[17] Fellows.
[18] Busy.
[19] Not improbably this was done in a spirit of literal obedience to
the injunction (Matthew vi. 6): ‘Thou, when thou prayest, enter into
thy closet.’ Commentators on this passage mention that every Jewish
house had a place of secret devotion built over the porch.
[20] When Colonel Gardiner occupied it the house was known as Olive
Bank. It was later changed to Bankton House by Andrew Macdowall, who,
when raised to the Bench in 1755, took the title of Lord Bankton.
[21] Bankton House has been burned down and rebuilt since this was
written.
[22] _History of Edinburgh_, p. 205, note.
[23] Before Major Weir took up house in the West Bow he is said to have
lodged in the Cowgate, where he had as a fellow-lodger the fanatic
Mitchell (Ravaillac _redivivus_), who attempted to shoot Archbishop
Sharpe.
[24] Sir Andrew Ramsay was provost of the city, first from 1654 till
1657, and then continuously for eleven years, 1662-73. It was he
who obtained from the king the title of Lord Provost for the chief
magistrate, and secured precedence for him next to the Lord Mayor of
London.
[25] The Rev. Mr Frazer, minister of Wardlaw, in his _Divine
Providences_ (MS. Adv. Lib.), dated 1670.
[26] _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered._
[27] The causeway. A skirmish fought between the Hamiltons and
Douglases, upon the High Street of Edinburgh, in the year 1515, was
popularly termed _Cleanse the Causeway_.
[28] Cane.
[29] Hamstringed.
[30] _Memorie of the Somervilles_, vol. ii. p. 271.
[31] This house was demolished in 1836.
[32] Jackson’s _History of the Stage_, p. 418.
[33] See _Notes from the Records of the Assembly Rooms of Edinburgh_.
Edinburgh: 1842. In the eighteenth century a lady’s ‘night-gown’ was a
special kind of evening-dress, often of silk brocade, &c., other than
full dress; and a gentleman’s night-gown was a dressing-gown, not a
bed-garment.
[34] It was a ball in the room of the Old Assembly Close building
which Goldsmith describes in the letter quoted, and in which public
assemblies were revived in 1746. The new rooms in Bell’s Wynd were
opened in 1756.
[35] Called the ‘Ovir Bow Port.’ It stood about the line of the present
Victoria Terrace.
[36] This house was demolished in 1835, to make way for a passage
towards George IV. Bridge.
[37] Taken down in 1839.
[38] Demolished in 1833.
[39] The narrow, crooked West Bow, descending very steeply from the
Lawnmarket to the Grassmarket, has been almost wholly obliterated by
Victoria Street, a comparatively wide and gradually sloping street
which crosses the line of the old West Bow from George IV. Bridge.
Victoria Street was built in 1835-40; and only a few houses on one side
of the head of the Bow still stand, and these have been rebuilt.