The feelings of “Peter,” as his friends always called Robertson, may be

imagined. True, it was the only copy of the _Review_ that contained the

couplet: it must have been some time before the disturbed poet found

out. Yet “Peter” was a “jokist” of a scarcely less desperate character.

At a dinner-party an Oxford don was parading his Greek erudition, to the

boredom of the whole company. Robertson gravely replied to some

proposition, “I rather think, sir, Dionysius of Halicarnassus is against

you there.” “I beg your pardon,” said the don quickly, “Dionysius did

not flourish for ninety years after that period.” “Oh,” rejoined

Patrick, with an expression of face that must be imagined, “I made a

mistake; I meant Thaddeus of Warsaw.” There was no more Greek erudition

that night. This fondness for a jest followed those men into every

concern of life. One of Wilson’s daughters came to her father in his

study and asked, with appropriate blushes, his consent to her engagement

to Professor Aytoun. He pinned a sheet of paper to her back, and packed

her off to the next room, where her lover was. They were both a little

mystified till he read the inscription: “With the author’s compliments.”

De Quincey spent the last thirty years of his life mainly in Edinburgh.

His grave is in St. Cuthbert’s Churchyard. He seems a strange, exotic

figure, for his literary interests, at any rate, were not at all Scots.

Once he paid a casual visit to Gloucester Place, where Wilson lived. It

was a stormy night, and he stayed on—for about a year. His hours and

dietary were peculiar, but he was allowed to do exactly as he liked.

“Thomas de Sawdust,” as W. E. Henley rather cruelly nicknamed him,

excited the astonishment of the Scots cook by the magnificent way in

which he ordered a simple meal. “Weel, I never heard the like o’ that in

a’ my days; the bodie has an awfu’ sicht o’ words. If it had been my ain

maister that was wanting his denner he would ha’ ordered a hale tablefu’

in little mair than a waff o’ his han’, and here’s a’ this claver aboot

a bit mutton no bigger than a preen. Mr. De Quinshay would mak’ a gran’

preacher, though I’m thinking a hantle o’ the folk wouldna ken what he

was driving at.” During most of the day De Quincey lay in a stupor; the

early hours of the next morning were his time for talk. The Edinburgh of

that time was still a town of strong individualities, brilliant wits,

and clever talkers, but when that weird voice began, the listeners,

though they were the very flower of the intellect of the place, were

content to hold their peace: all tradition lies, or this strange figure

was here the first of them all.

In some ways it was a curious and primitive time, certainly none of

these men was a drunkard, but they all wrote as if they quaffed liquor

like the gods of the Norse mythology, and with some of them practice

conformed to theory, whilst fists and sticks were quite orthodox modes

of settling disputes. Even the grave Ebony was not immune. A writer in

Glasgow, one Douglas, was aggrieved at some real or fancied reference in

the Magazine. He hied him to Edinburgh, and as Mr. Blackwood was

entering his shop, he laid a horsewhip in rather a half-hearted fashion,

it would seem, about his shoulders. Then he made off. The editor

publisher forthwith procured a cudgel, and luckily discovered his

aggressor on the point of entering the Glasgow coach; he gave him a

sound beating. As nothing more is heard of the incident, probably both

sides considered honour as satisfied. How difficult to imagine people of

position in incidents like this in Edinburgh of to-day; but I will not

dwell longer on them and their likes, but move on to another era.

“_Virgilium viditantum_,” very happily quoted Scott, the only time he

ever saw (save for a casual street view) and spoke with Burns. One

wishes that there was more to be said of Scott and Carlyle. Carlyle was

a student at Edinburgh, and passed the early years of his literary

working life there. He saw Scott on the street many a time and earnestly

desired a more intimate knowledge. This meeting would have been as

interesting as that, but it was not to be. Never was fate more ironical,

nay, perverse. Goethe was the friend and correspondent of both, and it

seemed to him at Weimar an odd thing that these men, both students of

German literature, both citizens of Edinburgh, should not be personal

friends. He did everything he could. Through Carlyle he sent messages

and gifts to Scott, and these Carlyle transmitted in a modest and

courteous note (13th April 1828). Alas! it was after the deluge. Scott,

with the bravest of hearts, yet with lessening physical and mental

power, was fighting that desperate and heroic battle we know so well.

The letter went unanswered, and they never met. Less important people

were kinder. Jeffrey told Carlyle he must give him a lift, and they were

great friends afterwards. In 1815 for the first time he met Edward

Irving in a room off Rose Street. The latter asked a number of local

questions about Annan, which subject did not interest the youthful sage

at all; finally, he professed total ignorance and indifference as to the

history and condition of some one’s baby. “You seem to know nothing,”

said Irving very crossly. The answer was characteristic. “Sir, by what

right do you try my knowledge in this way? I have no interest to inform

myself about the births in Annan, and care not if the process of birth

and generation there should cease and determine altogether.” Carlyle

studied for the Scots kirk, but he was soon very doubtful as to his

vocation. In 1817 he came from Kirkcaldy to put down his name for the

theological hall. “Old Dr. Ritchie was ‘not at home’ when I called to

enter myself. ‘Good,’ said I, ‘let the omen be fulfilled,’” and he shook

the dust of the hall from his feet for evermore. Possibly he muttered

something about, “Hebrew old Clo”, if he did, his genius for cutting

nicknames carried him away. Through it all no one had greater reverence

for the written Word. Carlyle, for good or for ill, was a Calvinist at

heart. In the winter of 1823 he was sore beset with the “fiend

dyspepsia.” He rode from his father’s house all the way to Edinburgh to

consult a specialist. The oracle was not dubious. “It was all tobacco,

sir; give up tobacco.” But could he give it up? “Give it up, sir?” he

testily replied. “I can cut off my hand with an axe if that should be

necessary.” Carlyle let it alone for months, but was not a whit the

better; at length, swearing he would endure the “diabolical farce and

delusion” no longer, he laid almost violent hands on a long clay and

tobacco pouch and was as happy as it was possible for him to be. Perhaps

the doctor was right after all.

Up to the middle of the last century a strange personage called Peter

Nimmo, or more often Sir Peter Nimmo, moved about the classes of

Edinburgh University, and had done so for years. Professor Masson in

_Edinburgh Sketches and Memories_ has told with his wonted care and

accuracy what it is possible to know of the subject. He was most

probably a “stickit minister” who hung about the classes year after

year, half-witted no doubt, but with a method in his madness. He

pretended or believed or not unwillingly was hoaxed into the belief that

he was continually being asked to the houses of professors and others,

where not seldom he was received and got some sort of entertainment.

Using Professor Wilson’s name as a passport he achieved an interview

with Wordsworth, who described him as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in

appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever

met with.” It was shrewdly suspected that he simply held his tongue, and

allowed Wordsworth to do all the talking; a good listener is usually

found a highly agreeable person. He tickled Carlyle’s sense of humour,

and was made the subject of a poem by the latter in _Fraser’s Magazine_.

It was one of the earliest and one of the very worst things that Carlyle

ever did.

I note in passing that Peter Nimmo had a predecessor or contemporary,

John Sheriff by name, who died in August 1844 in his seventieth year. He

was widely known as Doctor Syntax, from some fancied resemblance to the

stock portrait of that celebrity. He devoted all his time to University

class-rooms and City churches, through which he roamed at will as by

prescriptive right. He boasted that he had attended more than a hundred

courses of lectures; but his great joy was when any chance enabled him

to occupy the seat of the Lord High Commissioner in St. Giles’.

One of Carlyle’s best passages is the account in _Sartor Resartus_ of

his perambulation of the Rue St. Thomas de L’Enfer, the spiritual

conflict that he waged then with himself, the victory that he won in

which the everlasting “Yes” answered the everlasting “No.” Under the

somewhat melodramatic French name Leith Walk is signified, the most

commonplace thoroughfare in a town where the ways are rarely

commonplace. Perhaps the name was suggested by a quaint incident that

befell him there. He was walking along it when a drunken sailor coming

from Leith and “tacking” freely as he walked ran into a countryman going

the other way. “Go to hell,” said the sailor, wildly and unreasonably

enraged. “Od, man, I’m going to Leith,” said the other, “as if merely

pleading a previous engagement, and proceeded calmly on his way.”

I have said the fates were kind in linking together though but for a

moment the lives of Burns and Scott, and they were unkind in refusing

this to the lives of Scott and Carlyle. You wish that in some way or

other they had allowed Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson to meet, if

but for a moment, so that the last great writer whom Edinburgh has

produced might have had the kindly touch of personal intercourse with

his predecessors; but it was not to be, nor are there many R.L.S.

Edinburgh anecdotes worth the telling. This which he narrates of his

grandfather, Robert of Bell Rock fame, is better than any about himself.

The elder Stevenson’s wife was a pious lady with a circle of pious if

humble friends. One of those, “an unwieldy old woman,” had fallen down

one of those steep outside stairs abundant in old Edinburgh, but she

crashed on a passing baker and escaped unhurt by what seemed to Mrs.

Stevenson a special interposition of Providence. “I would like to know

what kind of Providence the baker thought it,” exclaimed her husband.

R.L.S. had certain flirtations with the Edinburgh underworld of his

time, for the dreary respectability and precise formalism which has

settled like a cloud on the once jovial Auld Reekie was abhorrent to the

soul of the bright youth. No doubt he had his adventures, but if they

are still known they are not recorded. There is some tradition of a

novel, _Maggie Arnot_, I think it was called, wherein he told strange

tales of dark Edinburgh closes, but pious hands consigned it, no doubt

wisely and properly, to the flames; and though certain Corinthians were

scornful and wrathful, yet you feel his true function was that of the

wise and kindly, sympathetic and humane essayist and moralist that we

have learned to love and admire, the almost Covenanting writer whom of a

surety the men of the Covenant would have thrust out and perhaps

violently ended in holy indignation. I gather a few scraps. Of the

stories of his childhood this seems admirably characteristic. He was

busy once with pencil and paper, and then addressed his mother: “Mamma,

I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?” The makers of the New

Town when they planned those wide, long, exposed streets, forgot one

thing, and that was the Edinburgh weather, against which, if you think

of it, the sheltered ways of the ancient city were an admirable

protection. In many a passage R.L.S. has told us how the east wind, and

the easterly “haar,” and the lack of sun assailed him like cruel and

implacable foes. He would lean over the great bridge that spans what was

once the Nor’ Loch, and watch the trains as they sped southward on their

way, as it seemed, to lands of sunshine and romance.

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

As an Edinburgh Student]

It was but the pathetic inconsistency of human nature that in the lands

of perpetual sunshine made him think no stars were so splendid as the

Edinburgh street lamps, and so the whole romance of his life was bound

up with “the huddle of cold grey hills from which we came,” and most of

all with that city of the hills, and the winds and the tempest where he

had his origin. He was called to the Scots bar; his family were powerful

in Edinburgh and so he got a little work—four briefs in all we are

told. Even when he was far distant the brass plate on the door of 17

Heriot Row bore the legend “Mr. R. L. Stevenson, Advocate” for many a

long day. Probably the time of the practical joker is passed in

Edinburgh, or an agent might have been tempted to shove some papers in

at the letter-box; but what about the cheque with which it used to be,

and still is in theory at any rate, the laudable habit in the north of

enclosing as companion to all such documents? Ah! that would indeed have

been carrying the joke to an unreasonable length. I will not tell here

of the memorable occasion when plain Leslie Stephen, as he then was,

took him to the old Infirmary to introduce him to W. E. Henley, then a

patient within those grimy walls. It was the beginning of a long story

of literary and personal friendship, with strange ups and downs. Writing

about Edinburgh as I do, I would fain brighten my page and conclude my

chapter with one of his most striking notes on his birthplace. “I was

born likewise within the bounds of an earthly city illustrious for her

beauty, her tragic and picturesque associations, and for the credit of

some of her brave sons. Writing as I do in a strange quarter of the

world, and a late day of my age, I can still behold the profile of her

towers and chimneys, and the long trail of her smoke against the sunset;

I can still hear those strains of martial music that she goes to bed

with, ending each day like an act of an opera to the notes of bugles;

still recall with a grateful effort of memory, any one of a thousand

beautiful and spacious circumstances that pleased me and that must have

pleased any one in my half-remembered past. It is the beautiful that I

thus actively recall, the august airs of the castle on its rock,

nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden song of the blackbird

in a suburban lane, rosy and dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited

splendours of the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty

day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was received into a

sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and upwards by fresh

grades and rises, city beyond city, a New Jerusalem bodily scaling

heaven.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ARTISTS

St. Margaret, Queen of Malcolm Canmore, has been ingeniously if

fancifully claimed as the earliest of Scots artists. At the end of her

life she prophesied that Edinburgh Castle would be taken by the English.

On the wall of her chapel she pictured a castle with a ladder against

the rampart, and on the ladder a man in the act of climbing. In this

fashion she intimated the castle would fall; _Gardez vous de Français_,

she wrote underneath. Probably by the French she meant the Normans from

whom she herself had fled. They had taken England and would try, she

thought, to take Scotland. Thus you read the riddle, if it be worth your

while. The years after are blank; the art was ecclesiastical and not

properly native. In the century before the Reformation there is reason

to believe that Edinburgh was crowded with fair shrines and churches

beautifully adorned, but the Reformers speedily changed all that. The

first important native name is that of George Jamesone (1586-1644), the

Scots Van Dyck, as he is often called, who, though he was born in

Aberdeen, finally settled in Edinburgh, and, like everybody else, you

might say, was buried in Greyfriars.

In 1729 a fine art association, called the Edinburgh Academy of St.

Luke, was formed, but it speedily went to pieces. This is not the place

to trace the art history of that or of the Edinburgh Select Society. In

1760 classes were opened at what was called the Trustees Academy; it was

supported by an annual grant of £2000, which was part compensation for

the increased burdens imposed on Scotland by the union with England.

This was successively under the charge of Alexander Runciman, David

Allan, called the “Scots Hogarth,” John Graham, and Andrew Wilson. It

still exists as a department of the great government art institution at

South Kensington. In 1808 a Society of Incorporated Artists was formed,

and it began an annual exhibition of pictures which at first were very

successful. Then came the institution for the encouragement of fine arts

in Scotland, formed in 1819. In 1826 the foundations, so to speak, of

the Scottish Academy were laid. In 1837 it received its charter, and was

henceforth known as the Royal Scottish Academy; its annual exhibition

was the chief art event of the year in Scotland, and since 1855 this

exhibition has been held in the Grecian temple on the Mound, which is

one of the most prominent architectural effects in Edinburgh. It is a

mere commonplace to say there is no art without wealth, and, as far as

Edinburgh is concerned, it is only after a new town began that she had

painters worth the naming. It is a period of (roughly) 150 years. It is

possible that in the future Glasgow maybe more important than Edinburgh,

but with this I have nothing to do. I have only to tell a few anecdotes

of the chief figures, and first of all there is Jamesone.

Whatever be his merits, we ought to be grateful to this artist because

he has preserved for us so many contemporary figures. Pictures in those

days were often made to tell a story. After the battle of Langside Lord

Seton escaped to Flanders, where he was forced to drive a waggon for his

daily bread. He returned in happier times for his party, and entered

again into possession of his estates. He had himself painted by

Jamesone, represented or dressed as a waggoner driving a wain with four

horses attached, and the picture was hung at Seton Palace. When Charles

I. came to Scotland in 1633 he dined with my Lord. He was much struck

with the painting, could not, in fact, keep his eyes off it. The

admiration of an art critic of such rank was fatal. What could a loyal

courtier do but beg His Majesty’s acceptance thereof? “Oh,” said the

King, “he could not rob the family of so inestimable a jewel.” Royally

spoken, and, you may be sure, gratefully heard. It is said the

magistrates of Edinburgh employed Jamesone to trick up the Netherbow

Port with portraits of the century of ancient Kings of the line of

Fergus. Hence possibly the legend that he limned those same mythical

royalties we see to-day at Holyrood Palace, though it is certain enough

they are not his, but Flemish De Witt’s. Jamesone was in favour with

Charles, assuredly a discriminating patron of art and artists. The King

stopped his horse at the Bow and gazed long at the grim phantoms in

whose reality he, like everybody else, devoutly believed. He gave

Jamesone a diamond ring from his own finger, and he afterwards sat for

his portrait. He allowed the painter to work with his hat on to protect

him from the cold, which so puffed up our artist that he would hardly

ever take it off again, no matter what company he frequented. We don’t

know his reward, but it seems his ordinary fee was £1 sterling for a

portrait. No doubt it was described as £20 Scots, which made it look

better but not go farther. You do not wonder that there was a lack of

eminent painters when the leader of them all was thus rewarded.

Artists work from various motives. Witness Sir Robert Strange the

engraver. He fell ardently in love with Isabella Lumsden, whose brother

acted as secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The lady was an

extreme Jacobite, and insisted that Strange should throw in his lot with

the old stock. He was present in the great battles of the ’45, and at

Inverness engraved a plate for bank-notes for the Stuart Government. He

had soon other things to think of. When the cause collapsed at Culloden,

he was in hiding in Edinburgh for some time, and existed by selling

portraits of the exiled family at small cost. Once when visiting his

Isabella the Government soldiers nearly caught him; probably they had a

shrewd suspicion he was like to be in the house, which they unexpectedly

entered. The lady was equal to this or any other occasion. She wore one

of the enormous hoops of the period, and under this her lover lay hid,

she the while defiantly carolling a Jacobite air whilst the soldiers

were looking up the chimney, and under the table, and searching all

other orthodox places of refuge. The pair were shortly afterwards

married. Strange had various and, finally, prosperous fortunes, and in

1787 was knighted. “If,” as George III. said with a grin, for he knew

his history, “he would accept that honour from an Elector of Hanover.”

But the King’s great favourite among Scots artists was Allan Ramsay, the

son of the poet and possibly of like Jacobite proclivities, although

about that we hear nothing. He had studied “at the seat of the Beast,”

as his father said, in jest you may be sure, for our old friend was no

highflyer.

[Illustration: ALLAN RAMSAY, PAINTER,

From a Mezzotint after Artist’s own painting]

Young Ramsay became an accomplished man of the world, and had more than

a double share, like his father before him, of the pawkiness attributed,

though not always truthfully, to his countrymen. He was soon in London

and painting Lord Bute most diligently. He did it so well that he made

Reynolds, in emulation, carefully elaborate a full-length that he was

doing at the time. “I wish to show legs with Ramsay’s Lord Bute,” quoth

he. The King preferred Ramsay; he talked German, an accomplishment rare

with Englishmen at the period, and he fell in, so to say, with the

King’s homely ways. When His Majesty had dined plentifully on his

favourite boiled mutton and turnips he would say: “Now, Ramsay, sit down

in my place and take your dinner.” He was a curled darling of great folk

and was appointed Court painter in 1767. A universal favourite, even

Johnson had a good word for him. All this has nothing to do with art,

and nobody puts him beside Reynolds, but he was highly prosperous. The

King was wont to present the portrait of himself and his consort to all

sorts of great people, so Ramsay and his assistants were kept busy. Once

he went on a long visit to Rome, partly on account of his health. He

left directions with his most able assistant, Philip Reinagle, to get

ready fifty pairs of Kings and Queens at ten guineas apiece. Now

Reinagle had learned to paint so like Ramsay that no mortal man could

tell the difference, but as he painted over and over again the

commonplace features of their Majesties, he got heartily sick of the

business. He struck for more pay and got thirty instead of ten guineas,

so after the end of six years he managed to get through with it, somehow

or other, but ever afterwards he looked back upon the period as a horrid

nightmare. Ramsay was a scholar, a wit, and a gentleman. In a coarse age

he was delicate and choice. He was fond of tea, but wine was too much

for his queasy stomach. Art was certainly not the all in all for him,

and his pictures are feeble. Possibly he did not much care; he had his

reward. Some critics have thought that he might have been a great

painter if his heart had been entirely in his work.

It has been said of a greater than he, of the incomparable Sir Henry

Raeburn, that the one thing wanting to raise his genius into the highest

possible sphere was the chastening of a great sorrow or the excitement

of a great passion. I cannot myself conceive anything better than his

_Braxfield_ among men or his _Mrs. James Campbell_ among women, but I

have no right to speak. At least his prosperity enabled him to paint a

whole generation, though from that generation as we have it on his

canvas, a strange malice of fate makes the figure of Robert Burns, the

greatest of them all, most conspicuous by its absence. His prosperity

and contentment were the result of the simple life and plain living of

old Edinburgh. He was a great friend of John Clerk, afterwards Lord

Eldin. In very early days Clerk asked him to dinner. The landlady

uncovered two dishes, one held three herrings and the other three

potatoes. “Did I not tell you, wuman,” said John with that accent which

was to make “a’ the Fifteen” tremble, “that a gentleman was to dine wi’

me, and that ye were to get _sax_ herrings and _sax_ potatoes?”

These were his salad days, and ere they were fled a wealthy young widow

saw and loved Raeburn. She was not personally known to him, but her wit

easily devised a method. She asked to have her portrait painted, and the

rest was plain sailing. It was then the fixed tradition of all the

northern painters that you must study at Rome if you would be an artist.

Raeburn set off for Italy. The story is that he had an introduction to

Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom he visited as he passed through London.

Reynolds was much impressed with the youth from the north, and at the

end took him aside, and in the most delicate manner suggested that if

money was necessary for his studies abroad he was prepared to advance

it. Raeburn gratefully declined. When he returned from Rome he settled

in Edinburgh, from which he scarcely stirred. His old master, Martin,

jealously declared that the lad in George Street painted better before

he went to Rome, but the rest of Scotland did not agree. It became a

matter of course that everybody who was anybody should get himself

painted by Raeburn. He seemed to see at once into the character of the

face he had before him, and so his pictures have that remarkable

characteristic of great artists, they tell us more of the man than the

actual sight of the man himself does; but again I go beyond my province.

The early life of many Scots artists (and doctors) is connected with

Edinburgh, but the most important part is given to London. Thus Sir

David Wilkie belongs first of all to Fife, for he was born at Cults,

where his father was parish minister. His mother saw him drawing

something with chalk on the floor. The child said he was making “bonnie

Lady Gonie,” referring to Lady Balgonie, who lived near. Obviously this

same story might have been told of many people, not afterwards eminent.

In fact, Wilkie’s development was not rapid. In 1799, when he was

fourteen, he went to the Trustees Academy at Edinburgh. George Thomson,

the Secretary, after examining his drawings declared that they had not

sufficient merit to procure his admission. The Earl of Leven, however,

insisted he must be admitted, and admitted he was. He proceeded to draw

from the antique, not at first triumphantly. His father showed one of

his studies to one of his elders. “What was it?” queried the douce man.

“A foot,” was the answer. “A fute! a fute! it’s mair like a fluke than a

fute.” In 1804 he returned to Cults where he employed himself painting

Pitlessie Fair. At church he saw an ideal character study nodding in one

of the pews. He soon had it transferred to the flyleaf of the Bible. He

had not escaped attention, and was promptly taken to task. He stoutly

asserted that in the sketch the eye and the hand alone were engaged, he

could hear the sermon all the time. The ingenuity or matchless impudence

of this assertion fairly astounded his accusers, and the matter dropped.

I do not tell here how he went to London and became famous. How famous

let this anecdote show. In 1817 he was at Abbotsford making a group of

the Scott family: he went with William Laidlaw to Altrive to see Hogg.

“Laidlaw,” said the shepherd, “this is not the great Mr. Wilkie?” “It’s

just the great Mr. Wilkie, Hogg.” The poet turned to the painter: “I

cannot tell you how pleased I am to see you in my house and how glad I

am to see you are so young a man.”

[Illustration: REV. JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON,

From the Engraving by Croll]

This curious greeting is explained thus: Hogg had taken Wilkie for a

horse-couper. What Wilkie would have taken Hogg for we are not told,

possibly for something of the same.

Wilkie, as everybody knows, painted subjects of ordinary life in

Scotland and England, such as _The Village Festival_, _Rent Day_, _The

Penny Wedding_, and so forth. In the prime of life he went to Spain, and

was much impressed with the genius of Velasquez, then little known in

this country. He noticed a similarity to Raeburn, perhaps that peculiar

directness in going straight to the heart of the subject, that putting

on the canvas the very soul of the man, common to both painters. The

story goes that when in Madrid he went daily to the Museo del Prado, set

himself down before the picture _Los Borrachos_, spent three hours

gazing at it in a sort of ecstasy, and then, when fatigue and admiration

had worn him out, he would take up his hat and with a deep sigh leave

the place for the time.

Another son of the manse is more connected with Edinburgh than ever

Wilkie was, and this is the Rev. John Thomson, known as Thomson of

Duddingston, from the fact that he was parish minister there from 1801

till his death in 1840. His father was incumbent of Dailly in Ayrshire,

and here he spent his early years. He received the elements of art from

the village carpenter—at least, so that worthy averred. He was wont to

introduce the subject to a stranger. “Ye’ll ken ane John Thomson, a

minister?” “Why, Thomson of Duddingston, the celebrated painter? Do you

know him?” “_Me_ ken him? It was _me_ that first taught him to pent.” As

in the case of Wilkie, his art leanings got him into difficulty. At a

half-yearly communion he noted a picturesque old hillman, and needs must

forthwith transfer him to paper. The fathers and brethren were not

unnaturally annoyed and disgusted, and they deputed one of their number

to deal faithfully with the offender. Thomson listened in solemn

silence, nay, took what appeared to be some pencil notes of the grave

words of censure, at length he suddenly showed the other a hastily drawn

sketch of himself. “What auld cankered carl do ye think this is?” The

censor could not choose but laugh, and the incident ended. Thomson was

twice married. His second wife was Miss Dalrymple of Fordel. She saw his

picture of _The Falls of Foyers_, and conceived a passion to know the

artist, and the moment he saw her he determined “that woman must be my

wife.” As he afterwards said, “We just drew together.” The manse at

Duddingston became for a time a very muses’ bower; the choicest of

Edinburgh wits, chief among them Scott himself, were constant visitors.

Of illustrious strangers perhaps the greatest was Turner, though his

remarks were not altogether amiable. “Ah, Thomson, you beat me

hollow—in _frames_!” He was more eulogistic of certain pictures. “The

man who did _that_ could paint.” When he took his leave he said, as he

got into the carriage, “By God, though, Thomson, I envy you that loch.”

To-day the prospect is a little spoilt by encroaching houses and too

many people, but Scotland has few choicer views than that placid water,

the old church at the edge, the quaint village, and the mighty Lion Hill

that broods over all. Thomson is said to have diligently attended to his

clerical duties, but he was hard put to it sometimes, for you believe he

was more artist than theologian. He built himself a studio in the manse

garden down by the loch. This he called Edinburgh, so that too

importunate callers might be warded off with the remark that he was at

Edinburgh. “Gone to Edinburgh,” you must know, is the traditional excuse

of everybody in Duddingston who shuts his door. One Sunday John, the

minister’s man, “jowed” the bell long and earnestly in vain—the

well-known figure would not emerge from the manse. John rushed off to

the studio by the loch and found, as he expected, the minister hard at

work with a canvas before him. He admonished him that it was past the

time, that the people were assembled, and the bells “rung in.” “Oh,

John,” said his master, in perplexed entreaty, “just go and ring the

bell for another five minutes till I get in this bonnie wee bit o’ sky.”

An old woman of his congregation was in sore trouble, and went to the

minister and asked for a bit prayer. Thomson gave her two half-crowns.

“Take that, Betty, my good woman, it’s likely to do you more good than

any prayer I’m likely to make,” a kindly but amusingly cynical remark,

in the true vein of the moderates of the eighteenth century. “Here, J.

F.,” he said to an eminent friend who visited him on a Sunday afternoon,

“_you_ don’t care about breaking the Sabbath, gie these pictures a touch

of varnish.” These were the days before the Disruption and the

evangelical revival. You may set off against him the name of Sir George

Harvey, who was made president of the northern Academy in 1864. He was

much in sympathy with Scots religious tradition, witness his _Quitting

the Manse_, his _Covenanting Preaching_, and other deservedly famous

pictures. As Mr. W. D. M‘Kay points out, the Disruption produced in a

milder form a recrudescence of the strain of thought and sentiment of

Covenanting times, and this influenced the choice of subjects. In his

early days when Harvey talked of painting, a friend advised him to look

at Wilkie; he looked and seemed to see nothing that was worth the

looking, but he examined again and again, even as Wilkie himself had

gazed on Velasquez, and so saw in him “the very finest of the wheat.” In

painting the picture _The Wise and Foolish Builders_, he made a child

construct a house on the sand, so that he might see exactly how the

thing was done, not, however, that he fell into the stupid error of

believing that work and care were everything. He would neither persuade

a man nor dissuade him from an artistic career. “If it is in him,” he

was wont to say, “it is sure to come out, whether I advise him or not.”

Of the truth of this saying the life of David Roberts is an example. He

was the son of a shoemaker and was born at Stockbridge, Edinburgh, at

the end of the eighteenth century. Like most town boys of the period he

haunted the Mound, then a favourite stand for wild beast caravans. This

was before the era of Grecian temples and statues and trim-kept gardens,

and “Geordie Boyd’s mud brig” (to recall a long-vanished popular name)

was an unkempt wilderness. He drew pictures of the shows on the wall of

the white-washed kitchen with the end of a burnt stick and a bit of

keel, in order that his mother might see what they were like. When she

had satisfied her curiosity, why—a dash of white-wash and the wall was

as good as ever! His more ambitious after-attempts were exhibited by the

honest cobbler to his customers. “Hoo has the callant learnt it?” was

the perplexed inquiry. With some friends of like inclination he turned a

disused cellar into a life academy: they tried their prentice hands on a

donkey, and then they sat for one another; but this is not the place to

follow his upward struggles. In 1858 he received the freedom of the city

of Edinburgh.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, but ways are manifold and some of

them are negative. Horatio Maculloch, the landscape-painter, in his

_Edinburgh from Dalmeny Park_, had introduced into the foreground the

figure of a woodman lopping the branches of a fallen tree. This figure

gave him much trouble, so he told his friend, Alexander Smith, the poet.

One day he said cheerfully, “Well, Smith, I have done that figure at

last.” “Indeed, and how?” “I have painted it out!” Even genius and hard

work do not always ensure success. If ever there was a painter of genius

that man was David Scott, most pathetic figure among Edinburgh artists.

You scarce know why his fame was not greater, or his work not more

sought after. His life was a short one (1806-1849) and his genius did

not appeal to the mass, for he did not and perhaps could not produce a

great body of highly impressive work. Yet, take the best of his

illustrations to Coleridge’s _Ancient Mariner_. You read the poem with

deeper meaning, with far deeper insight, after you have looked on them;

to me at least they seem greater than William Blake’s illustrations to

_Blair’s Grave_, a work of like nature. Still more wonderful is the

amazing _Puck Fleeing Before the Dawn_. The artist rises to the height

of his great argument; his genius is for the moment equal to

Shakespeare’s; the spirit of unearthly drollery and mischief and impish

humour takes bodily form before your astonished gaze. “His soul was like

a star and dwelt apart;” the few anecdotes of him have a strange, weird

touch. When a boy, he was handed over to a gardener to be taken to the

country. He took a fancy he would never be brought back; the gardener

swore he would bring him back himself; the child, only half convinced,

treated the astonished rustic to a discourse on the commandments, and

warned him if he broke his word he would be guilty of a lie. The

gardener, more irritated than amused, wished to have nothing whatever to

do with him. Going into a room once where there was company, he was much

struck with the appearance of a young lady there; he went up to her,

laid his hand on her knees, “You are very beautiful,” he said. As a

childish prank he thought he would make a ghost and frighten some other

children. With a bolster and a sheet he succeeded only too well; he

became frantic with terror, and fairly yelled the house down in his

calls for help.

A different man altogether was Sir Daniel Macnee, who was R.S.A. in

1876. He was born the same year as David Scott, and lived long after

him. The famous portrait painter, kindly, polished, accomplished, was a

man of the world, widely known and universally popular, except that his

universal suavity of itself now and again excited enmity. “I dinna like

Macnee a bit,” said a sour-grained old Scots dame; “he’s aye everybody’s

freend!” The old lady might have found Sam Bough more to her taste.

Though born in Carlisle he settled in Edinburgh in 1855, and belongs to

the northern capital. In dress and much else he delighted to run tilt at

conventions, and was rather an _enfant terrible_ at decorous functions.

At some dinner or other he noted a superbly got up picture-dealer, whom

he pretended to mistake for a waiter. “John—John, I say, John, bring me

a pint of wine, and let it be of the choicest vintage.” His pranks at

last provoked Professor Blackie, who was present, to declare roundly and

audibly, “I am astonished that a man who can paint like an angel should

come here and conduct himself like a fool.” He delighted in the Lothian

and Fife coasts. The Bass he considered in some sort his own property,

so he jocularly told its owner, Sir Hew Dalrymple, “You get £20 a year

or so out of it; I make two or three hundred.” Bough was the very

picture of a genial Bohemian, perhaps he was rather fitted to shine, a

light of the Savage Club than of the northern capital, where, if

tradition was followed, there was always something grim and fell even

about the merry-making. One or two of his genial maxims are worth

quoting. There had been some row about a disputed succession. “It’s an

awful warning,” he philosophised, “to all who try to save money in this

world. You had far better spend your tin on a little sound liquor,

wherewith to comfort your perishable corps, than have such cursed rows

about it after you have gone.” And again his golden rule of the _Ars

Bibendi_, “I like as much as I can get honestly and carry decently,” on

which profound maxim let us make an end of our chapter.

CHAPTER NINE

THE WOMEN OF EDINBURGH

Anecdotes of the women of Edinburgh are mainly of the eighteenth

century. The events of an earlier period are too tragic for a trivial

story or they come under other heads. Is it an anecdote to tell how, on

the night of Rizzio’s murder (9th March 1566), the conspirators upset

the supper table, and unless Jane, Countess of Argyll, had caught at a

falling candle the rest of the tragedy had been played in total

darkness? And it is only an unusual fact about this same countess that

when she came to die she was enclosed in the richest coffin ever seen in

Scotland; the compartments and inscriptions being all set in solid gold.

The chroniclers ought to have some curious anecdotes as to the

subsequent fate of that coffin, but they have not, it vanishes

unaccountably from history. The tragedies of the Covenant have stories

of female heroism; the women were not less constant than the men, nay,

that learned but malicious gossip, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe,

insinuates that the husband might have given in at the last minute, ay,

when the rope was round his neck at the Cross or the Grassmarket, but

the wife urged him to be true to the death. The wives of the persecutors

had not seldom a strong sympathy with the persecuted. The Duchess of

Rothes, as Lady Ann Lindsay became, sheltered the Covenanters. Her

husband dropped a friendly hint, “My hawks will be out to-night, my

Lady, so you had better take care of your blackbirds.”

It was natural that a sorely tried and oppressed nation should paint the

oppressor in the blackest of colours. You are pleased with an anecdote

like the above, showing that a gleam of pity sometimes crossed those

truculent faces. The Duke of York (afterwards James VII.) at Holyrood

had his playful and humane hour. There was a sort of informal theatre at

the palace. In one of the pieces the Princess Anne lay dead upon the

stage—such was her part. Mumper, her own and her father’s favourite

dog, was not persuaded, he jumped and fawned on her; she laughed, the

audience loyally obeyed and the tragedy became a farce. “Her Majesty had

_sticked_ the part,” said Morrison of Prestongrange gruffly. The Duke

was shipwrecked on the return voyage to Scotland and Mumper was drowned.

A courtier uttered some suavely sympathetic words about the dog. “How,

sir, can you speak of _him_, when so many fine fellows went to the

bottom?” rejoined His Royal Highness.

Here is a story from the other side. In 1681 the Earl of Argyll was

committed to the Castle for declining the oath required by the Test Act.

On the 12th December he was condemned to death and on the 20th he

learned that his execution was imminent. Lady Sophia Lindsay of

Balcarres, his daughter-in-law, comes, it was given out, to bid him a

last farewell; there is a hurried change of garments in the prison, and

presently Argyll emerges as lacquey bearing her long train. At the

critical moment the sentinel roughly grasped him by the arm. Those Scots

dames had the nerve of iron and resource without parallel. The lady

pulled the train out of his hand into the mud, slashed him across the

face with it till he was all smudged over, and rated him soundly for

stupidity. The soldier laughed, the lady entered the coach, the fugitive

jumped on the footboard behind, and so away into the darkness and

liberty of a December night. Ere long he was safe in Holland, and she

was just as safe in the Tolbooth, for even that age would give her no

other punishment than a brief confinement. Perhaps more stoical

fortitude was required in the Lady Graden’s case. She was sister-in-law

to Baillie of Jerviswood. At his trial in 1684 for treason she kept up

his strength from time to time with cordials, for he was struck with

mortal sickness; she walked with him, as he was carried along the High

Street, to the place of execution at the Cross. He pointed out to her

Warriston’s window (long since removed from the totally altered close of

that name), and told of the high talk he had engaged in with her father,

who had himself gone that same dread way some twenty years before. She

“saw him all quartered, and took away every piece and wrapped it up in

some linen cloth with more than masculine courage.” So says Lauder of

Fountainhall, who had been one of the Crown counsel at the trial.

Even as children the women of that time were brave and devoted. Grizel

Hume, daughter of Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, when a child of twelve

was sent by her father from the country to Edinburgh to take important

messages to Baillie as he lay in prison. A hard task for a child of

those years, but she went through it safely; perhaps it was no harder

than conveying food at the dead of night to the family vault in Polwarth

Churchyard where her father was concealed. When visiting the prison she

became acquainted with the son and namesake of Jerviswood: they were

afterwards married. The memories of the Hon. George Baillie of

Jerviswood and of his wife the Lady Grizel Baillie are preserved for us

in an exquisite monograph by their daughter, Lady Grizel Murray of

Stanhope. The name of a distinguished statesman is often for his own age

merely, but the authoress of a popular song has a surer title to fame.

In one of his last years in Dumfries, Burns quoted Lady Grizel Baillie’s

“And werena my heart licht I wad dee” to a young friend who noted the

coldness with which the townsfolk then regarded him.

It is matter of history that Argyll did not escape in the long run. In

1685, three years before the dawn of the Revolution, he made that

unfortunate expedition to Scotland which ended in failure, capture and

death on the old charge. One of his associates was Sir John Cochrane of

Ochiltree; he also was captured and as a “forefaulted traitor” was led

by the hangman through the streets of Edinburgh bound and bareheaded. A

line from London and all was over, so his friends thought, but that line

never arrived. On the 7th of July in that year the English mail was

twice stopped and robbed near Alnwick. The daring highwayman turned out

to be a girl! She was Grizel, Sir John’s daughter, disguised in men’s

clothes and (of course) armed to the teeth. In the end Sir John obtained

his pardon, and lived to be Earl of Dundonald.

In the middle of the next century we have this on the Jacobite side.

When the Highlanders were in Carlisle in the ’45 a lady called Dacre,

daughter of a gentleman in Cumberland, lay at Rose Castle in the pangs

of childbirth and very ill indeed. A party of Highlanders under

Macdonald of Kinloch Moidart entered her dwelling to occupy it as their

own. When the leader learned what had taken place, the presumed Highland

savage showed himself a considerate and chivalrous gentleman. With

courteous words he drew off his men, took the white cockade from his

bonnet and pinned it on the child’s breast. Thus it served to guard not

merely the child but the whole household. The infant became in after

years the wife of Clerk of Pennicuick, her house was at 100 Princes

Street, she lived far into the last century, known by her erect walk,

which she preserved till over her eightieth year, and by her quaint

dress. Once she was sitting in Constable’s shop when Sir Walter Scott

went by. “Oh, sir Walter, are you really going to pass me?” she called

out in a dudgeon that was only half feigned. But she was easily

pacified. “Sure, my Lady,” said the Wizard in comic apology, “by this

time I might know your back as well as your face.” She was called the

“White Rose of Scotland” from the really beautiful legend of the white

cockade, which she wore on every important occasion. And what of the

Highland Bayard? His estates were forfeited, his home was burned to the

ground, and himself on the Gallows Hill at Carlisle on the 18th October

1746 suffered the cruel and ignominious death of a traitor—_aequitate

deum erga bona malaque documenta_!

The women were on the side of the Jacobites even to the end. “Old maiden

ladies were the last leal Jacobites in Edinburgh. Spinsterhood in its

loneliness remained ever true to Prince Charlie and the vanished dreams

of its youth.” Thus Dame Margaret Sinclair of Dunbeath; and she adds

that in the old Episcopal chapel in the Cowgate the last of those

Jacobite ladies never failed to close her prayer book and stand erect in

silent protest, when the prayer for King George III. and the reigning

family was read in the Church service. Alison Rutherford, born 1712 and

the wife of Patrick Cockburn of Ormiston, was not of this way of

thinking. She lived in the house of, and (it seems) under the rule of,

her father-in-law. She said she was married to a man of seventy-five. He

was Lord Justice-Clerk, and unpopular for his severity to the

unfortunate rebels of the ’15. The nine of diamonds, for some occult

reason, was called the curse of Scotland, and when it turned up at cards

a favourite Jacobite joke was to greet it as the Lord Justice-Clerk.

Mrs. Cockburn is best known as the authoress of one, and not the best,

version of the _Flowers of the Forest_. But this is not her only piece.

When the Prince occupied Edinburgh in the ’45, she wrote a skit on the

specious language of the proclamations which did their utmost to satisfy

every party. It began—

“Have you any laws to mend?

Or have you any grievance?

I’m a hero to my trade

And truly a most leal prince.”

With this in her pocket she set off to visit the Keiths at Ravelston.

They were a strong Jacobite family, which was perhaps an inducement to

the lady to wave it in their faces. She was driven back in their coach,

but at the West Port was stopped by the rough Highland Guard who

threatened to search after treasonable papers. Probably the lady then

thought the squib had not at all a humorous aspect, and she quaked and

feared its discovery. But the coach was recognised as loyal by its

emblazonry and it franked its freight, so to speak. Mrs. Cockburn was a

brilliant letter-writer, strong, shrewd, sensible, sometimes pathetic,

sometimes almost sublime, she gives you the very marrow of old

Edinburgh. Thus she declines an invitation: “Mrs. Cockburn’s compliments

to Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers. Would wait on them with a great deal of

pleasure, but finds herself at a loss, as Mrs. Chalmers sets her an

example of never coming from home, and as there is nobody she admires

more, she wishes to imitate her in everything.” A woman loses her young

child. These are Mrs. Cockburn’s truly Spartan comments: “Should she

lose her husband or another child she would recover: we need sorrowes

often. In the meantime, if she could accept personal severity it would

be well,—a ride in rain, wind and storm until she is fatigued to death,

and spin on a great wheel and never allowed to sit down till weariness

of nature makes her. I do assure you I have gone through all these

exercises, and have reason to bless God my reason was preserved and

health now more than belongs to my age.” And again: “As for me, I sit in

my black chair, weak, old, and contented. Though my body is not

portable, I visit you in my prayers and in my cups.” She tells us that

one of her occasional servants, to wit, the waterwife, so called because

she brought the daily supply of water up those interminable stairs, was

frequently tipsy and of no good repute. She discharged her, yet she

reappeared and was evidently favoured by the other servants; this was

because she had adopted a foundling called Christie Fletcher, as she was

first discovered on a stair in Fletcher’s Land. The child had fine eyes,

and was otherwise so attractive that Mrs. Cockburn got her into the

Orphan Hospital. “By the account,” she grimly remarks, “of that house, I

think if our young ladies were educated there, it would make a general

reform of manners.”

[Illustration: MRS. ALISON COCKBURN,

From a Photograph]

She heard Colonel Reid (afterwards General Reid and the founder of the

chair of Music in the University, where the annual Reid concerts

perpetuate his name) play on the flute. “It thrills to your very heart,

it speaks all languages, it comes from the heart to the heart. I never

could have conceived, it had a dying fall. I can think of nothing but

that flute.” Mrs. Cockburn saw Sir Walter Scott when he was six, and was

astonished at his precocity. He described her as “a virtuoso like

myself,” and defined a virtuoso as “one who wishes and will know

everything.”

The other and superior set of _The Flowers of the Forest_ was written by

Miss Jean Elliot, who lived from 1727 till 1805. The story is that she

was the last Edinburgh lady who kept a private sedan chair in her

“lobby.” In this she was borne through the town by the last of the

caddies. The honour of the last sedan chair is likewise claimed for Lady

Don who lived in George Square; probably there were two “lasts.” Those

Edinburgh aristocratic lady writers had many points in common; they

mainly got fame by one song, they made a dead secret of authorship, half

because they were shy, half because they were proud. Caroline Baroness

Nairne was more prolific than the others, for _The Land of the Leal,

Caller Herrin’_ (the refrain to which was caught from the chimes of St.

Giles’), _The Auld Hoose_, and _John Tod_ almost reach the high level of

masterpieces, but she was as determined as the others to keep it dark.

Her very husband did not know she was an authoress; she wrote as Mrs.

Bogan of Bogan. In another direction she was rather too daring. She was

one of a committee of ladies who proposed to inflict a bowdlerised Burns

on the Scots nation. An emasculated _Jolly Beggars_ had made strange

reading, but the project fell through.

Lady Anne Barnard, one of the Lindsays of Balcarres, was another

Edinburgh poetess. She is known by her one song, indeed only by a

fragment of it, for the continuation or second part of _Auld Robin Gray_

is anti-climax, fortunately so bad, that it has well-nigh dropped from

memory. The song had its origin at Balcarres. There was an old Scots

ditty beginning, “The bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.” It was

lewd and witty, but the air inspired the words to the gifted authoress.

She heard the song from Sophy Johnstone—commonly called “Suff” or “the

Suff,” in the words of Mrs. Cockburn—surely the oddest figure among the

ladies of old Edinburgh. Part nature, part training, or rather the want

of it, exaggerated in her the bluntness and roughness of those old

dames. She was daughter of the coarse, drunken Laird of Hilton. One day

after dinner he maintained, in his cups, that education was rubbish, and

that his daughter should be brought up without any. He stuck to this:

she was called in jest the “natural” child of Hilton, and came to pass

as such in the less proper sense of the word. She learned to read and

write from the butler, and she taught herself to shoe a horse and do an

artisan’s work. She played the fiddle, fought the stable boys, swore

like a trooper, dressed in a jockey coat, walked like a man, sang in a

voice that seemed a man’s, and was believed by half Edinburgh to be a

man in disguise. She had strong affections and strong hates, she had

great talent for mimicry, which made her many enemies, was inclined to

be sceptical though not without misgivings and fears. She came to pay a

visit to Balcarres, and stayed there for thirteen years. She had a

choice collection of old Scots songs. One lingered in Sir Walter Scott’s

memory:

“Eh,” quo’ the Tod, “it’s a braw, bricht nicht,

The wind’s i’ the wast and the mune shines bricht.”

She gave her opinion freely. When ill-pleased her dark wrinkled face

looked darker, and the hard lines about her mouth grew harder, as she

planted her two big feet well out, and murmured in a deep bass voice,

“Surely that’s great nonsense.” One evening at Mrs. Cockburn’s in

Crichton Street, the feet of Ann Scott, Sir Walter’s sister, touched by

accident the toes of the irascible Suff, who retorted with a good kick.

“What is the lassie wabster, wabster, wabstering that gait for?” she

growled. When she was an old woman, Dr. Gregory said she must abstain

from animal food unless she wished to die. “Dee, Doctor! odd, I’m

thinking they’ve forgotten an auld wife like me up yonder.” But all her

gaiety vanished near the end. From poverty or avarice she half starved

herself. The younger generation of the Balcarres children brought

tit-bits to her garret every Sunday. “What hae ye brocht? What hae ye

brocht?” she would snap out greedily.

[Illustration: MISS JEAN ELLIOT,

From a Sepia Drawing]

And so the curtain falls on this strange figure of old Edinburgh.

I cannot leave those sweet singers without a passing word on the old

ballad, surely of local origin:

“Now Arthur’s Seat shall be my bed,

The sheets shall ne’er be pressed by me.

St. Anton’s Well shall be my drink

Since my true love’s forsaken me!

Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw

An’ shake the green leaves aff the tree?

O! gentle death, when wilt thou come?

For o’ my life I am wearie.”

Is this a woman’s voice? You cannot tell. It is supposed to commemorate

the misfortunes of Lady Barbara Erskine, daughter of the Earl of Mar and

wife of the second Marquis of Douglas. A rejected and malignant suitor

is rumoured to have poisoned her husband’s mind against her, till he

drove her from his company.

Edinburgh has many records of high aristocratic, but very unconventional

or otherwise remarkable, dames. Lady Rosslyn sat in the company of her

friends one day when a woman whose character had been blown upon was

announced. Many of her guests rose in a hurry to be gone. “Sit still,

sit still,” said the old lady, “it’s na catchin’.” Dr. Johnson, on his

visit to Scotland, met Margaret, Duchess of Douglas, at James’s Court.

He describes her as “talking broad Scots with a paralytic voice scarcely

understood by her own countrymen.” It was enviously noted that he

devoted his attention to her exclusively for the whole evening. The

innuendo was that Duchesses in England had not paid much attention to

Samuel, and that he was inclined to make as much of a Scots specimen as

he could. An accusation of snobbery was a good stick wherewith to beat

the sage. The lady was a daughter of Douglas of Maines, and the widow of

Archibald, Duke of Douglas, who died in 1761. A more interesting figure

was the Duchess of Queensberry, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon. The

Act of the eleventh Parliament of James II., providing that “no Scotsman

should marry an Englishwoman without the King’s license under the Great

Seal, under pain of death and escheat of moveables,” was long out of

date. She detested Scots manners, and did everything to render them

absurd. She dressed herself as a peasant girl, to ridicule the stiff

costumes of the day. The Scots made an excessive and almost exclusive

use of the knife at table, whereat she screamed out as if about to

faint. It is to her credit, however, that she was a friend and patron of

Gay the poet, entertained him in Queensberry House, Canongate. Perhaps

his praises of her beauty ought thus to suffer some discount; but Prior

was as warm; and Pope’s couplet is classic:

“If Queensberry to strip there’s no compelling,

’Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.”

A little coarse, perhaps, but it was “the tune o’ the time.” “Wild as

colt untamed,” no doubt; and she got herself into some more or less

laughable scrapes; but what would not be pardoned to a beautiful

Duchess? Her pranks were nothing to those of Lady Maxwell of Monreith’s

daughters. They lived in Hyndford’s Close, just above the Netherbow. One

of them, a future Duchess of Gordon, too, chased, captured, and bestrode

a lusty sow, which roamed the streets at will, whilst her sister,

afterwards Lady Wallace, thumped it behind with a stick. In the

mid-eighteenth century, you perceive, swine were free of the High Street

of Edinburgh. In after years Lady Wallace had, like other Edinburgh

ladies, a sharp tongue. The son of Kincaid, the King’s printer, was a

well-dressed dandy—“a great macaroni,” as the current phrase went. From

his father’s lucrative patent, he was nicknamed “young Bibles.” “Who is

that extraordinary-looking young man?” asked some one at a ball. “Only

young Bibles,” quoth Lady Wallace, “bound in calf and gilt, but not

lettered.” Not that she had always the best of the argument. Once she

complained to David Hume that when people asked her age she did not know

what to say. “Tell them you have not yet come to the years of

discretion,” said the amiable philosopher. It was quite in his manner.

He talked to Lady Anne Lindsay (afterwards Barnard) as if they were

contemporaries. She looked surprised. “Have not you and I grown up

together; you have grown tall, and I have grown broad.”

Lady Anne Dick of Corstorphine, granddaughter of “Bluidy” Mackenzie, was

another wild romp. She loved to roam about the town at night in man’s

dress. Every dark close held the possibility of an exciting adventure.

Once she was caught by the heels, and passed the night in the

guard-house which, as Scott tells us, “like a huge snail stretched along

the High Street near the Tron Kirk for many a long day.” She wrote

society verses, light or otherwise. She fancied herself or pretended to

be in love with Sir Peter Murray—at least he was a favourite subject

for her muse. Your Edinburgh fine lady could be high and mighty when she

chose, witness Susanna Countess of Eglinton, wife of Alexander the ninth

Earl, and a Kennedy of the house of Colzean. When she was a girl, a

stray hawk alighted on her shoulder as she walked in the garden at

Colzean; the Eglinton crest or name was on its bells, and she was

entitled to hail the omen as significant. Perhaps the prophecy helped to

bring its own fulfilment: at least she refused Sir John Clerk of Eldin

for my Lord, though he was much her senior. “Susanna and the elder,”

said the wits of the time. She was six feet in height, very handsome and

very stately, and she had seven daughters like unto herself. One of the

great sights of old Edinburgh were the eight gilded sedan chairs that

conveyed those ladies, moving in stately procession from the old Post

Office Close to the Assembly Rooms.

[Illustration: SUSANNAH, COUNTESS OF EGLINTON,

From the Painting by Gavin Hamilton]

Their mansion house, by the way, afterwards served as Fortune’s tavern,

far the most fashionable of its kind in Edinburgh. The Countess has her

connection with letters: Allan Ramsay dedicated his _Gentle Shepherd_ to

her, William Hamilton of Bangour chanted her in melodious verse, and Dr.

Johnson and she said some nice things to one another when he was in

Scotland. She was a devoted Jacobite, had a portrait of Charles Edward

so placed in her bedroom as to be the first thing she saw when she

wakened in the morning. Her last place in Edinburgh was in Jack’s Land

in the Canongate. We have ceased to think it remarkable, that noble

ladies dwelt in those now grimy ways. She had a long innings of fashion

and power, for it was not till 1780, at the ripe age of ninety-one, that

she passed away. She kept her looks even in age. “What would you give to

be as pretty as I?” she asked her eldest daughter, Lady Betty. “Not half

so much as you would give to be as young as I,” was the pert rejoinder.

Another high and mighty dame was Catharine, daughter of John, Earl of

Dundonald, and wife of Alexander, sixth Earl of Galloway. She lived in

the Horse Wynd in the Cowgate, and, it is averred, always went visiting

in a coach and six. It is said—and you quite believe it—that whilst

she was being handed into her coach the leaders were already pawing in

front of the destined door. In youth her beauty, in age her pride and

piety, were the talk of the town. Are they not commemorated in the

_Holyrood Ridotto_? A more pleasing figure is that of Primrose Campbell

of Mamore, widow of that crafty Lord Lovat whose head fell on Tower Hill

in 1747. She dwelt at the top of Blackfriar’s Wynd, where Walter Chepman

the old Edinburgh printer had lived 240 years before. She passed a

pious, peaceable, and altogether beautiful widowhood; perhaps her

happiest years, for old Simon Fraser had given her a bad time. She

looked forward to the end with steady, untroubled eyes, got her

graveclothes ready, and the turnpike stair washed. Was this latter, you

wonder, so unusual a measure? She professed indifference as to her place

of sepulchre “You may lay me beneath that hearthstane.” And so, in 1796,

in her eighty-sixth year, she went to her rest.

Some of those ladies were not too well off. Two of the house of Traquair

lived close by St. Mary’s Wynd. The servant, Jenny, had been out

marketing. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo,

mem, just a dozen o’ taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad hae me to

tak’; they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny, tak’ back

the taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”

A curious story is narrated of Lady Elibank, the daughter of an eminent

surgeon in Edinburgh. She told a would-be suitor, “I do not believe that

you would part with a ‘leith’ of your little finger for my whole body.”

Next day the young man handed her a joint from one of his fingers; she

declined to have anything to do with him. “The man who has no mercy on

his own flesh will not spare mine,” which served _him_ right. She was

called up in church, as the use was, to be examined in the Assembly’s

catechism, as Betty Stirling. “Filthy fellow,” she said; “he might have

called me Mrs. Betty or Miss Betty; but to be called bare Betty is

insufferable.” She was called bare Betty as long as she lived, which

served _her_ right.

The servants of some of those aristocratic ladies were as old-fashioned,

as poor, and as devoted as themselves. Mrs. Erskine of Cardross lived in

a small house at the foot of Merlin’s Wynd, which once stood near the

Tron Kirk. George Mason, her servant, allowed himself much liberty of

speech. On a young gentleman calling for wine a second time at dinner,

George in a whisper, reproachful and audible, admonished him, “Sir, you

have had a glass already.” This strikes a modern as mere impudence, yet

passed as proper enough.

The fashionable life of old Edinburgh had its head-quarters in the

Assembly Rooms, first in the West Bow and then after 1720 south of the

High Street in the Assembly Close. The formalities of the meetings and

dances are beyond our scope. The “famed Miss Nicky Murray,” as Sir

Alexander Boswell called her, presided here for many years; she was

sister of the Earl of Mansfield, and a mighty fine lady. “Miss of What?”

she would ask when a lady was presented. If of nowhere she had short

shrift: a tradesman, however decked, was turned out at once. Her fan was

her sceptre or enchanted wand, with a wave of which she stopped the

music, put out the lights, and brought the day of stately and decorous

proceedings to a close.

Another lady directress was the Countess of Panmure. A brewer’s daughter

had come very well dressed, but here fine feathers did not make a fine

bird. Her Ladyship sent her a message not to come again, as she was not

entitled to attend the assemblies. Her justice was even-handed. She

noted her nephew, the Earl of Cassillis, did not seem altogether right

one evening. “You have sat too late after dinner to be proper company

for ladies,” quoth she; she then led him to the door, and calling out,

“My Lord Cassillis’s chair!” wished him “good-night.” Perhaps my Lord

betook himself to the neighbouring Covenant Close, where there was a

famed oyster-seller commemorated by Scott, who knew its merits. Was it

on this account or because the Covenant had lain for signature there

that Sir Walter made it the abode of Nanty Ewart when he studied

divinity at Edinburgh with disastrous results? Unfortunate Covenant

Close! The last time I peered through a locked gate on its grimy ways I

found it used for the brooms and barrows of the city scavengers. But to

resume.

The dancing in the Assembly Room was hedged about with various rites

that made it a solemn function. When a lady was assigned to a gallant he

needs must present her with an orange. To “lift the lady” meant to ask

her to dance. The word was not altogether fortunate; it is the technical

term still used in the north to signify that the corpse has begun its

procession from the house to the grave. “It’s lifted,” whispers the

undertaker’s man to the mourners, as he beckons them to follow. Another

quaint custom was to “save the ladies” by drinking vast quantities of

hot punch to their health or in their honour. If they were not thus

“saved” they were said to be “damned.”

There are as racy stories of folk not so well known, and not so exalted.

Mrs. Dundas lived on Bunker’s Hill (hard by where the Register House now

stands). One of her daughters read from a newspaper to her as to some

lady whose reputation was damaged by the indiscreet talk of the Prince

of Wales. “Oh,” said old fourscore with an indignant shake of her

shrivelled fist and a tone of cutting contempt, “the dawmed villain!

Does he kiss and tell?”

This is quaint enough. Miss Mamie Trotter, of the Mortonhall family,

dreamt she was in heaven, and describes her far from edifying

experience. “And what d’ye think I saw there? De’il ha’it but thousands

upon thousands, and ten thousands upon ten thousands o’ stark naked

weans! That wad be a dreadfu’ thing, for ye ken I ne’er could bide

bairns a’ my days!”

[Illustration: CAROLINE, BARONESS NAIRNE,

From a Lithograph]

“Come away, Bailie, and take a trick at the cairds,” Mrs. Telfer of St.

John Street, Canongate, and sister of Smollett, would exclaim to a

worthy magistrate and tallow chandler who paid her an evening visit.

“Troth, madam, I hae nae siller.” “Then let us play for a p’und of

can’le,” rejoined the gamesome Telfer.

On the other side of the Canongate, in New Street, there lived Christina

Ramsay, a daughter of Allan Ramsay. She was eighty-eight before she

died. If she wrote no songs she inherited, at any rate, her father’s

kindly nature; she was the friend of all animals, she used to

remonstrate with the carters when they ill-treated their horses, and

send out rolls to be given to the poor overburdened beasts that toiled

up the steep street. But she specially favoured cats. She kept a huge

number cosily stowed away in band-boxes, and put out food for others

round about her house; she would not even permit them to be spoken

against, any alleged bad deed of a cat she avowed must have been done

under provocation.

Here are two marriage stories. Dugald Stewart’s second wife was Ellen

D’Arcy Cranstoun, daughter of the Hon. George Cranstoun, and sister of

Lord Corehouse. She had written a poem, which her cousin, the Earl of

Lothian, had shown to the philosopher who was then his tutor. The

criticism was of a highly flattering nature. The professor fell in love

with the poetess, and she loved him for his eulogy; they were married,

and no union ever turned out better. The other is earlier and baser. In

November 1731 William Crawford, the elderly janitor of the High School,

proposed to marry a lady very much his junior. He and his friends

arrived at the church. She did not turn up, but there was a letter from

her. “William you must know I am pre-engaged I never could like a burnt

cuttie I have now by the hand my sensie menseful strapper, with whom I

intend to pass my youthful days. You know old age and youth cannot agree

together. I must then be excused if I tell you I am not your humble

servant.” Crawford took his rebuff quite coolly. “Let us at least,” said

he to his friends, “keep the feast as a feast-day. Let us go drink and

drive care away. May never a greater misfortune attend any man.” An

assemblage numerous, if not choice, graced the banquet; they got up a

subscription among themselves of one hundred marks and presented it to

Crawford, “with which he was as well satisfied as he who got madam.”

From all those clever and witty people it is almost a relief to turn to

some anecdotes of sheer stupidity. Why John Home the poet married Miss

Logan, who was not clever or handsome or rich, was a problem to his

friends. Hume asked him point-blank. “Ah, David, if I had not who else

would have taken her?” was his comic defence. Sir Adam Fergusson told

the aged couple of the Peace of Amiens. “Will it mak’ ony difference in

the price o’ nitmugs?” said Mrs. Home, who meant nutmegs, if indeed she

meant anything at all.

Jean, sister-in-law to Archibald Constable the publisher, had been

educated in France and hesitated to admit that she had forgotten the

language, and would translate coals “collier” and table napkin “table

napkune,” to the amazement and amusement of her hearers. Her ideas

towards the close got a little mixed. “If I should be spared to be taken

away,” she remarked, “I hope my nephew will get the doctor to open my

head and see if anything can be done for my hearing.” This is a

masterpiece of its kind, and perhaps too good to be perfectly true. She

played well; “gars the instrument speak,” it was said. There was one

touch of romance in her life. A French admirer had given her a box of

bonbons, wherein she found “a puzzle ring of gold, divided yet united,”

and with their joint initials. She never saw or heard from her lover,

yet she called for it many times in her last illness. It was a better

way of showing her constancy than that taken by Lady Betty Charteris, of

the Wemyss family. Disappointed in love, she took to her bed, where she

lay for twenty-six years, to the time of her death, in fact. This was in

St. John Street in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The stage was without much influence in Edinburgh save on rare

occasions. One of them was when Sarah Siddons was in Edinburgh in 1784.

Her first appearance was on the 22nd May of that year, when she scored a

success as Belvedere in _Venice Preserved_. The audience listened in

profound silence, and the lady, used to more enthusiasm, got a little

nervous, till a canny citizen was moved audibly to admit, “That’s no

bad.” A roar of applause followed that almost literally brought down the

galleries. She played Lady Randolph in _Douglas_ twice; “there was not a

dry eye in the whole house,” observed the contemporary _Courant_.

Shakespeare was not acted during her visit; the folk of the time were

daring enough to consider him just so-so after Home! Everybody was mad

to hear her. At any rate, the General Assembly of the Church was

deserted until its meetings were arranged not to clash with her

appearance. There were applications for 2550 places where there were

only 630 of that description on hand. The gallery doors were guarded by

detachments of soldiers with drawn bayonets, which they are said to have

used to some purpose on an all too insistent crowd. Her tragedy manner

was more than skin deep, she could never shake it off; she talked in

blank verse. Scott used to tell how, during a dinner at Ashestiel, she

made an attendant shake with—

“You’ve brought me water, boy—I asked for beer.”

Once in Edinburgh she dined with the Homes, and in her most tragic tones

asked for a “little porter.” John, the old servant-man, took her only

too literally; he reappeared, lugging in a diminutive though stout

Highland caddie, remarking, “I’ve found ane, mem; he’s the least I could

get.” Even Sarah needs must laugh, though Mrs. Home, we are assured, on

the authority of Robert Chambers, never saw the joke.

Another time Mrs. Siddons dined with the Lord Provost, who apologised

for the seasoning.

“Beef cannot be too salt for me, my Lord,”

was the solemn response of the tragic muse.

Such tones once heard were not to be forgotten. A servant-lass, by

patience or audacity, had got into the theatre and was much affected by

the performance. Next day, as she went about the High Street, intent on

domestic business, the deep notes of the inimitable Siddons rang in her

ears; she dropped her basket in uncontrollable agitation and burst

forth, “Eh, sirs, weel do I ken the sweet voice (“vice,” she would say,

in the dulcet dialect of the capital) that garred me greet sae sair

yestre’n.”

After all, Mrs. Siddons does not belong to Edinburgh, though I take her

on the wing, as it were, and here also I take leave both of her and the

subject.

[Illustration: MRS. SIDDONS AS “THE TRAGIC MUSE”,

From an Engraving after Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.]

CHAPTER TEN

THE SUPERNATURAL

Perhaps the sharpest contrast between old Scotland and the Scotland of

to-day is the decline of belief in the supernatural. Superstitions of

lucky and unlucky things and days and seasons still linger in the south,

nay, the byways of London are rich in a peculiar kind of folklore which

no one thinks it worth while to harvest. A certain dry scepticism

prevails in Scotland, even in the remote country districts; perhaps it

is the spread of education or the hard practical nature of the folk

which is, for the time, uppermost; or is it the result of a violent

reaction? In former days it was far other. Before the Reformation the

Scot accepted the Catholic faith as did the other nations of Europe. And

there was the usual monastic legend, to which, as far as it concerns

Edinburgh, I make elsewhere sufficient reference. Between the

Reformation and the end of the eighteenth century, or even later, the

supernatural had a stronger grip on the Scots than on any other race in

Europe. The unseen world beckoned and made its presence known by

continual signs; portents and omens were of daily occurrence; men like

Peden, the prophet, read the book of the future, every Covenanter lived

a spiritual life whose interest far exceeded that of the material life

present to his senses. As a natural result of hard conditions of

existence, a sombre temperament, and a gloomy creed, the portents were

ever of disaster. The unseen was full of hostile forces. The striking

mottoes, that still remain on some of the Edinburgh houses, were meant

to ward off evil. The law reports are full of the trials and cruel

punishment of wizards and witches, malevolent spirits bent on man’s

destruction were ever on the alert, ghostly appearances hinted at crime

and suffering; more than all, there was the active personality of Satan

himself, one, yet omnipresent, fighting a continual and, for the time,

successful war against the saints. Burns, whose genius preserves for us

in many a graphic touch that old Scotland which even in his time was

fast fading away, pictures, half mirthful, yet not altogether sceptical,

the enemy of mankind:

“Great is thy pow’r an’ great thy fame;

Far ken’d an’ noted is thy name;

An’ tho’ yon lowin’ heuch’s thy hame,

Thou travels far.

An’ faith! thou’s neither lag nor lame,

Nor blate nor scaur.”

[Illustration: JAMES IV.,

From an old Engraving]

And now for some illustrations. After the monkish legends, one of the

earliest, as it is the most famous, story of all is the appearance of

the ghostly heralds in the dead of night at the Cross in Edinburgh,

before the battle of Flodden, and the summons by them of the most

eminent Scotsmen of the day, including King James himself, to appear

before Pluto, Lord of the netherworld. A certain gentleman, Mr. Richard

Lawson, lay that night in his house in the High Street. He was to follow

the King southward, but his heart was heavy with the thought of

impending evil; he could not sleep, and roamed up and down the open

wooden gallery, which was then so marked a feature on the first floor of

Edinburgh houses. It was just in front of the Cross. He saw the dread

apparition, he heard his own name amongst the list of those summoned.

Loudly, he refused obedience, and protested, and appealed to God and

Christ. Lindsay of Pitscottie, whose chronicles preserve many a

picturesque tale of old Scotland, had this story at first hand from

Lawson himself, who assured him that of all those mentioned he alone had

escaped. It is scarce necessary to remind the reader how admirably Scott

has told this story in the fifth canto of _Marmion_. The Cross was the

chief place from which a summons must issue to the absent, and the

heralds were the persons to make it. The appeal and protest by Mr.

Richard Lawson were also quite in order. And there is the figure of St.

John the Apostle which appeared in St. Michael’s Church at Linlithgow to

warn James IV. from his projected expedition. Again Scott has told this

in the fourth canto of _Marmion_. It has been suggested that neither

legend is mere fancy, that both were elaborate devices got up by the

peace party to frighten James. This may be true of the Linlithgow

apparition, but it does not reasonably account for the other.

It strikes you at first as odd that there are no ghost stories about

Holyrood, but there is a substantial reason. These would mar the effect,

the illustrious dead with their profoundly tragic histories leave no

room for other interest. The annals of the Castle are not quite barren.

Here be samples at any rate. It was the reign of Robert III., and the

dawn of the fifteenth century. The Duke of Albany, the King’s brother,

was pacing, with some adherents, the ramparts of the Castle when a

bright meteor flared across the sky. Albany seemed much impressed, and

announced that this portended some calamity as the end of a mighty

Prince in the near future. Albany was already engaged in plots which

resulted, in March 1402, in the imprisonment and death by famine of his

nephew, David, Duke of Rothesay, so it may be said that he only

prophesied because he knew. However, the age believed in astrology; held

as indisputable that the stars influenced man’s life, and that every

sign in the firmament had a meaning for those who watched. Not seldom

were battles seen in the skies portending disasters to come. As you con

over the troubled centuries of old Scots history, it seems that disaster

always did come, there was nothing but wars and sieges, and red ruin and

wasting.

Before the death of James V. dread warnings from the other world were

conveyed to him. Sir James Hamilton, who had been beheaded, appeared

with a drawn sword in his hand, and struck both the King’s arms off.

Certain portents preceded the murder of Darnley. Some of his friends

dreamed he was in mortal danger, and received ghostly admonition to

carry help to him. It is easy to rationalise those stories. Many were

concerned in the murder, and it is not to be supposed that they all kept

quite discreet tongues.

Again, the following picturesque legend is exactly such as a troubled

time would evolve. After the coronation of Charles II. at Scone,

Cromwell marched towards Scotland. The Castle was put in order under

Colonel Walter Dundas. As the sentinel paced his rounds one gloomy night

he heard the beat of a drum from the esplanade, and the steady tramp of

a great host; he fired his musket to give the alarm, and the Governor

hurried to the scene, but there was nothing. The sentinel was punished

and replaced, but the same thing happened, till in the end Dundas

mounted guard himself. He hears the phantom drummer beating a weird

measure, then there is the tramp of innumerable feet and the clank of

armour. A mighty host, audible yet invisible, passes by, and the sound

of their motion dies gradually away. What could these things mean but

wars and rumours of wars? And there followed in quick succession Dunbar

and Worcester, commemorated with the victor in a high passage of English

literature:

“While Derwen stream, with blood of Scots imbued,

And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud

And Worcester’s laureat wreath,”

but then Milton was the laureate of the other side, and his view was not

that of the Scots.

Time passes on, and brings not merely the Restoration, but the

Revolution; the Castle is true to the old cause under the Duke of

Gordon, yet it gives in finally and becomes a hold for Jacobite

prisoners, among whom was Lord Balcarres. On the night of the 27th of

July 1689, a hand drew aside the curtains of the bed, and there was

Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, gazing at his startled friend.

Balcarres addressed the vision, but received no answer. The figure

looked steadfastly upon the captive, moved towards the mantelpiece, and

finally disappeared from the room, At that very hour, Dundee was lying

dead at Killiecrankie, the most splendid and most useless of victories.

The silver bullet had found its billet. The Covenanters were absolutely

convinced that the persecutors were in direct league with Satan, who

protected them to the utmost of his power. How else to explain their

charmed lives, when so many hungered and thirsted after their death? How

else to account for that reckless courage that provoked whilst it

avoided the mortal stroke? What the object of those legends thought of

them, we cannot tell, perhaps they were flattered. Dundee could turn his

horse on the slope of a hill like a precipice, and his courage—but then

courage was so cheap a commodity in old Scotland that only when it

failed was there cause for wonder and contemptuous comment. However, the

silver bullet was proof against enchantment, and Dundee ended as surely

himself had wished. Legends gathered about a much grimmer figure, the

very grimmest figure of all, Sir Thomas Dalzell of Binns. The long

beard, the truculent, cruel visage, the martial figure, trained in the

Muscovite service, well made up the man who never knew pity. Is it not

told that he bent forward from his seat in the Privy Council, at a

meeting in 1681, to strike with clenched fist the accused that was there

for examination? “Is there none other hangman in the toun but yourself?”

retorted the undaunted prisoner. Dalzell had the gift of devoted

loyalty, no razor had touched his face since the death of Charles I. The

legends about him are in character. At Rullion Green the Covenanters

feeling their cause lost ere the battle was fought, noted with dismay

that Dalzell was proof against all their shot. The bullets hopped back

from his huge boots as hail from an iron wall. Ah, those terrible boots!

if you filled them with water it seethed and boiled on the instant.

Certain sceptics declare, by the way, he never wore boots at all! Did he

spit on the ground, a hole was forthwith burnt in the earth. And yet,

strange malice of fate, Sir Thomas died peaceably in his bed, even

though his last hours were rumoured as anguished.

I pick up one or two memories of the supernatural from the closes and

ways of old Edinburgh. The “sanctified bends” of the Bow are long

vanished, and to-day nothing is more commonplace than the steps and the

street that bears that memorable name. Its most famous inhabitant was no

saint, except in appearance, for here abode Major Weir. From here he was

hauled to prison in 1670, and thence to his doom at the Gallow Lee. “The

warlock that was burned,” says “Wandering Willie” of him. The legend is

too well known for detailed description. Here he lived long in the odour

of sanctity, and finally, struck by conscience, revealed unmentionable

crimes. This story had a peculiar fascination, both for Sir Walter Scott

and R.L.S., both Edinburgh men, both masters of Scots romance, and they

have dwelt lovingly on the strange details. The staff which used to run

the Major’s errands, which acted as a link-boy to him o’ dark nights,

which answered the door for him, on which he leaned when he prayed, and

yet whereon were carved the grinning heads of Satyrs, only visible,

however, on close inspection, and after the downfall of its master, was

sure the strangest magic property ever wizard possessed. Its “rare

turnings” in the fire wherein it was consumed, along with its master,

were carefully noted. Long after strange sights were seen around his

house. At midnight the Major would issue from the door, mount a fiery

steed, which only wanted the head, and vanish in a whirlwind. His

sister, Grizel Weir, who ended as a witch, span miraculous quantities of

yarn. Perhaps this accounted for the sound as of a spinning-wheel that

echoed through the deserted house for more than a century afterwards;

but how to explain the sound as of dancing, and again as of wailing and

howling, and that unearthly light wherewith the eerie place was flooded?

How to explain, indeed! The populace had no difficulty, it was the

Devil!

It would seem that Satan had an unaccountable and, one might say, a

perverse fancy for the West Bow, abode of the righteous as it was. There

are distinct traces of him there in the early part of November 1707. At

that time a certain Mr. John Strahan, W.S., was owner of Craigcrook on

Corstorphine Hill, the house that was to become a literary centre under

Lord Jeffrey. He had left his town mansion under the care of a young

servant-girl called Ellen Bell. On Halloween night, still a popular

festival in Scotland, she had entertained two sweethearts of hers called

Thomson and Robertson. She told them she was going to Craigcrook on the

second morning thereafter, so they arranged to meet her and convoy her

part of the way. At five o’clock on the Monday morning, behold the three

together in the silent streets of the capital. The two youths politely

relieved the girl of the key of the house and some other things she was

carrying, and then, at the three steps at the foot of the Castle rock,

they suddenly threw themselves upon her and beat the life out. They then

returned to rob the house; probably they had gone further than they

intended in committing murder. They were panic-stricken at what they had

done, and each swore that if he informed against the other he was to be

devoted, body and soul, to the Devil. It were better, quoth one, to put

the matter in writing in a bond. “Surely,” echoed a suave voice, and by

their side they found an agreeable smiling gentleman of most obliging

disposition, who offered to write out the bond for them, and suggested

as the most suitable fluid for signature their own blood. The story does

not tell whether the two noticed anything remarkable about their

courteous friend, something not quite normal about the foot, possibly a

gentle hint of a tail. At any rate, they received the advances of the

stranger in anything but an affable spirit, so presently found

themselves alone. Mr. Strahan seems to have been a wealthy gentleman,

for there was £1000 in his abode (sterling, be it observed, not Scots),

with which the robbers made off. Robertson suggested the firing of the

house, but this Thomson would not allow. Mr. Strahan advertised a

substantial reward for the discovery of the criminals, but nothing was

heard for a long time. If we are to believe Wodrow in his agreeable

_Analecta_ it required the supernatural intervention of Providence to

unravel the mystery. Twelve months after, Lady Craigcrook (so Mrs.

Strahan was known, by the courtesy of the time) had a strange dream. She

saw Robertson, who had once been in her service, murder Ellen Bell, rob

the house, and conceal the money in two old barrels under some rubbish.

A search followed, unmistakable evidences of the robbery were found in

Thomson’s possession. He confessed his guilt, and after the usual

formalities made what might almost be called the conventional exit at

the Grassmarket. We are not told whether he was favoured with another

visit from his courteous old friend of the West Bow. The Scots criminal,

like all his countrymen, had abundant courage; he was ready to “dree his

weird,” or, in the popular language of our day, “face the music” with a

certain stoical philosophy, but he almost invariably did so in a pious

and orthodox frame of mind. Nothing could show more strongly the depth

and strength of the popular belief than the frequency with which both

persecutor and criminal turned at the end with whole-hearted conviction

to the creed of the people. There is nothing in Scotland of those jovial

exits which highwaymen like Duval and Sixteen-String Jack made at Tyburn

tree, unless we count M‘Pherson an exception. He was hanged at Banff in

1700. For the last time he played the tune called M‘Pherson’s Rant on

his fiddle, and we know how excellently Burns has written his epitaph;

but he was only a wild Hielandman, so the contemporary Lowlander would

have observed.

The West Bow runs off southward just where the Castle Hill joins the

Lawnmarket. On the north side of the Lawnmarket a little way down there

still stands Lady Stair’s Close and in it Lady Stair’s house, and about

the same time, that is, the early years of the eighteenth century, there

happened to Lady Stair, or Lady Primrose, as she then was, certain

miraculous events which constitute the most romantic tradition of the

Old Town. Scott has written a charming novelette, _My Aunt Margaret’s

Mirror_, on the theme, and I can only present it here in the briefest

possible fashion. Lord Primrose, the lady’s first husband, was, it would

appear, mad, at any rate, he tried to kill his wife, in the which

failing he left Auld Reekie and went abroad. As she wondered and

speculated what had become of him, she heard a gossiping rumour of an

Italian sorcerer possessed of strange power then in Edinburgh. He had a

magic mirror wherein he could show what any absent person was doing at

that precise moment. Lady Stair and her friend presently procured what

we should call a séance. The magician dwelt in a dark recess of some

obscure Canongate close, at least we must suppose so in order to get

sufficient perspective, for all those localities in Edinburgh were so

terribly near to one another. From Lady Stair’s Close to the Canongate

is but a few minutes’ leisurely promenade. After certain preliminary

rites the lady gazed in the magic mirror: it showed forth a bridal, and

the bridegroom was her own husband; the service went on some way, and

then it was interrupted by a person whom she recognised as her own

brother. Presently the figures vanished, and the curtain fell. The lady

took an exact note of the time and circumstances, and when her brother

returned from abroad she eagerly questioned him. It was all true: the

church was in Rotterdam, and her husband was about to commit the

unromantic offence of bigamy with the daughter of a rich merchant when

“the long arm of coincidence” led the brother to the church just in

time. “Excursions and alarums” of an exciting nature at once ensued, but

neither these nor the rest of the lady’s life, though that was

remarkable enough, concern us here.

A little way farther down the street, as it nears the western wall of

the Municipal Buildings, otherwise the Royal Exchange, there stood Mary

King’s Close. I cannot, nor can anybody, it seems, tell who Mary King

was. We have a picture of the close, or what remained of it in 1845;

then the houses were vacant and roofless, the walls ruined, mere

crumbling heaps of stones—weeds, wallflowers rankly flourishing in

every crevice, for as yet the improver was only fitfully in the land. As

far back as 1750 a fire had damaged the south or upper part of the

close, which disappeared in the Royal Exchange. The place had been one

of the spots peculiarly affected by the great plague of 1645; the houses

were then shut up, and it was feared that if they were opened the pest

would stalk forth again, but popular fancy soon peopled the close. If

you lusted after a tremor of delicious horror you had but to step down

its gloomy ways any night after dark and gaze through one of the

windows. You saw a whole family dressed in the garb of a hundred years

earlier and of undeniable ghost-like appearance quietly engaged in their

ordinary avocations; then all of a sudden these vanished, and you spied

a company “linking” it through the mazes of the dance, but not a

mother’s son or daughter of them but wanted his or her head. In the

close itself you might see in the air above you a raw head or an arm

dripping blood. Such and other strange sights are preserved for us in

_Satan’s Invisible World Displayed_ which was published in 1685 by

Professor George Sinclair of Glasgow, afterwards minister of Eastwood.

He tells us wondrous tales of the adventures in this close of Thomas

Coltheart and his spouse. After their entry on the premises there

appeared a human head with a grey floating beard suspended in mid air,

to this was added the phantom of a child, and then an arm, naked from

the elbow and totally unattached, which made desperate but unsuccessful

efforts to shake Mrs. Coltheart by the hand. Mr. Coltheart, in the most

orthodox fashion, begged from the ghosts an account of their wrongs,

that he might speedily procure justice for them; but in defiance of all

precedent they were obstinately silent, yet they grew in number—there

came a dog and a cat, and a number of strange and grotesque beings, for

whom natural history has no names. The flesh-and-blood inhabitants of

the room were driven to kneel on the bed as being the only place left

unoccupied. Finally, with a heart-moving groan, the appearances

vanished, and Mr. Coltheart was permitted to enjoy his house in peace

till the day of his death, but then he must himself begin to play

spectre. He appeared to a friend at Tranent, ten miles off, and when the

trembling friend demanded, “Are you dead? and if so, why come you?” the

ghost, who was unmistakably umquhile Coltheart, shook its head twice and

vanished without remark. The friend proceeded at once to Edinburgh and

(of course) discovered that Mr. Coltheart had just expired. The fact of

the apparition was never doubted, but the why and the wherefore no man

could discover, only the house was again left vacant. In truth, the

ghost must have been rather a trouble to Edinburgh landlords; it was

easy for a story to arise, and immediately it arose the house was

deserted. An old soldier and his wife were persuaded to take up their

abode there, but the very first night the candle burned blue, and the

head, without the body, though with wicked, selfish eyes, was present,

suspended in mid air, and the inmates fled and Mary King’s Close was

given over as an entirely bad business. After all, the old soldier was

not very venturesome, no more so than another veteran, William Patullo

by name, who was induced to take Major Weir’s mansion. He was

effectually frightened by a beast somewhat like a calf which came and

looked at him and his spouse as they lay in bed and then vanished, as

did the prospective tenants forthwith. It was not the age of insurance

companies, else had there been a special clause against spooks!

One is able to smile at some of those stories because there is a

distinctly comic touch about them. No one was the better or the worse

for those quaint visions of the other world, except the landlords who

mourned for the empty houses, against the which we must put the delight

of the “groundlings” whose ears were delicately “tickled”; but the

witches are quite another matter. Old Scots life was ugly in many

respects, in none more so than in the hideous cruelties practised on

hundreds of helpless old women, and sometimes on men, but to a much less

extent. Some half-century ago the scientific world looked on tales of

witchcraft as mere delusion, even though then the chief facts of

mesmerism were known and noted. But phenomena which we now call

“hypnotism” and “suggestion” are accepted to-day as facts of life, they

are thought worthy of scientific treatment, and we now see that they

explain many phenomena of witchcraft. Three hundred years ago everything

was ascribed to Satan, and fiendish tortures were considered the due of

his supposed children. A detailed examination is undesirable. What are

we to learn, for instance, from the story of the Broughton witches who

were burned alive, who, in the extremity of torture, renounced their

Maker and cursed their fellow-men? Some escaped half burned from the

flames and rushed away screaming in their agony, but they were pursued,

seized, and thrown back into the fire, which, more merciful than their

kind, at length terminated their life and suffering together. The

leading case in Scotland was that of the North Berwick witches; it

properly comes within our province, insomuch as James VI. personally

investigated the whole matter at Holyrood. James was the author of a

treatise on witchcraft, and was vastly proud of his gift as a

witch-finder. The story begins with a certain Jeillie Duncan, a

servant-girl at Tranent; she made so many cures that she was presently

suspected of witchcraft. She was treated to orthodox modes of torture;

her fingers were pinched with the pilliwinks, her forehead was wrenched

with a rope, but she would say nothing until the Devil’s mark was found

on her throat, when she gave in and confessed herself a servant of

Satan. Presently there was no end to her confessions! She accused all

the old women in the neighbourhood, especially Agnes Sampson “the eldest

witch of them all resident in Haddington,” and one man, “Dr. Fian alias

John Cunningham, Master of the Schoole at Saltpans in Lowthian.” Agnes

Sampson was taken to Holyrood for personal examination by the King. At

first she was obdurate, but after the usual tortures she developed a

story of the most extraordinary description. She told how she was one of

two hundred witches who sailed over the sea in riddles or sieves, with

flagons of wine, to the old kirk of North Berwick. Jeillie Duncan

preceded them to the kirk dancing and playing on the jews’ harp,

chanting the while a mad rhyme. Nothing would serve the King but to have

Jeillie brought before him. She played a solo accompaniment the while

Agnes Sampson went on with her story. She described how the Devil

appeared in the kirk, and preached a wretched sermon, mixed with obscene

rites and loaded with much abuse of the King of Scotland, “at which time

the witches demanded of the Devill why he did beare such hatred to the

King?” who answered, “by reason the King is the greatest enemie hee hath

in the world.” Solomon listened with mouth and ears agape, and eyes

sticking out of his head in delighted horror, yet even for him the

flattery was a little too gross or the wonders were too astounding.

“They were all extreame lyears,” he roundly declared. But Agnes was

equal to the occasion. She took His Highness aside, and told him the

“verie wordes which passed betweene the Kinges majestie and his queene

at Upslo in Norway, the first night of mariage, with there answere ech

to other, wherat the Kinges majestie wondered greatly and swore by the

living God that he believed that all the devils in hell could not have

discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and

therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.”

Thus encouraged she proceeded to stuff James with a choice assortment of

ridiculous details; sometimes fear had the better of her and she

flattered him, then possibly rage filled her heart and she terrorised

him. For her and her “kommers” there was presently the same end. The

King then moved on to Dr. Fian’s case, and he, after a certain amount of

torture, began his extraordinary confessions, which, like his sisters in

misfortune, he embroidered with fantastic details. Here is one incident.

The doctor was enamoured of a young lady, a sister of a pupil. To obtain

her affection he persuaded the boy to bring him three of his sister’s

hairs. The boy’s mother was herself a witch, and thus trumped _his_

cards. She “went to a young heyfer which never had borne calfe,” took

three hairs from it, and sent them to Fian. He practised his

incantations with surprising result. “The heyfer presently appeared

leaping and dancing,” following the doctor about and lavishing upon him

the most grotesque marks of affection.

There is a curious little story of Balzac’s _Une passion dans le desert_

which recalls in an odd way this strange Scots episode, whereof it is

highly improbable Balzac ever heard. Fian, it seems, had acted as

registrar to the Devil in the North Berwick kirk proceedings. With it

all he might possibly have escaped, but having stolen the key of his

prison he fled away by night to the Saltpans. The King felt himself

defrauded, and he soon had the doctor again in safe keeping. He felt

himself still more defrauded when Fian not merely refused to continue

his revelations, but denied those he had already made, and then “a most

straunge torment” was ordered him. All his nails were torn off, one

after another, with a pair of pincers, then under every nail there was

thrust in, two needles up to the heads. He remained obdurate. He was

then subjected to the torture of the “bootes,” “wherein hee continued a

long time and did abide so many blowes in them that his legges were

crusht and beaten together as small as might bee, and the bones and

flesh so bruised that the blood and marrow spouted forth in great

abundance, whereby they were made unserviceable forever.” He still

continued stubborn, and finally was put into a cart, taken to the Castle

Hill, strangled and thrown into a great fire. This was in January 1591.

In trying to bring up the past before us it is necessary to face such

facts, and to remember that James VI. was, with it all, not a cruel or

unkindly man.

I gladly turn to a lighter page. The grimy ways of Leith do not suggest

Fairy land, but two quaint legends of other days are associated

therewith. In front of the old battery, where are now the new docks,

there stood a half-submerged rock which was removed in the course of

harbour operations. This was the abode of a demon named Shellycoat, from

the make of his garments, which you gather were of the most approved

Persian attire. He was a malevolent spirit of great power, a terror to

the urchins of old Leith, and perhaps even to their elders, but like

“the dreaded name of Demogorgon” his reputation was the worst of him. If

he wrought any definite evil, time has obliterated the memory. When his

rock was blasted, poor Shellycoat was routed out, and fled to return no

more.

The other legend is of the fairy boy of Leith who o’ Thursday nights

beat the drum to the fairies in the Calton Hill. Admission thereto was

obtained by a pair of great gates, which opened to them, though they

were invisible to others. The fairies, said the boy, “are entertained

with many sorts of music besides my drum; they have besides plenty of

variety of meats and wine, and many times we are carried into France or

Holland in a night and return again, and whilst we are there we enjoy

all the pleasures the country doth afford.” The fairy boy must at least

be credited with a very vivid imagination. His questioner trysted him

for next Thursday night: the youth duly turned up, apparently got what

money he could, but towards midnight unaccountably disappeared and was

seen no more. When people were so eager to discover the supernatural,

one cannot wonder that they succeeded. In 1702, Mr. David Williamson was

preaching in his own church in Edinburgh when a “rottan” (rat) appeared

and sat down on his Bible. This made him stop, and after a little pause

he told the congregation that this was a message of God to him. He broke

off his sermon and took a formal farewell of his people and went home

and continued sick. This was the time of the Union of the Kingdoms, and

two years later, that is, in 1707, a mighty shoal of whales invaded the

Firth of Forth, “roaring, plunging, and threshing upon one another to

the great terror of all who heard the same.” Thirty-five of them

foundered on the sands of Kirkcaldy, where they made a yet “more

dreadful roaring and tossing, when they found themselves aground so much

that the earth trembled. What the unusual appearance of so great a

number of them at this juncture may portend, shall not be our business

to inquire.” The chronicler is convinced that there must be some deep

connection between such portentous events as the Union of the Crowns and

the appearance of the whales, though with true scientific caution he

does not think it proper to further riddle out the matter!

[Illustration: A BEDESMAN, OR BLUEGOWN,

From a Sketch by Monro S. Orr]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE STREETS

I collect here a few anecdotes of life on the streets, and among the

people of old Edinburgh. The ancient Scots lived very sparely, yet

sumptuary laws were passed, not to enable them to fare better, but to

keep them down to a low standard. The English were judged mere gluttons;

“pock puddings” the frugal Caledonian deemed them. It was thought the

Southern gentlemen whom James I. and his Queen brought into Scotland

introduced a sumptuous mode of living. In 1533, the Bishop of St.

Andrews raged in the pulpit against the wasteful luxury of later years.

A law was presently passed, fixing how each order should live, and

prohibiting the use of pies and other baked meats to all below the rank

of baron. In fashionable circles there were four meals a day, breakfast,

dinner, supper, and livery, which last was a kind of collation taken in

the bedchamber, before retiring to rest. A century ago it was usual to

furnish the bedroom with liquor, which, perhaps, was a reminiscence of

this old-world meal. The time for breakfast was seven, then came dinner

at ten, supper at four, and livery between eight and nine. This detail

is only of the well-off minority. Legislators need not have alarmed

themselves, grinding poverty was the predominant note of old Scots life.

Pestilence swept the land from time to time—one cause was imperfect

sanitation; a stronger was sheer lack of food.

Here is James Melville’s account of plague-torn Edinburgh in November

1585:—“On the morn we made haste and coming to Losterrick (Restalrig)

disjoined, and about eleven hours came riding in at the Water-gate up

through the Canongate, and rode in at the Nether Bow through the great

street of Edinburgh, _in all whilk way we saw not three persons_, sae

that I miskenned Edinburgh, and almost forgot that I had ever seen sic a

town.”

One effect of poverty was innumerable beggars. Naturally they thronged

Edinburgh, where they made themselves a well-nigh intolerable nuisance.

The Privy Council formulated edicts against “the strang and idle

vagabonds” who lay all day on the causeway of the Canongate, and bullied

the passers-by into giving them alms. Perhaps it was to regulate an

abuse which could not be entirely checked, that the King’s bedesmen, or

Bluegowns, as they were called, from their dress, were established or

re-formed as licensed beggars. These assembled yearly on the King’s

birthday to receive an annual dole of bread and ale and blue gown, and

to hear service in St. Giles’. More welcome than all was the gift of a

penny for every year of the King’s reign, which was given in a leather

purse. The place was the north side of the Tolbooth, hence called “The

Puir Folks’ Purses,” or more briefly, “The Purses.” The scene was

afterwards transferred to the Canongate Church, and then it was done

away with altogether. The analogous Maundy money is still distributed

annually at Westminster Abbey. The classic example of this picturesque

figure of old Scots life is Edie Ochiltree in _The Antiquary_, but in

Scott’s time Bluegowns still adorned Edinburgh streets; hence the

following anecdote. Scott, as he went to and fro from college, was in

the habit of giving alms to one of those gentlemen. It turned out that

he kept a son Willy, as a divinity student at college, and he made bold

to ask Scott to share a humble meal with them in their cottage at St.

Leonards, at the base of Arthur’s Seat. “Please God I may live to see my

bairn wag his head in a pulpit yet.” At the time appointed Scott partook

of the meal with father and son, the latter at first not unnaturally a

little shamefaced. The fare was simple, but of the very best; there was

a “gigot” of mutton, potatoes, and whisky. “Dinna speak to your father

about it,” said Mrs. Scott to Walter; “if it had been a shoulder he

might have thought less, but he will say that gigot was a sin.” The old

Edinburgh beggars were no doubt a droll lot, though particulars of their

pranks are sadly lacking. When Sir Richard Steele, known to his

familiars as Dickie Steele, was in Edinburgh in 1718, he collected the

oldest and oddest of them to some obscure “howf” in Lady Stair’s Close;

he feasted them to their heart’s content and avowed “he found enough

native drollery to compose a comedy.” Well, he didn’t, but the same

century was to give us a greater than Steele and—_The Jolly Beggars!_

The folk of old Edinburgh were used to scenes of bloodshed—I tell

elsewhere the story of “Cleanse the Causey,” as the historic street

fight between the Douglases and the Hamiltons was called. It was almost

a matter of necessity that men should go armed. Wild dissipation was a

common incident, passions were high, and people did not hold either

their own lives or those of others at any great rate. Here is a story

from 1650, when the English were in occupation of Edinburgh, and so for

the time the predominant party. An English officer had a squabble with

some natives; he mounted his horse and said to them disdainfully, “With

my own hands I killed that Scot which ought this horse and this case of

pistols and who dare say that in this I wronged him?” He paid bitterly

for his rashness. “I dare say it,” said one of his audience, “and thus

shall avenge it.” He stabbed him with a sword right through the body so

that he fell dead. The Scot threw himself into the vacant saddle, dashed

over the stones to the nearest Port, and was lost for ever to pursuit.

The measures against those acts of violence were ludicrously

ineffectual. In the houses the firearms were chained down lest they

should be used in accidental affrays; but the streets were not policed

at all, and gentlemen did much as they liked. It is told of Hugh

Somerville of Drum, who died in 1640, that he went one day to St. Giles’

with Lady Ross, his sister-in-law. A gentleman happened by chance, it

would seem, to push against him, there was a scuffle and Somerville had

his dagger out on the instant, and would have stuck it into the intruder

had not Lady Ross seized and held him; the while she begged the stranger

to go away. A duel was like to ensue, but in cold blood the affair no

doubt seemed ridiculous, and was made up. Quarrels about equally small

matters often led to duels. In January 1708, two friends, young Baird of

Saughtonhall and Robert Oswald, were drinking in a tavern at Leith, when

they had a dispute; they accommodated it, and drove to Edinburgh

together, they leave the coach at the Netherbow, when Baird revives the

quarrel, and in a few minutes, or perhaps seconds, kills his friend with

his sword. A reaction followed, and the assassin expressed his deep

regret, which did not bring the dead man to life again; the other fled,

but finally escaped without punishment as the act was not premeditated.

One of the last incidents of this class was a duel between Captain

Macrae of Marionville and Sir George Ramsay of Bamff in 1790. It arose

out of a quarrel caused by the misconduct of a servant. Macrae shot his

opponent dead, and then fled to France, and he never thought it safe to

return to Scotland. Duelling was considered proper for gentlemen, but

only for gentlemen, and not to be permitted to all and sundry. Towards

the end of the sixteenth century a barber challenged a chimney sweep,

and they had a very pretty “set to” with swords at which neither was

hurt. The King presently ordered the barber to summary execution because

he presumed to take the revenge of a gentleman. The upper classes did

not set a good example to their inferiors. One need not discuss whether

the Porteous mob was really a riot of the common people. The _Heart of

Midlothian_, if nothing else, has made it a very famous affair. The

Edinburgh mob, which was very fierce and determined according to Scott,

had one or two remarkable maxims. At an Irish fair the proper course is

to bring down your shillelagh on any very prominent head. Here the rule

was to throw a stone at every face that looked out of a window. Daniel

Defoe was in Edinburgh in 1705, on a special mission from Government, to

do all he could to bring about the Union. From his window in the High

Street he was gazing upon the angry populace and only just dodged a

large stone. He afterwards discovered not merely the rule but the reason

thereof, that there might be no recognition of faces. As the old cock

crows the young cock learns, even the children were fighters. I have

already told how the boys of the High School killed Bailie Macmorran in

a barring out business. There is a legend of the famous Earl of

Haddington, “Tam of the Coogate,” that when a fight was on between the

lads of the High School and the students of the College, he took

strenuously the side of the former. Nay, he drove the students out of

the West Port, locked the gate in their faces, that they might cool

themselves by a night in the fields, and placidly retired to his

studies. The fighting tradition lasted through the centuries. Scott

tells us of the incessant bickers between the High School and street

callants, which, however lawless, had yet their own laws. During one of

those fights a youth known from his dress as Green-breeks, a leader of

the town, was stuck with a knife, and somewhat seriously wounded. He was

tended in the Infirmary and in due time recovered, but nothing would

prevail upon him to give any hint whereby his assailant might be

discovered. The High Schoolboys took means to reward him, but the fights

were continued with unabated vigour.

Student riots are a chapter by themselves, and in Edinburgh were almost

to be looked upon as a matter of course, and to a mild extent still are,

on such occasions as Rectorial elections. In past times no occasion was

lost for burning the Pope in effigy, that was always a safe card to

play. Even the piety of old Edinburgh served to stimulate its brawls.

The famous commotion at the reading of the service book in St Giles’ on

23rd July 1637 is a case in point. Jenny Geddes is to-day commemorated

within the Cathedral itself, and she lives in history by her classic

pleasantry, on the Dean announcing the collect for the day: “Deil colic

the wame o’ thee fause thief, wilt thou say mass at my lug?” There is

one other story about Jenny to be told. On 19th June 1660 there were

great rejoicings in Edinburgh upon the Restoration. There was service at

the Church, banquet of sweetmeats and wine at the Cross, which ran

claret for the benefit of the populace; at night there were fireworks at

the Castle, effigies of Cromwell and the Devil were paraded through the

streets, bonfires blazed everywhere, and as fuel for these last Jenny is

reported to have contributed her stool. No doubt much water had run

under the bridge since 1637; Jenny may or may not have changed her

views, but she was nothing if not enthusiastic, and there was really no

inconsistency in her conduct. Other folk than Jenny had a difficulty to

reconcile their various devotions!

The people of Edinburgh had a strong aversion from bishops. On 4th June

1674, as the members of the Council were going to their meeting-place in

the Parliament Close, fifteen ladies appeared with a petition for a free

ministry. Archbishop Sharp was pointedly described as Judas, and

Traitor. Indeed one of the ladies struck him on the neck, screaming that

he should yet pay for it ere all was done. Any scandal against a bishop

was readily circulated. Bishop Patterson of Edinburgh was lampooned as a

profligate and loose liver. In the midst of a seemingly impassioned

discourse he is said to have kissed, in the pulpit, his bandstrings,

that being the signal agreed upon between him and his lady-love to prove

that he could think upon her even in the midst of solemn duties. He was

nicknamed “Bishop Bandstrings.” The bishops of the persecuting Church

disappear from history in a rather undignified manner. Patrick Walker

tells with great glee how at the Revolution, as the convention grew more

and more enthusiastic for the new order, they, fourteen in number, “were

expelled at once and stood in a crowd with pale faces in the Parliament

Close.” Some daring members of the crowd knocked the heads of the poor

prelates “hard upon each other,” the bishops slunk off, and presently

were seen no more in the streets. “But some of us,” continues Patrick,

“would have rejoiced still more to have seen the whole cabalsie sent

closally down the Bow that they might have found the weight of their

tails in a tow to dry their stocking soles, and let them know what

hanging was.”