In this tall _land_, dated 1690, there is a house on the second-floor
where that venerable drug, Dr Anderson’s pills, is sold, and has
been so for above a century. As is well known, the country-people in
Scotland have to this day [1824] a peculiar reverence for these pills,
which are, I believe, really a good form of aloetic medicine. They
took their origin from a physician of the time of Charles I., who gave
them his name. From his daughter, Lillias Anderson, the patent came
to a person designed Thomas Weir, who left it to his daughter. The
widow of this last person’s nephew, Mrs Irving, is now the patentee; a
lady of advanced age, who facetiously points to the very brief series
of proprietors intervening between Dr Anderson and herself, as no
inexpressive indication of the virtue of the medicine. [Mrs Irving died
in 1837, at the age of ninety-nine.] Portraits of Anderson and his
daughter are preserved in this house: the physician in a Vandyke dress,
with a book in his hand; the lady, a precise-looking dame, with a pill
in her hand about the size of a walnut, saying a good deal for the
stomachs of our ancestors. The people also show a glove which belonged
to the learned physician.
[1868.—In 1829 Mrs Irving lived in a neat, self-contained mansion in
Chessels’s Court, in the Canongate, along with her son, General Irving,
and some members of his family. The old lady, then ninety-one, was
good enough to invite me to dinner, when I likewise found two younger
sisters of hers, respectively eighty-nine and ninety. She sat firm and
collected at the head of the table, and carved a leg of mutton with
perfect propriety. She then told me, at her son’s request, that in the
year 1745, when Prince Charles’s army was in possession of the town,
she, a child of four years, walked with her nurse to Holyrood Palace,
and seeing a Highland gentleman standing in the doorway, she went
up to him to examine his peculiar attire. She even took the liberty
of lifting up his kilt a little way; whereupon her nurse, fearing
some danger, started forward for her protection. But the gentleman
only patted her head, and said something kind to her. I felt it as
very curious to sit as guest with a person who had mingled in the
Forty-five. But my excitement was brought to a higher pitch when,
on ascending to the drawing-room, I found the general’s daughter, a
pretty young woman recently married, sitting there, dressed in a suit
of clothes belonging to one of the nonagenarian aunts—a very fine one
of flowered satin, with elegant cap and lappets, and silk shoes three
inches deep in the heel—the same having been worn by the venerable
owner just seventy years before at a Hunters’ Ball at Holyrood Palace.
The contrast between the former and the present wearer—the old lady
shrunk and taciturn, and her young representative full of life and
resplendent in joyous beauty—had an effect upon me which it would be
impossible to describe. To this day, I look upon the Chessels’s Court
dinner as one of the most extraordinary events in my life.]
[Illustration: Chessels’s Court, Canongate.]