[255] A noted brewer, much given to preaching. Of him Claudero says:
‘Our souls with gospel he did cheer,
Our bodies, too, with ale and beer;
_Gratis_ he gospel got and gave away;
For ale and beer he only made us pay.’
[256] This thriving parliamentary burgh originated in a cottage built,
and long inhabited, by a retired seaman of Admiral Vernon’s squadron,
who gave it this name in commemoration of the triumph which his
commander there gained over the Spaniards in 1739. There must have been
various houses at the spot in 1753, when we find one ‘George Hamilton,
in Portobello,’ advertising in the _Edinburgh Courant_ that he would
give a reward of three pounds to any one who should discover the author
of a scandalous report, which represented him as harbouring robbers
in his house. The waste upon which Portobello is now partly founded
was dreadfully infested at this time with robbers, and resorted to
by smugglers; see _Courant_. [Portobello, while remaining one of the
‘Leith burghs’ for parliamentary purposes, was municipally incorporated
with Edinburgh in 1896. Claudero’s ‘Frigate Whins’ are better known as
the ‘Figgate Whins.’]
[257] Claudero could have little serious expectation that several of
these predictions would come to pass before he had been forty years in
his grave.
[258] A celebrated and much-esteemed fishing-rod maker, who afterwards
flourished in the old wooden _land_ at the head of Blackfriars Wynd.
He survived to recent times, and was distinguished for his adherence
to the cocked hat, wrist ruffles, and buckles of his youth. He was a
short, neat man, very well bred, a great angler, intimate with the
great, a Jacobite, and lived to near a century. He had fished in almost
every trouting stream in the three kingdoms, and was seen skating on
Lochend at the age of eighty-five.
[259] This seems to bear some reference to the seizure of young
Macdonald of Kinlochmoidart at Lesmahagow in 1745.