This house presents a feature which forms a curious memorial of the
manners of a past age. In common with all the houses built from
about 1690 to 1740—a substantial class, still abundant in the High
Street—there is at the end of each row of windows corresponding to
a separate mansion, a narrow slit-like window, such as might suffice
for a closet. In reality, each of these narrow apertures gives light
to a small cell—much too small to require such a window—usually
entering from the dining-room or some other principal apartment.
The use of these cells was to serve as a retreat for the master of
the house, wherein he might perform his devotions. The father of a
family was in those days a sacred kind of person, not to be approached
by wife or children too familiarly, and expected to be a priest in
his own household. Besides his family devotions, he retired to a
closet for perhaps an hour each day to utter his own prayers;[19]
and so regular was the custom that it gave rise, as we see, to this
peculiarity in house-building. Nothing could enable us more clearly
to appreciate that strong outward demonstration of religious feeling
which pervaded the nation for half a century after the agonies of ‘the
Persecution.’ I cannot help here mentioning the interest with which
I have visited Bankton House,[20] in East Lothian, where, as is well
known, Colonel Gardiner spent several years of his life. The oratory
of the pious soldier is pointed out by tradition, and it forms even a
more expressive memorial of the time than the closets in the Edinburgh
houses. Connected with a small front room, which might have been a
library or _study_, is a little recess, such as dust-pans and brooms
are kept in, consisting of the angular space formed by a stair which
passes overhead to the upper floor. This place is wholly without light,
yet it is said to have been the place sacred to poor Gardiner’s private
devotions. What leaves hardly any doubt on the matter is that there has
been a wooden bolt within, capable only of being shot from the inside,
and therefore unquestionably used by a person desiring to shut himself
in. Here, therefore, in this darksome, stifling little cell, had this
extraordinary man spent hours in those devotional exercises by which he
was so much distinguished from his class.[21]