annandale, and who that has seen Hawthornden will

doubt here was the ideal spot for such an encounter? Drummond was a

devoted cavalier; his death was caused or hastened by that of Charles I.

He was buried by his favourite river in the neighbouring churchyard of

Lasswade. He has written his own epitaph:

“Here Damon lies whose songs did sometime grace

The wandering Esk—may roses shade the place.”

The town of Edinburgh honoured itself and the two poets by a banquet,

and in the next century Allan Ramsay honoured the pair in a more

appropriate fashion. There was once a huge pile of buildings called the

Luckenbooths, between St. Giles’ Church and the north side of the High

Street. The building at the east end, afterwards known as Creech’s Land,

from the bookseller who did business there, and who was locally famous

as the Provost and is still remembered as Burns’s publisher, was

occupied by Ramsay, and here, in 1725, he established the first

circulating library ever known in Scotland. It would have been the last

if godly Mr. Robert Wodrow and his fellows could have had their way, on

account of “the villainous, profane, and obscene books of plays” it

contained. You see they neither weighed nor minced words at the time. As

sign Allan stuck over the door the heads of Drummond of Hawthornden and

Ben Jonson.

Scots literature was altogether on the side of the Crown, or one should

rather say of the Stuarts. Who so stout a Jacobite as Allan, in words,

at any rate? In deeds it was quite otherwise: you never hear of him in

the ’45. His copious muse that could throw off a popular ballad on the

instant was silent during that romantic occupation of Edinburgh by the

young Ascanius. It was prudence that saved him. He was a Jacobite and so

against the powers that were, but he took no hurt; he was given to

theatrical speculation and he did burn his fingers over an abortive

business in that Carrubber’s Close which has now a reputation far other,

yet he came to no harm in the end, even if it be true that his

prosperous painter son had finally to discharge some old debts. We have

seen the view of the godly anent the books he sold or lent, and yet he

dodged their wrath; but I wonder most of all how he escaped a drunkard’s

death. Who knew better that grimy, witty, sordidly attractive, vanished

Edinburgh underworld of tavern and oyster-cellar—and worse? _The Gentle

Shepherd_ is all very well, and the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, with its

sentimental faking up of old Scots songs, is often very ill, though you

cannot deny its service to Scots literature; but not there is the real

Allan to be found. He minces and quibbles no longer when he sings the

praises of umquhile Maggie Johnson, who kept that famous “howf” on

Bruntsfield links.

“There we got fou wi’ little cost

And muckle speed.

Now wae worth Death! our sport’s a’ lost

Since Maggy’s dead!”

Nor is his elegy on Luckie Wood of the Canongate less hearty.

“She ne’er gae in a lawin fause,

Nor stoups a’ froath aboon the hause,

Nor kept dow’d tip within her waws,

But reaming swats.

She ne’er ran sour jute, because

It gees the batts.”

Unfortunately I cannot follow him in his lamentation over John Cowper or

Luckie Spence, or dwell on the part those worthies played in old

Edinburgh life. An’ you be curious you must consult the

original—unexpurgated. Let us quote our Allan on at least a quotable

topic.

“Then fling on coals and ripe the ribs,

And beek the house baith but and ben,

That mutchkin stoup it hauds but dribs,

Then let’s get in the tappit hen.

Good claret best keeps out the cauld,

And drives away the winter sune;

It makes a man baith gash and bauld,

And heaves his saul beyond the mune.”

Among drinking-songs it would be hard to beat these lines for vigour.

Did he quaff as heartily as he sang? I think not, probably his comrades

shouted “pike yer bane” to no purpose (he would have translated it to an

English admirer as “no heel taps”) to this little “black-a-vised” man

with his nightcap for head-dress, and his humorous, contented,

appreciative smile. The learned Thomas Ruddiman, his fellow-townsman and

fellow-Jacobite, used to say “The liquor will not go down” when urged to

yet deeper potations; perhaps Allan escaped with some such quip, at

least there is no touch of dissipation about his life, nay, a

well-founded reputation for honest, continuous, and prosperous industry.

In the end he built that famous house on the Castle Hill, called, from

its quaint shape, the “Goose Pie.” “Indeed, Allan, now that I see you in

it I think the term is very properly applied,” said Lord Elibank. The

joke was obvious and inevitable, but for all that rather pointless,

unless it be that Ramsay affected a little folly now and then to escape

envy or a too pressing hospitality. However, he lived reputably, died a

prosperous citizen, and his is one of the statues you see to-day in the

Princes Street Gardens.

Although Buchanan was one of the greatest scholars of his time in

Europe, he was not the founder of a race in minute points of classical

scholarship, especially in correct quantities of Latin syllables.

Scotland was long lacking, perhaps the reason was the want of rich

endowments, but Dr. Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), the physician, the

Jacobite, and the scholar, had another reason: “If it had not been for

the stupid Presbyterianism we should have been as good as the English at

longs and shorts.” Oddly enough, the same complaint was echoed within

the national Zion itself. Dalzel, Professor of Greek and Clerk to the

General Assembly, was, according to Sydney Smith, heard to declare, “If

it had not been for that Solemn League and Covenant we should have made

as good longs and shorts as they.” Before I pass from Pitcairne I quote

a ludicrous story of which he is the hero. His sceptical proclivities

were well known in Edinburgh, and he was rarely seen inside a church. He

was driven there, however, on one occasion by a shower of rain. The

audience was thin, the sermon commonplace, but the preacher wept

copiously and, as it seemed to Pitcairne, irrelevantly. He turned to the

only other occupant of the pew, a stolid-visaged countryman, and

whispered, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “You would maybe greet

yoursel’,” was the solemn answer, “if ye was up there and had as little

to say.”

I pass from one sceptic to another—one might say from one age to

another. Edinburgh, in the latter part of the eighteenth century,

according to Smollett’s famous phrase, was a “hotbed of genius.” When

Amyot, the King’s dentist, was in Edinburgh he said, as he stood at the

Cross, that he could any minute take fifty men of genius by the hand. Of

this distinguished company David Hume was the chief. To what extent this

historian, philosopher, sceptic, is now read, we need not inquire; he

profoundly influenced European thought, and gave a system of religious

philosophy the deadliest blow it ever received. He was a prominent and

interesting figure, and many and various are the legends about him. What

were his real religious beliefs, if he had any, remains uncertain. He

was hand in glove with “Jupiter” Carlyle, Principal Robertson, Dr. Hugh

Blair, and other leading moderates. They thought his scepticism was

largely pretence, mere intellectual bounce, so to speak; they girded at

his unreasonable departure from the normal, and indeed Carlyle takes

every opportunity of thrusting at him on this account. The Edinburgh

folk regarded him with solemn horror. The mother of Adam, the architect,

who was also aunt to Principal Robertson, had much to say against the

‘atheist,’ whom she had never seen. Her son played her a trick. Hume was

asked to the house and set down beside her. She declared “the large

jolly man who sat next me was the most agreeable of them all.” “He was

the very atheist, mother,” said the son, “that you were so much afraid

of.” “Oh,” replied the lady, “bring him here as much as you please, for

he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” His

scepticism was subject for his friends’ wit and his own. He heard

Carlyle preach in Athelstaneford Church. “I did not think that such

heathen morality would have passed in East Lothian.” One day when he sat

in the Poker Club it was mentioned that a clerk of Sir William Forbes,

the banker, had bolted with £900. When he was taken, there was found in

one pocket Hume’s _Treatise on Human Nature_ and in the other Boston’s

_Fourfold State of Man_, this latter being a work of evangelical

theology. His moderate friends presently suggested that no man’s

morality could hold out against the combination. Dr. Jardine of the Tron

Kirk vigorously argued with him on various points of theology, suggested

by Hume’s _Natural History of Religion_. His friend, like most folk in

Edinburgh, lived in a flat off a steep turnpike stair, down which Hume

fell one night in the darkness. Jardine got a candle and helped the

panting philosopher to his feet. Your old Edinburgh citizen never could

resist the chance of a cutting remark. The divine was no exception.

“Davy, I have often tell’t ye that ‘natural licht’ is no’ sufficient.”

Like Socrates, he hid his wit under an appearance of simplicity. His own

mother’s opinion of him was: “Davy’s a fine, good-natured crater, but

uncommon wake-minded.” He had his weaknesses, undoubtedly. Lord Saltoun

said to him, referring to his credulity, “David, man, you’ll believe

onything except the Bible,” but like other Scotsmen of his time he did

not believe overmuch in Shakespeare. In 1757 he thus addresses the

author of _Douglas_: “You possess the true theatrical genius of

Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the barbarisms of the one, and the

licentiousness of the other.” Put beside this Burns’s famous and fatuous

line: “Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,” and what can you

do but shudder? When young, he had paid his court to a lady of fashion,

and had met with scant courtesy. He was told afterwards that she had

changed her mind. “So have I,” said the philosopher. On another occasion

he was more gallant. Crossing the Firth in a gale he said to Lady

Wallace, who was in the boat, that they would soon be food for the

fishes. “Will they eat you or me?” said the lady. “Ah,” was the answer,

“those that are gluttons will undoubtedly fall foul of me, but the

epicure will attack your ladyship.” David, like the fishes he described,

was a bit of an epicure of the simplest kind. He would sup with his

moderate friends in Johnny Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd. On the

table lay his huge door-key, wherewith his servant, Peggy, had been

careful to provide him that she might not have to rise to let him in.

After all, the friends did not sit very late, and the supper was some

simple Scots dish—haddock, or tripe, or fluke, or pies, or it might be

trout from the Nor’ Loch, for Dowie’s was famous for these little

dainties. But the talk! Would you match it in modern Edinburgh with all

its pomp and wealth? I trow not—perhaps not even in mightier London.

The story is threadbare of how he was stuck in a bog under the Castle

rock, and was only helped out by a passing Edinburgh dame on condition

that he would say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. More witty and more

probable, though perhaps as well known, is the following: In the last

years of his life he deserted the Old Town for the New. He had a house

at the corner of St. Andrew Square, in a street as yet anonymous. “St.

David Street” chalked up a witty young lady, Miss Nancy Ord, daughter of

Chief Baron Ord, and St. David Street it is to this day. His servant, in

a state of indignation, brought him the news. “Never mind, lassie, many

a better man has been made a saint without knowing it,” said the placid

philosopher. A female member of a narrow sect called upon him near the

end with an alleged message from Heaven. “This is an important matter.

Madam, we must take it with deliberation. Perhaps you had better get a

little temporal refreshment before you begin.—Lassie, bring this young

lady a glass of wine.” As she drank, he in his turn questioned, and

found that the husband was a tallow-chandler. How fortunate, for he was

out of candles! He gave an order, the woman forgot the message, and

rushed off to fulfil it. Hume, you fancy, had a quiet chuckle at his

happy release. He was a great friend of Mrs. Mure, wife of Baron Mure,

and was a frequent visitor at their house at Abbeyhill, near Holyrood.

On his death-bed he sent to bid her good-bye. He gave her his _History

of England_. “O, Dauvid, that’s a book ye may weel be proud o’! but

before ye dee ye should burn a’ yer wee bookies,” to which the

philosopher, with difficulty raising himself on his arms, was only able

to reply with some little show of vehemence, “_What for_ should I burn

a’ my wee bookies?” But he was too weak to argue such points; he pressed

the hand of his old friend as she rose to depart. When his time came he

went quietly, contentedly, even gladly, regretted by saint and sceptic

alike. If Carlyle girded at him, his intimate friend, Adam Smith, who

might almost dispute his claim to mental eminence, pictured him forth in

those days as the perfectly wise man, so far as human imperfections

allowed. The piety or caution of his friends made them watch the grave

for some eight nights after the burial. The vigil began at eight

o’clock, when a pistol was fired, and candles in a lanthorn were placed

on the grave and tended from time to time. Some violation was feared,

for a wild legend of Satanic agency had flashed on the instant through

the town. Hume has no monument in Edinburgh, crowded as she is with

statues of lesser folk; but the accident of position and architecture

has in this, as in other cases, produced a striking if undesigned

result. From one cause or another the valley is deeper than of yore, and

the simple round tower that marks Hume’s grave in the Calton

burying-ground crowns a half-natural, half-artificial precipice. It is

seen with effect from various points: thus you cannot miss it as you

cross the North Bridge. Some memory of this great thinker still projects

itself into the trivial events of the modern Edinburgh day.

Of Hume’s friend and companion, Adam Smith, there are various anecdotes,

more or less pointed, bearing on his oblivious or maybe contemptuous

indifference to the ordinary things of life. The best and best known

tells how, as he went with shuffling gait and vacant look, a Musselburgh

fishwife stared at him in amazement. “Hech, and he is weel put on tae.”

It seemed to her a pity that so well-dressed a simpleton was not better

looked after. No amount of learning helps you in a crowded street. The

wisdom of the ancients reports that Thales, wrapt in contemplation of

the stars, walked into a well and thus ended. Adam Smith’s grave is in a

dark corner of the Canongate Churchyard; it is by no means so prominent

as Hume’s, nay, it takes some searching to discover. When I saw it last

I found it neglected and unvisited alike by economic friends and foes.

Among Hume’s intimate cronies was Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, whose

_Autobiography_ preserves for us the best record of the men of his time.

“The grandest demigod I ever saw,” says Sir Walter Scott, “commonly

called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the King of

gods and men to Gavin Hamilton, and a shrewd, clever old carle he was,

no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor.” This last is apropos

of some rhyming of Carlyle’s as bad as rhymes can possibly be. In 1758

Carlyle and Principal Robertson and John Home were together in London;

they went down to Portsmouth and aboard the _Ramilies_, the warship in

the harbour, where was Lieut. Nelson, a cousin of Robertson’s. The

honest sailor expressed his astonishment in deliciously comical terms:

“God preserve us! what has brought the Presbytery of Edinburgh here? for

damme me if there is not Willy Robertson, Sandie Carlyle, and John Home

come on board.” He soon had them down in the cabin, however, and treated

them to white wine and salt beef. A jolly meal, you believe, for divines

or sceptics, philosophers or men of letters or business, those old

Edinburgh folk had a common and keen enjoyment of life. Certainly

Carlyle had. Dr. Lindsay Alexander of Augustine Church, Edinburgh,

remembered as a child hearing one of the servants say of this divine,

“There he gaed, dacent man, as steady as a wa’ after his ain share o’

five bottles o’ port.” Home by this time was no longer a minister of the

Church. He had thrown up his living in the previous year on account of

the famous row about the once famous tragedy of _Douglas_. He still had

a hankering after the General Assembly, where, if he could no longer sit

as teaching elder, he might as ruling elder, because he was Conservator

of Scots privileges at Campvere, but he was something else; he was

lieutenant in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Fencibles, and as such had a right

to attire himself in a gorgeous uniform, and it was so incongruously

adorned that he took his seat in that reverend house. The country

ministers stared with all their eyes, and one of them exclaimed, “Sure,

that is John Home the poet! What is the meaning of that dress?” “Oh,”

said Mr. Robert Walker of Edinburgh, “it is only the farce after the

play.”

Eminent lawyers who are also industrious, and even eminent writers, were

a feature of the time, but of them I have already spoken and there is

little here to add. Monboddo had a remarkable experience in his youth;

the very day, in 1736, he returned to Edinburgh from studying abroad he

heard at nightfall a commotion in the street. In nightdress and slippers

he stepped from the door and was borne along by a wild mob, not a few of

whom were attired as strangely as himself. It was that famous affair of

Captain Porteous, and, _nolens volens_, he needs must witness that

sordid yet picturesque tragedy whose incidents, you are convinced, he

never forgot, and often, as an old man, retailed to a newer generation.

[Illustration: JAMES BOSWELL,

From an Engraving after Sir Joshua Reynolds P.R.A.]

Like many another Scots lawyer, Lord Kames had a keen love for the land,

keener in his case because it had come to him from his forbears; but his

zeal was not always according to knowledge. One of the “fads” of the

time was a wonderful fertilising powder. He told one of his tenants that

he would be able to carry the manure of an acre of land in his coat

pocket, “And be able to bring back the crop in yer waistcoat pouch?” was

the crushing reply. He would have his joke, cruel and wicked, at any

cost. To him belongs the well-nigh incredible story of a murder trial at

Ayr in 1780. He knew the accused and had played chess with him. “That’s

checkmate for you, Matthie,” he chuckled in ungodly glee when the

verdict was recorded. This story, by the way, used to be told of

Braxfield, to whom it clearly does not belong, and one wished it did not

belong to Kames either. He spared himself as little as he did others. He

lived in New Street, an early old-time improvement on the north side of

the Canongate, and from there he went to the Parliament House in a sedan

chair. One morning, near the end, he was being helped into it, for he

was old and infirm, when James Boswell crossed his path. Jamie was

always in one scrape or the other, but this time you fancy he had done

something specially notorious. “I shall shortly be seeing your father,”

said Kames (old Auchinleck had died that year (1782), as on the 27th of

December did Kames himself); “have you any message for him? Shall I tell

him how you are getting on?” You imagine his diabolical grin and Bozzy’s

confused answer.

Beside these quaint figures Lord Hailes, with his ponderous learning, is

a mere Dry-as-dust antiquary—the dust lies ever deeper over his many

folios; of his finical exactness there still linger traditions in the

Parliament House. It is said he dismissed a case because a word was

wrongly spelt in one of the numbers of process. Thus he earned himself a

couplet in the once famous _Court of Session Garland_.

“To judge of this matter I cannot pretend,

For justice, my Lords, wants an ‘e’ at the end.”

So wrote Boswell, himself, though he only partly belongs to Edinburgh,

not the least interesting figure of our period. There is more than one

story of him and Kames. The judge had playfully suggested that Boswell

should write his biography! How devoutly you wish he had. What an

entertaining and famous book it had been! but perhaps he had only it in

him to do one biography, and we know how splendid _that_ was. Poor Bozzy

once complained to the old judge that even he, Bozzy himself, was

occasionally dull. “Homer sometimes nods,” said Kames in a reassuring

tone, but with a grin that promised mischief. The other looked as

pleased as possible till the old cynic went on: “Indeed, sir, it is the

only chance you have of resembling him.” Old Auchinleck, his father, was

horrified at his son’s devotion to Johnson. “Jamie has gaen clean gyte.

What do you think, man? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s aff wi’ the

land-loupin’ scoondrel o’ a Corsican. Whae’s tail do ye think he has

preened himsel’ tae noo? A dominie man—an auld dominie who keepit a

schule and caa’ed it an Acaademy!” In fact, the great Samuel pleased

none of the Boswell clan except Boswell and Boswell’s baby daughter.

Auchinleck had many caustic remarks even after he had seen the sage: “He

was only a dominie, and the worst-mannered dominie I ever met.” So much

for the father. The wife was not more favourable: “She had often seen a

bear led by a man, but never till now had she seen a man led by a bear.”

Afterwards, when the famous biography was published, the sons were

horribly ashamed both of it and of him. Bozzy has given us so much

amusement—we recognise his inimitable literary touch—that we are

rather proud of and grateful to him; but then, we don’t look at the

matter with the eyes of his relatives.

Johnson was himself in Edinburgh. You remember how he arrived in

February 1773 at Boyd’s Whitehorse Inn off St. Mary’s Wynd, not the more

famous Inn of that name in the Whitehorse Close down the Canongate; how

angry he was with the waiter for lifting with his dirty paw the sugar to

put in his lemonade; how, in the malodorous High Street, he pleasantly

remarked to Boswell, “I smell you in the dark”; how, as he listened at

Holyrood to the story of the Rizzio murder, he muttered a line of the

old ballad _Johnnie Armstrong’s last good-night_—“And ran him through

the fair bodie.” They took him to the Royal Infirmary, and he noted the

inscription “Clean your feet.” “Ah,” said he, “there is no occasion for

putting this at the doors of your churches.” The gibe was justified; he

had just looked in at St. Giles’, then used for every strange civic

purpose, and plastered and twisted about to every strange shape. Most

interesting to me is that Sunday morning, 15th August 1773, when Bozzy

and Principal Robertson toiled with him up the College Wynd to see the

University, and passed by Scott’s birthplace. The Wizard of the North

was then two years old, and who could guess that his fame in after years

would be greater than that of those three eminent men of letters put

together? In this strange remote way do epochs touch one another. No

wonder Bozzy’s relatives got tired of his last hobby, his very subject

himself got tired. “Sir,” said the sage, “you have but two topics,

yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Yet Bozzy knew what he was about

when he stuck to his one topic. After his idol was gone, what was there

for him but the bottle? It was one of the earliest recollections of Lord

Jeffrey that he had assisted as a boy in putting the biographer to bed

in a state of absolute unconsciousness. Next morning Boswell was told of

the service rendered: he clapped the lad on the head, and complacently

congratulated him. “If you go on as you’ve begun, you may live to be a

Bozzy yourself yet.” And so much bemused the greatest of biographers

vanishes from our sight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MEN OF LETTERS. PART II.

To turn to some lesser figures. Hugo Arnot, advocate, is still

remembered as author of one of the two standard histories of Edinburgh.

No man better known in the streets of the old capital: he was all length

and no breadth. That incorrigible joker, Harry Erskine, found him one

day gnawing a speldrin—a species of cured fish chiefly used to remove

the trace of last night’s debauch, and prepare the stomach for another

bout. It is vended in long thin strips. “You are very like your meat,”

said the wit. The Edinburgh populace called a house which for some time

stood solitary on Moutries Hill, afterwards Bunkers Hill, where is now

the Register House, “Hugo Arnot,” because the length was out of all

proportion to the breadth. One day he found a fishwife cheapening a

Bible in Creech’s shop; he had some semi-jocular remarks, probably not

in the best taste, at the purchase and the purchaser. “Gude ha mercy on

us,” said the old lady, “wha wad hae thocht that ony human-like cratur

wud hae spokan that way; but _you_,” she went on with withering

scorn—“a perfect atomy.” He was known to entertain sceptical opinions,

and he was pestered with chronic asthma, and panted and wheezed all day

long. “If I do not get quit of this,” he said, “it will carry me off

like a rocket.” “Ah, Hugo, my man,” said an orthodox but unkind friend,

“but in a contrary direction.” He could joke at his own infirmities. A

Gilmerton carter passed him bellowing “sand for sale” with a voice that

made the street echo. “The rascal,” said the exasperated author, “spends

as much breath in a minute as would serve me for a month.” Like other

Edinburgh folk he migrated to the New Town, to Meuse Lane, in fact, hard

by St. Andrew Square. What with his diseases and other natural

infirmities, Hugo’s temper was of the shortest. He rang his bell in so

violent a manner that a lady on the floor above complained. He took to

summoning his servant by firing a pistol; the remedy was worse than the

disease. The caustic, bitter old Edinburgh humour was in the very bones

of him. He was, as stated, an advocate by profession, and his collection

of criminal trials, by the way, is still an authority. Once he was

consulted in order that he might help in some shady transaction. He

listened with the greatest attention. “What do you suppose me to be?”

said he to the client. “A lawyer, an advocate,” stammered the other.

“Oh, I thought you took me for a scoundrel,” sneered Arnot as he showed

the proposed client the door. A lady who said she was of the same name

asked how to get rid of an importunate suitor. “Why, marry him,” said

Hugo testily. “I would see him hanged first,” rejoined the lady. The

lawyer’s face contorted to a grin. “Why, marry him, and by the Lord

Harry he will soon hang himself.” All very well, but not by such arts is

British Themis propitiated. Arnot died in November 1786 when he was not

yet complete thirty-seven. He had chosen his burial-place in the

churchyard at South Leith, and was anxious to have it properly walled in

ere the end, which he clearly foresaw, arrived. It was finished just in

time, and with a certain stoical relief this strange mortal departed to

take possession.

[Illustration: HENRY MACKENZIE, “THE MAN OF FEELING”,

From an Engraving after Andrew Geddes]

Another well-known Edinburgh character was Henry Mackenzie. Born in 1745

he lived till 1831, and connects the different periods of Edinburgh

literary splendour. His best service to literature was his early

appreciation of Burns, but in his own time the _Man of Feeling_ was one

of the greatest works of the day, and the _Man of the World_ and _Julia

de Roubigné_ followed not far behind. To this age all seems weak,

stilted, sentimental to an impossible degree, but Scott and Lockhart, to

name but these, read and admired with inexplicable admiration. In

ordinary life Mackenzie was a hard-headed lawyer, and as keen an

attendant at a cock main, it was whispered, as Deacon Brodie himself. He

told his wife that he’d had a glorious night. “Where?” she queried.

“Why, at a splendid fight.” “Oh Harry, Harry,” said the good lady, “you

have only feeling on paper.”

Tobias Smollett, though not an Edinburgh man, had some connection with

the place. His sister, Mrs. Telfer, lived in the house yet shown in the

Canongate, at the entrance to St. John Street. Here, after long absence,

his mother recognised him by his smile. Ten years afterwards he again

went north, and again saw his mother; he told her that he was very ill

and that he was dying. “We’ll no’ be very lang pairted onie way. If you

gang first, I’ll be close on your heels. If I lead the way, you’ll no’

be far ahint me, I’m thinking,” said this more than Spartan parent. But

when you read the vivacious Mrs. Winifred Jenkins in the _Expedition of

Humphrey Clinker_, you recognise how good a thing it was for letters

that Smollett visited Edinburgh.

It is a little odd, but I have no anecdotes to tell (the alleged meeting

between him and old John Brown in Haddington Churchyard is a wild myth)

of that characteristic Edinburgh figure, Robert Fergusson, the Edinburgh

poet, the native and the lover. He struck a deeper note than Allan

Ramsay, has a more intimate touch than Scott, is scarcely paralleled by

R. L. Stevenson, who half believed himself a reincarnation of “my

unhappy predecessor on the causey of old Edinburgh” . . . “him that went

down—my brother, Robert Fergusson.”

“Auld Reekie! thou’rt the canty hole,

A bield for mony a cauldrife soul

Wha’ snugly at thine ingle loll

Baith warm and couth,

While round they gar the bicker roll

To weet their mouth.”

There you see the side of Edinburgh that most attracted him. He was no

worse than his fellows perhaps, but perhaps he could not stand what they

stood. It is said that he once gave as an excuse, “Oh, sirs, anything to

forget my poor mother and these aching fingers.” As Mr. H. G. Graham

truly says: “It was a poor enough excuse for forgetting himself.” He

used to croon over that pleasing little trifle, _The Birks of Invermay_,

in Lucky Middlemist’s or elsewhere, and dream of trim rural fields he

did not trouble to visit. I have no heart to repeat the melancholy story

of his lonely death in the Schelles, hard by the old Darien House at the

Bristo Port in 1774, at the age of twenty-four. His interest is as a

ghost from the Edinburgh underworld, you catch a glimpse of a more

vicious Grub Street. There must have been a circle of broken

professional men of all sorts, more or less clever, all needy, all

drunken and ready to do anything for a dram. What a crop of anecdotes

there was! But no one gathered, and the memory of it passed away with

the actors. Local history that chronicled the oddities of Kames or

Monboddo refused to chronicle the pranks of lewd fellows of the baser

sort. Only when the wastrel happened to be a genius do we piece together

in some sort his career. Whatever one says about Fergusson, you never

doubt his genius.

It is curious how very occasional is the anecdote of this Caledonian

Grub Street. Here is rather a characteristic straw which the stream of

time has carried down regarding a certain drudge called Stewart. One

night, homeless and houseless, he staggered into the ash pit of a

primitive steam-engine, and lay down to rest. An infernal din aroused

him from his drunken slumber; he saw the furnace opened, grimy black

figures stoking the fire and raking the bars of the enormous grate,

whilst iron rods and chains clanked around him with infernal din. A

tardily awakened conscience hinted where he was. “Good God, has it come

to this at last?” he growled in abject terror. Another anecdote, though

of a later date, is told in Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_. Constable, the

Napoleon of publishers, called the crafty in the _Chaldean Manuscript_,

is reported “a most bountiful and generous patron to the ragged tenants

of Grub Street.” He gave stated dinners to his “own circle of literary

serfs.” At one of these David Bridges, “tailor in ordinary to this

northern potentate,” acted as croupier. According to instructions he

brought with him a new pair of breeches, and for these Alister Campbell

and another ran a race, and yet this same Campbell was editor of

_Albyn’s Anthology_, 1816, to which Scott contributed _Jock o’

Hazeldean_, _Pibroch of Donald Dhu_, and better than any, that brilliant

piece of extravagance, _Donald Caird’s come again_. Perhaps the story

isn’t true, but it is at least significant that Lockhart should tell it.

One glittering Bohemian figure, though he was much greater and much

else, lights up for us those Edinburgh taverns, Johnnie Dowie’s and the

rest, those Edinburgh clubs, the Crochallan Fencibles and the others,

that figure is Robert Burns. His winter of 1786-1787 in the Scots

capital is famous. To us, more than a century after, it still satisfies

the imagination, a striking, dramatic, picturesque appearance. On the

whole, Edinburgh, not merely her great but common men, received him

fitly. One day in that winter Jeffrey was standing in the High Street

staring at a man whose appearance struck him, he could scarce tell why.

A person standing at a shop door tapped him on the shoulder and said:

“Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man; that’s Robert Burns.” He

never saw him again. His experience in this was like that of Scott; but

you are glad at any rate that Burns and Scott did meet, else had that

Edinburgh visit wanted its crowning glory. Scott was then fifteen. He

saw Robin in Professor Fergusson’s house at Sciennes. It was a

distinguished company, and Scott, always modest, held his tongue. There

was a picture in the room of a soldier lying dead in the snow, by him

his dog and his widow with his child in her arms. Burns was so affected

at the idea suggested by the picture that “he actually shed tears,” like

the men of the heroic age, says Andrew Lang; he asked who wrote the

lines which were printed underneath, and Scott alone remembered that

they were from the obscure Langhorne. “Burns rewarded me with a look and

a word which, though a mere civility, I then received, and still

recollect, with very great pleasure.” Scott goes on to describe Burns as

like the “douce guid man who held his own plough.” Most striking was his

eye: “It was large and of a dark cast and glowed (I say literally

_glowed_) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such

another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished

men in my time.” Whether Scott was right in thinking that Burns talked

with “too much humility,” I will not discuss. We know what Robin thought

of the “writer chiel.” The most pleasing result of his Edinburgh visit,

as it is to-day still the most tangible, was the monument, tasteful and

sufficient, which he put over Fergusson’s grave in the Canongate

Churchyard. R.L.S., by the way, from his distant home in the South Seas,

was anxious that if neglected it should be put in order. I do not think

it has ever been neglected. I have seen it often and it was always

curiously spick and span: these _vates_ have not lacked pious services

at the hands of their followers. Scott was not so enthusiastic an

admirer, but he knew his Fergusson well and quotes him with reasonable

frequency. When Fergusson died Scott was only three years old. Edinburgh

was then a town of little space, and the unfortunate poet may have seen

the child, but he could not have noticed him, and we have no record.

Just as the last half of the eighteenth century may be said to group

itself round Hume, so the first half of the nineteenth has Scott for its

central figure. I have spoken of his birthplace in the College Wynd. In

1825 he pointed out its site to Robert Chambers. “It would have been

more profitable to have preserved it,” said Chambers in a neat

compliment to Scott’s rapidly growing fame. “Ay, ay,” said Sir Walter,

“that is very well, but I am afraid that I should require to be dead

first, and that would not have been so comfortable, you know.” Thus,

with good sense and humour, Scott turned aside the eulogium which

perhaps he thought too strong. How modest he was! He frankly, and

justly, put himself as a poet below Byron and Burns, and as for

Shakespeare, “he was not worthy to loose his brogues.” His sense and

good-nature helped to make him popular with his fellows. Hogg, the

Ettrick Shepherd, was a possible exception. Scott did him good, yet

after Scott’s death he wrote some nasty things. In truth, he had an

unhappy nature, since he was somewhat rough to others and yet abnormally

sensitive. Lockhart tells a story of Hogg’s visit to Scott’s house in

Castle Street, where he was asked to dinner. Mrs. Scott was not well,

and was lying on a sofa. The Shepherd seized another sofa, wheeled it

towards her, and stretched himself at full length on it. “I thought I

could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house.” His hands, we are

told, had marks of recent sheep-shearing, of which the chintz bore

legible traces; but the guest noted not this; he ate freely, and drank

freely, and talked freely; he became gradually more and more familiar;

from “Mr. Scott” he advanced to “Shirra” and thence to “Scott,”

“Walter,” “Wattie,” until at supper he fairly convulsed the whole party

by addressing Mrs. Scott as “Charlotte.” I think, however, that Scott

was too much of a gentleman ever to have told this story. “The

Scorpion,” as the _Chaldean Manuscript_ named Lockhart, had many good

qualities, but was, after all, a bit of a “superior person.”

Scott’s connection with John Leyden was altogether pleasant, and no one

mourned more sincerely over the early death in the East of that

indefatigable poet and scholar. Leyden was of great assistance to Scott

in collecting material for his _Border Minstrelsy_. Once there was a

hiatus in an interesting old ballad, when Leyden heard of an ancient

reported able to recite the whole thing complete. He walked between

forty and fifty miles and back again, turning the recovered verses over

in his mind, and as Scott was sitting after dinner with some company “a

sound was heard at a distance like that of the whistling of a tempest

through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it.” It was

Leyden who presently burst into the room, chanting the whole of the

recovered ballad. Leyden and Thomas Campbell had a very pretty quarrel

about something or other. When Scott repeated to Leyden the poem of

_Hohenlinden_, the latter burst out, “Dash it, man, tell the fellow that

I hate him; but, dash him, he has written the finest verses that have

been published these fifty years.” Scott, thinking to patch up a peace,

repeated this to Campbell. He only said, “Tell Leyden that I detest him,

but I know the value of his critical approbation.” Well he might! Leyden

once repeated to Alexander Murray, the philologist, the most striking

lines in Campbell’s _Lochiel_, adding, “That fellow, after all, we may

say, is King of us all, and has the genuine root of the matter in him.”

Campbell’s verse still lives, but our day would not place it so high. I

have spoken of Scott’s modesty, also he was quiet under hostile

criticism. Jeffrey had some hard things to say of _Marmion_ in the

_Edinburgh Review_, and immediately after dined in Castle Street. There

was no change in Scott’s demeanour, but Mrs. Scott could not altogether

restrain herself. “Well, good-night, Mr. Jeffrey. They tell me you have

abused Scott in the _Review_, and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you very

well for writing it,” which was rather an odd remark. As that Highland

blue-stocking, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, observed, “Mr. Scott always seems

to me like a glass through which the rays of admiration pass without

sensibly affecting it, but the bit of paper that lies beside it will

presently be in a blaze—and no wonder.” Scott was “truest friend and

noblest foe.” In June 1821, as he stood by John Ballantyne’s open grave

in the Canongate Churchyard, the day, which had been dark, brightened

up, and the sun shone forth, he looked up and said with deep feeling to

Lockhart, “I feel as if there will be less sunshine for me from this

time forth.” And yet through the Ballantynes Scott was involved in those

reckless speculations which led to the catastrophe of his life. His very

generosity and nobleness led him into difficulties. “I like Scott’s ain

bairns, but Heaven preserve me from those of his fathering,” says

Constable. As for those “ain bairns,” especially those Waverley Novels,

which are a dear possession to each of us, there are anecdotes enough.

[Illustration: JOHN LEYDEN,

From a Pen Drawing]

We know the speed and ease, in truth Shakespearean, with which he threw

off the best of them, yet to the outsider he seemed hard at work. In

June 1814 a party of young bloods were dining in a house in George

Street, at right angles with North Castle Street. A shade overspread the

face of the host. “Why?” said the narrator. “There is a confounded hand

in sight of me here which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t

let me fill my glass with a good will. Since we sat down I have been

watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops; page after page is

finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied,

and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long

after that; it is the same every night.” It was the hand of Walter

Scott, and in the evenings of three weeks in summer it wrote the last

two volumes of Waverley (there were three in all). Whatever impression

the novels make upon us has been discounted before we have read them,

but when they were appearing, when to the attraction of the volumes

themselves was added the romance of mystery, when the Wizard of the

North was still “The Great Unknown,” _then_ was the time to enjoy a

Waverley. James Ballantyne lived in St. John Street, then a good class

place off the Canongate. He was wont to give a gorgeous feast whenever a

new Waverley was about to appear. Scott was there, but he and the

staider members of the company left in good time, and then there were

broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch, and James Ballantyne was

persuaded to produce the proof-sheets, and, with a word of preface, give

the company the liver wing of the forthcoming literary banquet. Long

before the end the secret was an open secret, but it was only formally

divulged, as we all know, at the Theatrical Fund dinner, on Friday the

23rd February 1827. Among the company was jovial Patrick Robertson, “a

mighty incarnate joke.” When _Peveril of the Peak_ appeared he applied

the name to Scott from the shape of his head as he stood chatting in the

Parliament House, “better that than Peter o’ the Painch,” was the not

particularly elegant but very palpable retort at Peter’s rotundity. At

the banquet Scott sent him a note urging him to confess something too.

“Why not the murder of Begbie?” (the porter of the British Linen Company

Bank, murdered under mysterious circumstances in November 1806, in

Tweeddale Close, in the High Street). Immediately after, the farce of

_High Life Below Stairs_ was played in the theatre. A lady’s lady asked

who wrote Shakespeare? One says Ben Jonson, another Finis. “No,” said an

actor, with a most ingenious “gag,” “it is Sir Walter Scott; he

confessed it at a public meeting the other day.”

Most of the literary men of the time were in two camps. Either they

wrote for the _Edinburgh Review_, or for _Blackwood’s Magazine_,

occasionally for both. The opponents knew each other, and were more or

less excellent friends, though they used the most violent language.

Jeffrey was the great light on the _Edinburgh_; he was described by

Professor Wilson’s wife as “a horrid little man, but held in as high

estimation here as the Bible.” Her husband, with Lockhart and Hogg, were

the chief writers for the Magazine. The first number of that last, as we

now know it, contained the famous _Chaldean Manuscript_, in which

uproarious fun was made of friends and foes, under the guise of a

scriptural parable. They began with their own publisher and real editor.

“And his name was as it had been the colour of ebony, and his number was

the number of a maiden when the days of the year of her virginity have

expired.” In other words, Mr. Blackwood of 17 Princes Street. Constable,

the publisher, was the “crafty in council,” and he had a notable horn in

his forehead that “cast down the truth to the ground.” This was the

_Review_. Professor Wilson was “the beautiful leopard from the valley of

the plane trees,” referring to the _Isle of Palms_, the poem of which

Christopher North was the author. Lockhart was the “scorpion which

delighteth to sting the faces of men.” Hogg was “the great wild boar

from the forests of Lebanon whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle.”

It was the composition of these last three spirits, and is described by

Aytoun as “a mirror in which we behold literary Edinburgh of 1817,

translated into mythology.” It was chiefly put together one night at 53

Queen Street, amidst uproarious laughter that shook the walls of the

house, and made the ladies in the room above send to inquire in wonder

what the gentlemen below were about. Even the grave Sir William Hamilton

was of the party; he contributed a verse, and was so amused at his own

performance that he tumbled off his chair in a fit of laughter. Perhaps

the personalities by which it gained part of its success were not in the

best taste, but never was squib so successful. It shook the town with

rage and mirth. After well-nigh a century, though some sort of a key is

essential, you read it with a grin; it has a permanent, if small, place

in the history of letters. Yet Wilson contributed to the _Edinburgh_!

“John,” said his mother when she heard it, “if you turn Whig, this house

is no longer big enough for us both.” There was no fear of _that_,

however.

The most engaging stories of Christopher North tell of his feats of

endurance. After he was a grave professor he would throw off his coat

and tackle successfully with his fists an obstreperous bully. He would

walk seventy miles in the waking part of twenty-four hours. Once, in the

braes of Glenorchy, he called at a farmhouse at eleven at night for

refreshment. They brought him a bottle of whisky and a can of milk,

which he mixed and consumed in two draughts from a huge bowl. He was

called to the Scots bar in 1815, and from influence, or favour, agents

at first sent him cases. He afterwards confessed that when he saw the

papers on his table, he did not know what to do with them. But he

speedily drifted into literature, wherein he made a permanent mark. We

have all dipped into that huge mine of wit and wisdom, the _Noctes

Ambrosianæ_. You would say of him, and you would of Scott, they were

splendid men, their very faults and excesses lovable. What a strange

power both had over animals! As in the case of Queen Mary, their

servants were ever their faithful and devoted friends. Wilson kept a

great number of dogs. Rover was a special favourite. As the animal was

dying, Wilson bent over it, “Rover, my poor fellow, give me your paw,”

as if he had been taking leave of a man. When Camp died, Scott

reverently buried him in the back garden of his Castle Street house; his

daughter noted the deep cloud of sorrow on her father’s face. Maida is

with him on his monument as in life. Wilson kept sixty-two gamebirds all

at once; they made a fearful noise. “Did they never fight?” queried his

doctor. “No,” was the answer; “but put a hen amongst them, and I will

not answer for the peace being long observed. And so it hath been since

the beginning of the world.” These gifted men played each other tricks

of the most impish nature. Lockhart once made a formal announcement of

Christopher North’s sudden death, with a panegyric upon his character in

the _Weekly Journal_; true, he confined it to a few copies, but it was

rather a desperate method of jesting. Patrick Robertson, as Lord

Robertson, a Senator of the College of Justice, published a volume of

poems. This was duly reviewed in the _Quarterly_, which Lockhart edited,

and a copy sent to the author; it finished off with this mad couplet:

“Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter,

Who broke the laws of God and man and metre.”