In more recent times, this substantial mansion was the abode of Mr
Baird of Newbyth; and here it was that the late gallant Sir David
Baird, the hero of Seringapatam, was born and brought up. Returning in
advanced life from long foreign service, this distinguished soldier
came to see the home of his youth on the Castle-hill. The respectable
individual whom I found occupying the house in 1824 received his
visitor with due respect, and after showing him through the house,
conducted him out to the garden. Here the boys of the existing tenant
were found actively engaged in throwing cabbage-stalks at the tops
of the chimneys of the houses of the Grassmarket, situated a little
below the level of the garden. On making one plump down the vent, the
youngsters set up a great shout of triumph. Sir David fell a-laughing
at sight of this example of practical waggery, and entreated the father
of the lads ‘not to be too angry; he and his brother, when living here
at the same age, had indulged in precisely the same amiable amusement,
the chimneys then, as now, being so provokingly open to such attacks
that there was no resisting the temptation.’
The whole matter might have been put into an axiomatic form—Given a
garden with cabbage-stalks, and a set of chimneys situated at an angle
of forty-five degrees below the spot, any boys turned loose into the
said garden will be sure to endeavour to bring the cabbage-stalks and
the chimneys into acquaintance.
The Citadel seems to have been a little nest of aristocracy, of the
Cavalier party. In 1745 one of its inhabitants was Dame Magdalen Bruce
of Kinross, widow of the baronet who had assisted in the Restoration.
Here lived with her the Rev. Robert Forbes, Episcopal minister of
Leith [afterwards Bishop of Orkney], from whose collections regarding
Charles Edward and his adventures a volume of extracts was published
by me in 1834. [The _Lyon in Mourning_ is here referred to, from which
Dr Chambers published a number of the narratives in his _Jacobite
Memoirs_ (1834), and from which he also utilised some information
of the Rebellion of 1745 in the preparation of his _History of the
Rebellion_. At his death he bequeathed the work to the Advocates’
Library, Edinburgh, where it now remains. It consists of eight small
octavo volumes of manuscript of about two hundred pages, each bound
in black leather, with blackened edges, and around the title-page of
each volume a deep black border. The collection was the work of the
Rev. Robert Forbes, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church of Scotland,
who became in 1762 Bishop of Ross and Caithness. It was treasured
by his widow for thirty years, and then bought by Sir Henry Stewart
of Allanton in 1806. Dr Robert Chambers unearthed it for historical
purposes, and later purchased it from Sir Henry Stewart. Some relics
which Forbes succeeded in obtaining from his correspondents—such as
a piece of the Prince’s garter, a piece of the gown he wore as Betty
Burke, and of the string of the apron he then had on, a fragment of a
waistcoat worn by the Prince, and other things—were preserved on the
inside of some of the boards of the volumes. The _Lyon in Mourning_ was
edited by Mr Henry Paton from the manuscript in the Advocates’ Library,
and published in three volumes by the Scottish History Society (1895).]
Throughout those troublous days, a little Episcopal congregation was
kept together in Leith; their place of worship being the _first floor_
of an old, dull-looking house in Queen Street (dated 1615), the lower
floor of which was, in my recollection, a police-office.