The word ‘as’ is obliterated. The words are, in modern English,
simply the well-known scriptural command: ‘Love God above all, and
thy neighbour as thyself.’ Perched upon the corner above the door is
a small effigy of the Reformer, preaching in a pulpit, and pointing
with his right hand to a stone above his head in that direction, which
presents in rude sculpture the sun bursting from clouds, with the name
of the Deity inscribed on his disc in three languages:
ΘΕΟΣ
DEUS
GOD
Dr M’Crie, in his _Life of John Knox_, states that the Reformer, on
commencing duty in Edinburgh at the conclusion of the struggles with
the queen-regent, ‘lodged in the house of David Forrest, a burgess of
Edinburgh, from which he removed to the lodging which had belonged to
Durie, Abbot of Dunfermline.’ The magistrates acted liberally towards
their minister, giving him a salary of two hundred pounds Scottish
money, and paying his house-rent for him, at the rate of fifteen merks
yearly. In October 1561 they ordained the Dean of Guild, ‘with al
diligence, to mak ane warm studye of dailles to the minister, Johne
Knox, within his hous, aboue the hall of the same, with lyht and
wyndokis thereunto, and all uther necessaris.’ This study is generally
supposed to have been a very small wooden projection, of the kind
described a few pages back, still seen on the front of the _first
floor_. Close to it is a window in the angle of the building, from
which Knox is said by tradition to have occasionally held forth to
multitudes below.
The second floor, which is accessible by two narrow spiral stairs,
one to the south, another to the west, contains a tolerably spacious
room, with a ceiling ornamented by stucco mouldings, and a window
presented to the westward. A partition has at one time divided this
room from a narrow one towards the north, the ceiling of which is
composed of the beams and flooring of the attic flat, all curiously
painted with flower-work in an ancient taste. Two inferior rooms extend
still farther to the northward. It is to be remarked that the wooden
projection already spoken of extends up to this floor, so that there
is here likewise a small room in front; it contains a fireplace, and a
recess which might have been a cupboard or a library, besides two small
windows. That this fireplace, this recess, and also the door by which
the wooden chamber is entered from the decorated room should all be
formed in the front wall of the house, and with a necessary relation to
the wooden projection, strikes one as difficult to reconcile with the
idea of that projection being an afterthought; the appearances rather
indicate the whole having been formed at once, as parts of one design.
The attic floor exhibits strong oaken beams, but the flooring is in bad
order.
In the lower part of the house there is a small room, said by tradition
to have been used in times of difficulty for the purpose of baptising
children; there is also a well to supply the house with water, besides
a secret stair, represented as communicating subterraneously with a
neighbouring alley.
From the size of this house, and the variety of accesses to it, it
becomes tolerably certain that Knox could have occupied only a portion
of it. The question arises, which part did he occupy? Probability
seems decidedly in favour of the _first floor_—that containing the
window from which he is traditionally said to have preached, and where
his effigy appears. An authentic fact in the Reformer’s life favours
this supposition. When under danger from the hostility of the queen’s
party in the castle—in the spring of 1571—‘one evening a musket-ball
was fired in at his window, and lodged in the roof of the apartment
in which he was sitting. It happened that he sat at the time in a
different part of the room from that which he had been accustomed to
occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it took, must have
struck him’ (M’Crie). The second floor is too high to have admitted
of a musket being fired in at one of the windows. A ball fired in at
the ground-floor would not have struck the ceiling. The only feasible
supposition in the case is that the Reformer dwelt in the _first
floor_, which was not beyond an assassin’s aim, and yet at such a
height that a ball fired from the street would hit the ceiling.[223]
[Illustration: JOHN KNOX’S MANSE.