At the bottom of the High Street, on the south side, there is an
uncommonly huge and dense mass of stone buildings or _lands_,
penetrated only by a few narrow closes. One of these is Hyndford’s
Close, a name indicating the noble family which once had lodgment
in it. This was a Scotch peerage not without its glories—witness
particularly the third earl, who acted as ambassador in succession to
Prussia, to Russia, and to Vienna. It is now extinct: its _bijouterie_,
its pictures, including portraits of Maria Theresa, and other royal and
imperial personages, which had been presented as friendly memorials
to the ambassador, have all been dispersed by the salesman’s hammer,
and Hyndford’s Close, on my trying to get into it lately (1868), was
inaccessible (literally) from filth.
[Illustration: Hyndford’s Close.]
The entry and stair at the head of the close on the west side was a
favourite residence, on account of the ready access to it from the
street. In the second floor of this house lived, about the beginning of
the reign of George III., Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and there brought
up her beautiful daughters, one of whom became Duchess of Gordon. The
house had a dark passage, and the kitchen door was passed in going
to the dining-room, according to an agreeable old practice in Scotch
houses, which lets the guests know on entering what they have to
expect. The fineries of Lady Maxwell’s daughters were usually hung up,
after washing, on a screen in this passage to dry; while the coarser
articles of dress, such as shifts and petticoats, were slung decently
out of sight at the window, upon a projecting contrivance similar to a
dyer’s pole, of which numerous specimens still exist at windows in the
Old Town for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants.
So easy and familiar were the manners of the great in those times,
fabled to be so stiff and decorous, that Miss Eglintoune, afterwards
Lady Wallace, used to be sent with the tea-kettle across the street
to the Fountain Well for water to make tea. Lady Maxwell’s daughters
were the wildest romps imaginable. An old gentleman, who was their
relation, told me that the first time he saw these beautiful girls was
in the High Street, where Miss Jane, afterwards Duchess of Gordon, was
riding upon a sow, which Miss Eglintoune thumped lustily behind with
a stick. It must be understood that in the middle of the eighteenth
century vagrant swine went as commonly about the streets of Edinburgh
as dogs do in our own day, and were more generally fondled as pets by
the children of the last generation.[224] It may, however, be remarked
that the sows upon which the Duchess of Gordon and her witty sister
rode, when children, were not the common vagrants of the High Street,
but belonged to Peter Ramsay, of the inn in St Mary’s Wynd, and were
among the last that were permitted to roam abroad. The two romps used
to watch the animals as they were let loose in the forenoon from the
stable-yard (where they lived among the horse-litter), and get upon
their backs the moment they issued from the close.
The extraordinary cleverness, the genuine wit, and the delightful
_abandon_ of Lady Wallace made an extraordinary impression on Scottish
society in her day. It almost seemed as if some faculty divine had
inspired her. A milliner bringing home a cap to her when she was just
about to set off to the Leith races was so unlucky as to tear it
against the buckle of a porter’s knee in the street. ‘No matter,’ said
her ladyship; and instantly putting it on, restored all to grace by a
single pin. The cap thus misarranged was found so perfectly exquisite
that ladies tore their caps on nails, and pinned them on in the hope of
imitating it. It was, however, a grace beyond the reach of art.
Of the many _bon mots_ attributed to her, one alone seems worthy, from
its being unhackneyed, of appearing here. The son of Mr Kincaid, king’s
printer—a great Macaroni, as the phrase went; that is, dandy—was
nicknamed, from his father’s lucrative patent, _Young Bibles_. This
beau entering a ballroom one evening, some of the company asked who was
that extraordinary-looking young man. ‘Only Young Bibles,’ quoth Lady
Wallace, ‘bound in calf, and gilt, but not lettered!’
[In the same stair in Hyndford’s Close lived another lady of rank,
and one who, for several reasons, filled in her time a broad space
in society. This was Anne, Countess of Balcarres, the progenitrix of
perhaps as many persons as ever any woman was in the same space of
time. Her eldest daughter, Anne, authoress of the ballad of _Auld
Robin Gray_, was, of all her eleven children, the one whose name is
most likely to continue in remembrance—yea, though another of them
put down the Maroon war in the West Indies. When in Hyndford’s Close,
Lady Balcarres had for a neighbour in the same alley Dr Rutherford,
the uncle of Sir Walter Scott; and young Walter, often at his uncle’s,
occasionally accompanied his aunt ‘Jeanie’ to Lady Balcarres’s.
Forty years after, having occasion to correspond with Lady Anne
Barnard, _née_ Lindsay, he told her: ‘I remember all the _locale_ of
Hyndford’s Close perfectly, even to the Indian screen with Harlequin
and Columbine, and the harpsichord, though I never had the pleasure of
hearing Lady Anne play upon it. I suppose the close, once too clean to
soil the hem of your ladyship’s garment, is now a resort for the lowest
mechanics—and so wears the world away.... It is, to be sure, more
picturesque to lament the desolation of towers on hills and haughs,
than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking
on the simple and cosie retreats where worth and talent, and elegance
to boot, were often nestled, and which now are the resort of misery,
filth, poverty, and vice.’[225]
The late Mrs Meetham, a younger sister of Miss Spence Yeaman, of
Murie, in the Carse of Gowrie, had often heard her grand-aunt, Miss
Molly Yeaman, describe, from her own recollection, the tea-drinkings
of the Countess of Balcarres in Hyndford’s Close. The family was not
rich, and it still retained something of its ancient Jacobitism. The
tea-drinkings, as was not uncommon, took place in my lady’s bedroom.
At the foot of a four-posted bed, exhibiting a finely worked coverlet,
stood John, an elderly man-servant, and a _character_, in full
Balcarres livery, an immense quantity of worsted lace on his coat.
Resting with his arm round a bedpost, he was ready to hand the kettle
when required. As the ladies went chattering on, there would sometimes
occur a difficulty about a date or a point in genealogy, and then
John was appealed to to settle the question. For example, it came to
be debated how many of the Scotch baronetcies were real; for, as is
still the case, many of them were known to be fictitious, or assumed
without legal grounds. Here John was known to be not only learned, but
eloquent. He began: ‘Sir James Kinloch, Sir Stuart Threipland, Sir
John Wedderburn, Sir —— Ogilvy, Sir James Steuart of Coltness’ [all
of them forfeited baronets, be it observed]: ‘these, leddies, are the
only _real_ baronets. For the rest, I do believe, the Deil’——then a
figurative declaration not fit for modern print, but which made the
Balcarres party only laugh, and declare to John that they thought him
not far wrong.]