COKiNhLL U^NIVERSITY LrSRARY Cornell University Library DA 890.E3W34 1912 Edinburgh and the Lothians / 3 1924 006 624 369 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924006624369 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS f.iiinii1.'Ri;h, ahvoi a'j I-, ^ i j^o^k EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS BY FRANCIS WATT With twelve illustrations in colodr by WALTER DEXTER, R.B.A. NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS mo CONTENTS CHAPTER I A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH PAGB Its Site— A City of the Hills— "Mine Own Romantic Town"— Its Troubled History — Early Times — Various Names for the City— The Castle Rock— The James's in Edinburgh- The Flodden Wall and its Memories — Mary of Guise — Mary Stuart and the Reformation — The Union of the Kingdoms and the Union of the Crowns — Effect on Edinburgh — The Porteous Mob — The '45 — Literary Greatness — The Disruption — The Edinburgh of To-day ...... i CHAPTER II TO-DAY AT THE CASTLE The Core and Centre of Old Scotland — Scenic Effects— The Espla- nade and its Monuments — The Argyll Battery — The Argyll Tower — Mons Meg and her Story — The Oratory of St Margaret — The Parliament Hall — The Dungeons Underneath — Birth- Room of James VI. and I. — The Honours of Scotland — Their Chequered Annals . . . . .15 CHAPTER III ANNALS OF THE CASTLE St Margaret of Scotland — Legends of her Death and Burial — Another Queen Margaret — Her Acceunt of the Castle Rock — The Fortress in the War of Independence — Escape of James II. — The Douglas Tragedy — The Black Kist— Jousting under James IV. — The Burning of Lady Glamis — Mary Stuart in the Castle — The Birth of an Heir — Kirkaldy of Grange and the Siege of 1573 — Crown and Covenant in the Castle — Legend of the Phantom Drummer — Death of the Argylls — The Castle at the Revolution — " Bonnie Dundee " — The Vision of Balcarres — Later Records of the Castle ..... 24 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS CHAPTER IV AT HOLYROOD PAGB The Approach to Holyrood-Charm, BeauUes and Memories of th= Palace-The Entrance-The Gallery of Kings-The Crowd of Shadows-The Damley Rooms-The Mary S^"' frlvS i^ The Secret Staircase-Comments of Visiors-The Graves m the Abbey-Lord Belhaven-Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney and Shetlandt-Royal Vault-A Legend of Holyrood-Queen Mary s Bath and Croft-an-Righ-The Gardens-The Precincts . 37 CHAPTER V THE STORY OF HOLYROOD The Legend of King David— The Foundation of the Abbey— Fate of the Black Rood of Scotland— The Right of Sanctuary of the Abbey and the Palace— The Thirty-one Abbots— Holyrood as Palace— Marriage of James IV. and Margaret Tudor— Other Royalties— Queen Mary's Reception — Her Happy Days — The Storm-cloud— Murders of Rizzio and Darnley— Wild Voices round the Palace— James VI. at Holyrood— The Bothwell Escapades— Holyrood after the Union of the Crowns— Palace burned down and rebuilt— The Last Riding of the Parliament —Royal Fugitives at Holyrood— Later Days . . .48 CHAPTER VI THE HISTORIC MILE The High Street and Canongate — Its Divisions — Romantic Note in Scots Annals — The Old-time Aspect— The Great Invasion — The Closes — Their Strange History — Inscriptions on the Houses and their Meanings — The Changes Inevitable . . .64 CHAPTER VII SOME CLOSES AND HOUSES IN HIGH STREET AND CANONGATE A Stroll from the Castle to Holyrood— The Palace of Mary of Guise — ^The Free Kirk College — Memories of James's Court — Libberton's Wynd— The Eventful History of Lady Stair— The Anchor Close — Guy Mannering — The Folk of Warriston's Close — The City Chambers and the City Museum — Round about the Tron Church — ^The Meeting of the Ways — ^John Knox's House — Its Traditions — Strichen's Close and the Bluidy Advocate Mackenzie — The Begbie Murder — World's End Close and the Netherbow Port — A Brief Chronicle of the Canongate — Morocco Land and its Legend — Golfer's Land — The White Horse Close — The Royal Tennis Court and the Early Theatre — Huntly House and Popular Tradition — Moray House and its Memories— St John Street— The Fall of the Canongate . 71 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII ROUND ABOUT THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE PACB The Parliament Close as Centre of Edinburgh Life — Its Old-time Aspect — The Luckenbooths — Memories of Allan Ramsay and Creech— The Old Kirk or Stinking Style— The Kraraes— The Tolbooth : its History : its Details — ^A Famous Prison — The Purses — The Bluegowns'— The Parliament House — Portraits of Famous Lawyers — The Courts — The Advocates' Library — French Influence — History of the Parliament House— Old Customs— A Changed World ..... 88 CHAPTER IX IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET An Impression of the Grassmarket — Its Present State— Ports- burgh— The West Port— The High Riggs— The Castle Wynd — The Story of the Macgregor — The Highlander in Old Edin- burgh — ^The Irish Invasion — The West Bow — The Grime of Old Edinburgh — Dame Jean Bethune — The Place of Execu- tion — The Heads of Criminals — The Covenanters — " Famous Guthrie " — The Porteous Mob — The Burke and Hare Murders — Ferocity of the Time — ^The White Mice of Tanner's Close . 99 CHAPTER X ABOUT THE COWGATE Present-day Aspect of the Cowgate — Its Former Splendour^ — ' ' The Palaces of the Cowgate " — Its Early History — Candlemaker Row— The Society— The New Town to the South— The Darien House and the Darien Scheme — Last Days of Fergusson the Poet — The Potterrow — Discovery of the Casket Letters — The Horse Wynd — The Countess of Galloway and her little Oddities — The College Wynd and its Memories — Sir Walter Scott — Guthrie Street — A Cowgate Anecdote — Edinburgh Fires — Hope House and its Inmates — Tam o' the Cowgate — The Philosopher's Stone — Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld — The Palace of Cardinal Beaton . . . . .111 CHAPTER XI KIRK O' FIELD, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE HOSPITALS The Way to the College — The Buildings — The Academy of James VI.— An Historic Site— Kirk o' Field— The Note of Scots Tragedies — The Story of Darnley's Murder — Brief Annals of the University — Its Recent Growth — Inner Life of the Scots Student — Its Trials and Triumphs — Altered Conditions — The High School and Site of the Old Infirmary — A Literary Inter- lude — George Heriot's Hospital and its Fellows — A City of Schools . . . . . . . . 122 vii EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS CHAPTER XII Arthur's seat and calton hill PAGE The Hills of Edinburgh— Arthur's Seat and the King's Park— A Royal Demesne — ^St Margaret's Loch and Dunsappie Loch — St Margaret's Well — Whinny Hill and its Memories — Muschat's Cairn— The Ballad of the Hill— The Hunter's Bog —The Radical Road — The Duke's Walk — Duddingston Village— The Sheep's Head — Duddingston Kirk — ^An Artist Minister — Cauvin's Hospital — Duddingston Loch — Its Winter Aspects— Word Pictures by R. L. S.— The Lion Hill— The Legend of King Arthur — Salisbury Crags — St Anthony the Hermit — May-day Dew — The Calton Hill — Its Monuments — The National Monument — Calton Jail — Its Story — History and Traditions of the Calton — Word Pictures in Sartor Resartus ....... 133 CHAPTER XIII THE NEW TOWN AND THE SUBURBS BY THE SEA Tht Growth of New Edinburgh — Its Beginning — ^First Plan of the New Town— How far it was realized— A River in the Valley ! —The Railway— The Beauty of George Street— A Royal Figure — Princes Street — Its Defects and Qualities— The Modern Athens— New Town Interiors— A Lack of Historic Interest — The Citizen of the New Town — Newhaven and its Fisherfolk- The Port and Pier of Leith— Glories of the Edin- burgh Margate— The End of the Seaside Suburbs . . 147 CHAPTER XIV THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH The Churches— St Giles before its Last Restoration— The Old Church— The Vandals of 1829— The Crown of the Steeple— The Legend of St Giles— The Reformation Changes— Varied Uses for Old St Giles— The Chambers Restoration and its Effects— A Note on Present Aspects— Jenny Geddes and her Work — The Preachings of Knox — Other Churches — St Cuthbert's- St Mary's Cathedral— The Barclay Church— Old Greyfnars- Dr Lee and Dr Robert Wallace, and their Work —The Tron— The Canbngate Church— Memories of Trinity College and Tnmty College Hospital— Their Destruction- The Dust of Mary of Gueldres— A Long Controversy— Rebuilding ?iE Trinity College — Its Present State — Memories of thi Magdalen Chapel— Its Present Use— Its Peculiar Interest . 158 viii CONTENTS CHAPTER XV THE GRAVEYARDS OF EDINBURGH rAGB The Graveyards of Edinburgh in Edinburgh History— The Burial- place of Knox — The Greyfriars, a Gift from Queen Mary — Memories of the Covenant— " Bluidy Mackenzie" again — Emblems of Mortality— The Resurrectionist — A View from the Canongate Cemetery — Adam Smith — Robert Fergusson — David Hume's Monument on the Calton — A Note on the Philosopher— The Graveyard of St Cuthbert's— The Weight of Mortality ....... 170 CHAPTER XVI TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS Scots Crime and Criminals — Case of Major Weir — The West Bow again — Its Saints and Sinners — Weir's Early History and High Position — The Legend of his Staff — His Confession — His Apprehension and that of his Sister — Their Conduct in Prison — Their Trial and Condemnation — End of the Major on the Gallowlee, and of his Sister in the Grassmarket — The Growth of the Legend — After History of Major Weir's Land — Major Weir in Literature — ^The True Significance of his Story — ^The Deacon and his Close — His Early History and Reputable Position — His Secret Vices — His Associates — The Robbery of the Excise OfiSce — The Deacon Escapes to Holland — He is brought back — Incidents of the Trial — The Verdict of Guilty — The Last Scene by the Tolbooth — The Deacon's Bravado — His Portrait — Reflections on his Life and Career — The Play of Henley and Stevenson . . . . .178 CHAPTER XVII THREE EDINBURGH MASTERS AND A VISITOR The Great Men of Edinburgh— Three Edinburgh Authors and their Monuments — The Fergusson Localities — His Life and Character— His Chief Poems— His Pictures of Edinburgh — The Scott Localities — His Pictures of Edinburgh Folk and Edinburgh Places — ^The Stevenson Localities — His Early Years — The Attraction of the North — His Literary Use of Edinburgh — His Remarks on, and Interest in, Fergusson — His Suggestions for a Monument — Scott and Stevenson Con- trasted — A Personal Reminiscence of Stevenson — The Burns 1 Localities — His Life in Edinburgh — Clarinda . . 192 ix EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS CHAPTER XVIII LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH PAGl Edinburgh and Men of Letters— The New and the Old— Fugitive Figures— The Great Days of James IV. — William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay — Their Lives and Works — The Reformation Epoch— John Knox and George Buchanan— Life and Times of Allan Ramsay — The Great Men that followed him— " A Hotbed of Genius" — The Last Days of Adam Smith— " Bozzy " and his Pranks — Lord Jeffrey and Henry Mackenzie — The Edinburgh Review — Its Founders and their Work — Blackwood's Magazine and its Work — The Chaldee Manuscript — The Chief Figures — The Scots Observer — Drjohn Brown— The End of the Story . . . . .206 CHAPTER XIX A NOTE ON ART Old Scotland unfavourable to Art — Church and Church Splendours before the Reformation — The Altar-piece at Holyrood — A Time of Destruction — The Statue of the Old Town — James Norrey, George Jameson, David Allan — The New Town and the Changes it brought — Museums of the Capital — A Lesser South Kensington — The Corporation Museum — Its Value for the Student — ^The Antiquarian Museum and its Treasures — The National Portrait Gallery — The National Picture Gallery — Raeburn and his Work — Art Treasures in the Lothians outside Edinburgh — The Buildings of Edinburgh — Their Various Merits — The Scott Monument — Divergent Views — In the Classic Style — Hopes for the Future . . . . .219 CHAPTER XX THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS The End of Old-world Scotland— Early Stage of the Rising— In the Lothians— Plight of the Dragoons— Fear of the Citizens — Lochiel Enters the Town— The Prince Reaches the City- Proclamation at the Cross — The Night at Holyrood — ^The Advance of Cope — The Battle of Prestonpans— Victory of the Jacobites — Edinburgh under the Prince — His March on the South— End of the Ri^ng — Was Success Possible ?— Conduct of the Highlanders during the Occupation — Traditions, Grave and Gay— The Last Notes of the Pipes . .22) CONTENTS CHAPTER XXI ROSLIN AND aAWTHORNDEN PAGE On the Road to Roslin— The Pentlands— The North and South Esk — The Gentle Shepherd — Roslin Castle — Memories of the Erskines — A Quaint Legend — The Glory of Roslin Chapel — Roslin Glen — Its Varied Peauties — Hawthornden and the Drnmmonds — The Visit of Ben Jonson — Drummond's Epitaph — Some Words on his House — A Note on Lasswade and Dalkeith ....... 241 CHAPTER XXn QUEENSFERRY AND ITS MEMORIES The Queensferry Road — Objects of Interest on the Way — Cramond Brig in Fact and Drama — The Story of the Ferry — Memories of St Margaret — The Hawes Inn — The Unearned Increment — Mentioned by Scott and Stevenson — The Romantic Note — The Forth Bridge— Blackness and Barnbougle Castles — Graham's Dyke ........ 248 CHAPTER XXni LINLITHGOW The Linlithgow Road — Impressions of the Pentland Hills — First Thoughts of Linlithgow — A Town of Wells— Historic Sites — In the Palace Grounds — The Old-time Castle and its Fortunes — The Assassination of Moray — What Followed After — The Visioh of James IV. in St Michael's Kirk — Outside and Inside the Palace — A Memory of the '4.5 — Burning of the Palace — The Stuarts and Linlithgow — Riding of the Marches— " Adew, Lithgow" 2SS CHAPTER XXIV HADDINGTON Dead Men's Bones — Some Quaint Buildings — Nungate of Haddington — Its Interest — Lucerna Laudoniie — Its Varied Fortunes — The Bridge — Trials of the Old Citizens — Legends of a Flood — The Siege — A Story about it — The Birthplace of Knox— Old Town Life— Literary History — The Writings of Knox — Self-Interpreting Bible — The Letters of Mrs Carlyle — Samuel Smiles— A Nook in the Garleton Hills — Sir David Lyndsay — The Village of Athelstaneford — Blair and Home . 266 xi EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS CHAPTER XXV ON LAMMER LAW FAGB Spring bytheTyne-The " Stanners Heids "-The Tower of the Maitlands-An Alpine Touch-The Hamlet of Bolton-A Memory of Burns— The Countryside— A Pastoral Interlude — Soutra Hospital and Soutra Aisle— Pringle of Goodmans Acre— Soutra Hill— By the Cairn on Lammer Law— Mist and Gloom— A Hillside Shepherd— The Downward Path— The Journey's End ..••■•• 277 CHAPTER XXVI BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN Hardgate of Haddington — House Mottoes — The Banks of Tyne— Amisfield Park — The Tr^edy of Newmills — The Abbey Hamlet— Relics of the Abbey— Its History— Mary Stuart- Stevenson House— Untrodden Ways— Barbed Wire — Hailes Castle— Memories of Mary and Bothwell— The Castle Pre- cincts— Traprain— Its Legend— " Speed the Plough"— The Harvesters . • . ■ • • • 285 CHAPTER XXVII DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD The Berwick Road — Gladsmuir — Principal Robertson — The Craw- stane — St Lawrence House — The Leper and the Tramp — The Croakers' Hedges— Pencraik — The Stannin' Stane — The Tyne at East Linton — Belhaven Sands — Dunbar Tolbooth — The Presence of the Sea — The Story of Dunbar — The Castle — Its Ruin — The Prophecy of Thomas of Ercildoune — The Ex- ploits of Black Agnes — Queen Mary in the Castle — Dunbar Drive — The Genius of Cromwell . . .294 CHAPTER XXVIII TANTALLON AND THE BASS East Lothian Cottages — A Woodland Scene — Whitekirk — Legend of St Baldred— Our Lady of Whitekirk— A Gouty Pope— Tantallon— The Ducat— The Douglas Family— Their Strong- hold — Gawin Douglas and Scott — A Ghost Story — The Bass — Its Various Aspects — The Martyrs of the Bass — Legends of Peden the Prophet — Old-time Beer and Tobacco — Jacobites on the Bass — Solan Geese — Myths about them — A Caledonian Tit-bit ...... . . 306 xii CONTENTS CHAPTER XXIX NORTH BERWICK AND THE SHORE OF THE FIRTH PAGB On North Berwick Law — The Prospect — North Berwick Old and New — Antiquities — The Nunnery — The Witches — Gellie Duncan— A Royal Witch-finder— Golf and the Golfer— Dress and_ Habits— The Caddies — Islands in the Firth— Dirleton— Feuing and Fea-duties — Two Prosperous Lawyers— GuUane — Old Days on the Links — Bogle Hill— -Longniddry and its Memories — Fenton Tower and the Red House — The Seton Country and the Setons — The Thistle and the Rose . 319 Index ........ 329 xm LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 3DINBURGH, Advocate's Close . . . Frontispiece FACING PAGE lOLyROCD Palace and Arthur Seat ... 48 Edinburgh, the Canongate Tolbooth . . 82 Idinburgh, View from Calton Hill . . . 142 Edinburgh Castle from Greyfriars Churchyard 170 'iDiNBURGH, High Street from Knox's House . 208 OSLIN Chapel, the South Doorway . . . 242 AWTHORNDEN 246 iNLiTHGOw Palace from the Loch . . .262 ungate Bridge, Haddington . . . .270 VNTALLON CaSTLE 3 10 the Garleton Hills 326 XV EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS CHAPTER I A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH Its Site— A City of the Hills— "Mine Own Romantic Town"— Its Troubled History — Early Times — Various Names for the City— The Castle Rock— The James's in Edinburgh— The Flodden Wall and its Memories — Mary of Guise — Mary Stuart and the Reformation^The Union of the Kingdoms and the Union of the Crowns — Effect on Edinburgh — The Porteous Mob — The '45 — Literary Greatness — The Disruption — The Edinburgh of To-day. THE history of Edinburgh is for long the history of its Castle. During another period it is the history of Scotland, so much are all the events concentrated here. The incidents are usually connected with some famous spot, thus Holyrood, St Giles's, the Parliament House, Old Greyfriars have each an impressive story which will be set forth in due course. It will be serviceable to connect our beads by a string, and without attempting to write the history of Scotland, to say a few words on the history of Edinburgh. The ground which it now covers is profoundly inter- esting to the geologist, and many authorities have described how it came to have that peculiar conformation. To a plain man it is something like this : — On the north, some two miles away, is the Firth of Forth ; the EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS ground is fairly level when you turn your back on that arm of the sea and walk southward towards the city, then it swells upward till you reach George Street in the New Town. Now you begin another descent, and presently come to Princes Street. This was the first of the New Town building scheme. In the valley below, where is now garden and railway, there once lay the Nor" Loch. Before you rises the Old Town on the other side of the Loch, and that is simply the Castle Hill on the west sloping down towards Holyrood on the east. Two other hills must be noted. Blocking up the east end of Princes Street is the Calton Hill, and away to the south and east of Holyrood is Arthur's Seat. To the south of the Old Town the ground falls rapidly down to the Cow- gate, and then there is a short rise until you come to the College, beyond which all is fairly level for some two or three miles, where you have the Braid Hills to the south, then to the south-west is the huge mass of the Pentlands. A city of hills in truth is this same Edinburgh ! Not merely is she built on the heights, but other heights, as Arthur's Seat and the Calton Hill, are close at hand, tower right over the streets. And in the further distance the Braids and the Pentlands affect you in a remoter and different way. AH these you see from many points, but you must go to places like the Castle Rock to catch the finer influences of hill scenery, to see not merely the Lomonds of Fife, but beyond Fife itself the great rampart of the Highland hills, concealing within their depths more mystery to the old inhabitants than Africa or thfe Poles do for you to-day. A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH Mine own romantic town, so Scott in one happy phrase described Edinburgh. The site is picturesque, the history exciting and adventurous, but happy is the nation that has no history. Edinburgh has bought its glory at a terrible price: she has many a story of heroism and bravery, but there is always the confused noise of battle and garments rolled in blood. The stones have been washed again and again with tears. It was not an easy life those old Edinburgh folk lived, their career was short and touched with ill-fortune ; it was tragic, interesting, pathetic, before all emphatic ; they lived much if not long, and their heroic, extravagant souls had not changed their crowded hour of glorious strife for the dull commonplace tedium of to-day. It strikes you rather oddly howthe name of the city and its great hill smacks of English earth. Edwin and Arthur are of the south. The early annals are misty and uncer- tain. Stow places its origin at 989 B.C., but that is a part of the mediaeval romance, which links the historyof Britain with the history of Troy. You jump over a thousand years and find the Castle emerging as (possibly) taken from the Picts in 452 A.D., and then with Edwin, King of North- umbria (585-633), you reach something like firm ground. The Castle Rock made an almost unparalleled natural fortress. To-day, as then, you gain access to it by a narrow ledge. Draw a barrier across that, and up to our own time you were safe from everything but trick or famine, and in fact it was only thus it fell. It seems that Edwin, having got as far north, fortified the place, and extended into the beginning of a town EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the huts that must always have gathered outside the Castle. Thus from him it derived its name, unless in this, as in some other cases, an old Celtic root has been twisted into an English form. Other terms have been claimed for it. It was Mynyd Agned in the " Language of the ancient Britons," the Hill of Agned, whoever this was. Some have explained it as the Christian St Agnes, and again these same curious words have been translated Castrum Puellarum or Maiden Castle, because the Pictish Kings here stored away as in a place of safety the Princesses of the blood royal. The legend is not improbable, and it is worth noting that some ex- cavations in 1853 on the summit of the Castle Rock discovered a huge quantity of human bones, all of which were the bones of women. But Buchanan, who was as sceptical in one way as he was credulous in another will have this " Maiden Castle " an invention of romance, and to the same untrustworthy origin he traces the terra Dolorous Valley, which at least has a highly romantic sound. In our own day affectation describes it as the Modern Athens, but its quaint and familiar title of Auld Reekie is that wherein those who love it delight most. It smokes like a tall chimney. Far off, in Fife or the Lothians, you note its murky crown, or rather flag, for according to the airt of the wind it sends out a long line in one particular direction. Not that its reek was worse than that of other big towns, but it was more obvious, and perhaps in the old days of peat and wood fires it even brought an agreeable odour to distant fields. Thus the balance of evidence is in favour of Edwin as 4 A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH name giver, and Dunedin is, you observe, a Celtic version of the same thing. As for Arthur's Seat, here conjecture is again let loose. The Dictionary of National Biography is by no means sure that Arthur ever existed, and with considerable hesitation it gives a shadowy biography. Then, was he a King of Cornwall or Lowland Scotland ? If he were the latter, and you take Mynyd as a name for Edinburgh you can place one of his battles hereabouts. And so you account for Arthur's Seat. As you slip down the centuries the light grows more and more, though it does not reach Edinburgh as the city of Scotland even after the Picta and Scots were united, nay, even after the boundaries of the kingdom were delimited as they practically exist to-day. Your early Scots monarch was of a peripatetic turn of mind ; he skipped hither and thither with wondrous agility, — Dunfermline, Stirling, Perth, Scone came as natural to him as Edinburgh. Nay, William the Lion showed a remarkable and what might seem — for we have not the key of the mystery — an inexplicable fondness for Haddington, where he spent all the time he could. It was not till David I. (1084-1 158) founded the Abbey of Holyrood, and Alexander II. (1214-1249) endowed the growing town with the Blackfriars Monastery, of which Blackfriars Street between the High Street and the Cowgate still preserves the memory, and the church of St Mary in the Field, afterwards to acquire such an evil repute as Kirk o' Field, that things began to turn decidedly in favour of Edinburgh as the Scots capital — nor does it bulk large in the War of Independ- S EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS ence. In 1291 Edward I. took it after a siege of fifteen days, but in 13 12 it fell, like many other fortresses, again into the possession of the Scots, In the previous century the Treaty of Falaise (i 174), by which William the Lion, to save his own skin, con- fessed the English King as overlord, surrendered it to England.but it was peacefully recovered twelve years later. By the time of the James's, which began in 1406, it was fairly acknowledged as the Scots capital. Up to then English annalists had sneered at it as a village, and Froissart tells us it had only four hundred houses. James I. seems linked with Perth, because there he met his tragic end, but his chief m"rderers were executed, with hideous tortures, in Edinburgh, and there the boy prince was crowned as James 1 1. In his reign Edinburgh was enclosed by a wall (temp, 1456) that took in little more than the High Street, as starting from the Castle Rock it ran east between that and the Cowgate, turned north by the Netherbow and ended at the Nor' Loch, its length was but a mile or so. The Wellhouse Tower in Princes Street Gardens, right under the Castle, is the only substantial remaining part. James III. (1460- 1483) was peculiarly the patron of Edinburgh. He granted its " Golden Charter," making the Provost and Bailies, Sheriffs in their own territories, giving them jurisdiction over Leith, a jurisdiction not shaken off till the middle of last century. And the Queen and the ladies of her courtknitted with their ownfairhands a gorgeous flag for special Edinburgh use. This was the famous Blue Blanket, for centuries the burgher standard. 6 A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH The reign of James IV. has one impressive memory for Edinburgh, for in 1513 the King, and for some time it was thought the Kingdom, fell at Flodden. Even yef the memory of that memorable field — a calamity it has been said, rather than a disgrace — stirs within you as you move through the town. At the Cross the ghostly herald appeared at midnight and announced well-nigh every famous name in Scotland to appear before his Master within forty days, and all those named fell at Flodden save a certain Mr Robert Lawson who, ill and sleepless, paced uneasily the wooden gallery of his house near by, at the dread hour. How his hair stood on end when the ghostly voice rang through the silent street ! How terrible to hear his own name among those proclaimed ; yet lost he not his presence of mind. Hastily procuring a coin, he dashed it on the pavement, and appealed to his Maker against the powers of dark- ness and destruction. A strange legend truly, with its exact observance of Scots legal forms mixed with classic imagery and mediaeval superstition ! A summons and proclamation at the Cross was a sight and sound of all others the most familiar to an Edinburgh citizen, and the tabling of a coin as a sign of protest and appeal is still in use in grave Scots' assemblies. In the Flodden Wall Edinburgh has one material sign of this terrible year. The rulers rose to the occasion ; vain lamentation was sternly put down, the women went to quiet prayers and the men to the sword and the trowel, and in desperate haste — a haste of which it is said you can still see traces in the wall itself — a huge 7 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS buttress, so to speak, was run round the whole city. It began at the Castle Rock, went south to the west end of the Grassmarket and up the Vennel to where is now George Heriot's Hospital— indeed the west wall of the Hospital grounds contains the chief existing part of that great wall. It then ran east to the College, thence north by the Pleasance and like the old wall, which no doubt it used when available, entered the High Street at the Netherbow, and making a loop to include Trinity College, ended at the Nor' Loch. And for centuries it determined the peculiar conditions of Edinburgh life. In those times of stress and turmoil, when an English invasion was a possibility or a probability for many a long day, and when all sorts of forces from the un- known might suddenly rise up against the hard-working burgher, it made all the difference in the world on which side of the wall he lived. Until that wall was finished no citizen on the height scanned the horizon without dread and terror. And afterwards he gazed on the fair prospect of hill and dale and sea with anything but longing, nay, rather you fancy he hugged himself in his cosy though malodorous den, in the recesses of some dark close, for was he not safe within the circuit of the Flodden Wall ? Yet the town needs must grow in wealth and folk, and as it could not widen it lengthened, hence those tall lands, where storey rose on storey in endless succession ; those narrow passes between them, known as closes, that careful economy of space everywhere, so that the centre of the very High Street was seized upon for houses and shops in 8 A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH the Luckenbooths and parliament chamber and law courts, and afterwards prison in the Tolbooth. It has been well said that every Edinburgh land was a street, not flat but perpendicular 1 Flodden was not a subject that poets were like to leave alone. In its own time we have Sir David Lyndsay and the balladists of whatever era ; and a later age, almost our own in fact, gave us Scott's Marmion and Aytoun's Edinburgh after Flodden — to name but these. Of James V.'s reign nothing need here be said. He died in 1542, and immediately began around his infant daughter, the new Queen Mary, those intrigues and movements of war and politics that were to hang about her whole life. First was the rough wooing by which Henry VIII. tried to win her for his son Edward. In 1544 Hertford came north. Spite of the wall he took and destroyed Edinburgh, and that so thoroughly, that it is said that nothing private of that day remains. Three years afterwards he was here again, won the Battle of Pinkie on Black Saturday, loth September 1547, and for spoil loaded himself with the leaden roof of Holyrood, the only available thing it would appear left for booty. Then follow the troubles of the Reforma- tion time. Mary of Guise made a brave fight for the old faith. As Regent for her infant daughter she proved herself a woman of uncommon ability ; she lived much in Edinburgh — indeed her splendid palace on the Castle Hill lasted until it was made the site of the Free Kirk College. The new forces were too much for her, however, and when she died in 1560 she must 9 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS have known herself defeated. Next year, on the 19th August, Mary landed in Edinburgh, and as by magic the scene was changed. The following six years were the most important in the town's history. Up to this time it had been a provincial capital, far out of the current of European thoughts and interest, now it leapt into vivid light. Suitors for Mary's hand came from England, France and Spain ; the intrigues of Holyroodi were watched and noted in all the Courts of Europe, nowhere more anxiously than at the Vatican. A mere chronicle of dates recalls the great events. On 9th March 1 566 Rizzio was murdered ; three months later James 1. was born. The February of next year witnessed the death of Damley at Kirk o' Field ; in May, Mary was married to Bothwell. On the i6th June was her last night in Edinburgh, and she herself fades from the history of the town. Kirkaldy of Grange and Lethington long held the Castle for her, but it fell in 1 573, and Mary's power so far as Edinburgh is concerned was a thing of the past. The memoirs of that time are exceedingly voluminous, a significant mark of the interest and importance of current events. We are able to trace what happened from day to day with minuteness, but with Mary's departure the centre of interest shifted, and when in 1603 James VI, and I. went south to the English throne, the importance of Edinburgh of necessity lessened. There were great rejoicings and pageants when James and his son Charles returned to their native land, but such things do not make history. More important was the signing 10 A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH of the Covenant in 1638, the mark of a great national movement. The struggle was mainly religious, and Edinburgh was the scene of its most tragic trials and executions. Here Montrose and the Argylls were put to death, here the Covenanters were confined after RuUion Green, and here a long succession of them "glorified God in the Grassmarket." Here too was the centre of the Revolution drama with its striking and impressive figures : the Duke of Gordon in the Castle, Bonnie Dundee clattering at the head of his troops along the High Street, Sir George Mackenzie facing a hostile audience in the Parliament House, the bishops of the Scots Episcopal Church expelled and rabbled at the door by the mob. But the Revolu- tion triumphed and things fell quiet again. The Darien scheme was at least directed from Edinburgh, and its house hard by the Bristo Port long retained its memory, and that led to the Union of 1707, hated and feared, fortunate for the country but disastrous for Edinburgh, destined now to be scarce even a provincial capital. The year 1736 was noted for the riot called the Porteous Mob, of little real importance, but marked by its mystery and romance, and enshrined for ever in The Heart of Midlothiun. 1745 saw Prince Charles at Holyrood, and for a flash Edinburgh might believe itself again a European capital, but the Stuarts faded away, and Cumberland's presence in Edinburgh next year seemed commonplace and prose after poetry and romance. The remaining years of the century gave Edinburgh intellectual triumphs greater and more II EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS enduring than the others, for it was then that men like David Hume and Adam Smith did work that was to last for all time; and if Principal Robertson as an historian has now lost his vogue it was at least great enough in his own day. It was then also that the town refused to be chained any longer within the Flodden Wall ; it crept a little way to the south, and to-day George Square is the most expressive mark of that extension. But in 1767 the New Town, to the north of the ravine, was planned, and its first house was built in 1769, and in time Princes Street succeeded to the whins and pasture and rock of the Lang Dykes. The next century showed that a new era of literary splendour was still reserved for Edinburgh. In 1802 the Edinburgh Review was founded, and in 18 17 Black- woods Magazine, still controlled and managed at any- rate from the north and so more faithful to its traditions than the Review or even the Encylopadia Britannica, since both once smacking so strongly of Edinburgh, are now altogether London. Then in 1843 came the Disruption, which rent, not for the first time, the national church in twain, and produced the Free, now with additions, the United Free Church. It was a genuinely Scots movement produced by a condition of things impossible to recur. It was impressive and noble. It was really the end of an auld sang, to use a phrase of the Union time. Edinburgh has not since been the theatre of an historic event. It is less and less likely that she will be so, and thus the great interest of this unique and remarkable town lies in its past. 12 A SHORT HISTORY OF EDINBURGH You must know what those stones mean as you tread them. This is the narrow theatre on which so many great and memorable tragedies were played. Everything happened in the Castle or Holyrood or in the short historic mile between the two : faithful friend and devoted foe jostled each other daily in that crowded street. From near the very confines they could have shouted to one another loud enough to be heard in a pause of that restless wind, that o' winter nights wails and moans and sobs round the tall lands of old Edinburgh as if it tried to utter the secrets of past years. Spite its grime and squalor, you accept the Old Town as the finest bit of Edinburgh. It is not now quite so squalid as it was some thirty years ago ; changes in the manners of the people, stricter sanitary laws, a return of better class business to it, have all worked in this direction. As regards the New Town, a sti-anger once remarked to me that it seemed built of rather small houses. We stood beside the Bank of Scotland in Bank Street, and were preparing to descend the Mound. When it w«ts built, Scotland was richer than it had been, and not at all so rich as it is now. Standards of living rise, and houses are the most sensitive to the change, and the change in Edinburgh seems to go ever faster. Middle-aged men remember when the town terminated at Newington and Momingside on the south. There was still a piece of country between it and Leith, and it scarcely stretched beyond Abbeyhill on the east and the Haymarket to the west of Princes Street. There are miles of new 13 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS streets now in all directions, the Braid Hills are terraced, the Pentlands are threatened. Leith is one with the capital, the two miles between Edinburgh and the sea are rapidly filling in, and the building and growing keeps steadily on and on. And the old changes : poverty and inaction, are the only things that keep a nation or a town as it is. You have that in Spain and in remoter parts of Italy ; you have an almost perfect example in Bruges, but how to find it in the capital of bustling, eager, active Scotland ? Here is no longer a political capital, here is the wealthy city. The town seems to dislimn and change before your very eyes. You scarce know what will be left. The great historic monuments, the Castle, Holyrood, St Giles, and so forth are safe, but what shall we say of the old historic lands and closes ? You sometimes get a glimpse sideways as it were of an old close, or yard, or street-corner that brings before you the Edinburgh of other days, but how long even that will be I know not. Also the New Town has suffered change. Princes Street is not as it was first built ; an edifice like the North British Hotel foreshadows a more mammoth style of architecture. Here the changes, notably on the slopes of the Calton and in the ravine, have been improvements, nor do they disturb august associa- tions as every stroke of the pick does in the Old Town : there so memorable is the history that the bare theatre, though stripped of all its furnishings, would still command our attention ; yes, restore those hills to their first de- solation, mighty ghosts would abide amid the solitude, the history of the ruin would ever hold our attention. 14 CHAPTER II TaDAY AT THE CASTLE The Core and Centre of Old Scotland— Scenic Effects— The Esplanade and its Monuments— The Argyll Battery— The Argyll Tower— Mons Meg and her Story— The Oratory of St Margaret — The Parliament Hall— The Dungeons Underneath — Birth-Room of James VI. and I. — The Honours of Scotland — Their Chequered Annals. THERE are two main points of interest in Edin- burgh: these are the Castle and Holyrood. Nothing else apprQaches them. They gather into themselves the whole tragic interest of old Scots life and history, and if we balance the one against the other we ought to give the preference to the Castle, — but I am not sure that we do. Holyrood has rarer and choicer moments ; it is more life-like and pathetic. In its old rooms the past actually lives for you again. The very dust in its chapel is " dropt from the ruined sides of kings." Amidst the bustling activities of the Castle, its ugly barracks and storehouses, you feel yourself in a modem fortress ; but put yourself away from the present, listen to the voices of the past, and you are at the very core and centre of old Scotland. Busy as it is, all is mere nothing, — ^the ghosts have it here as always in Edinburgh, — to-day is unreal and shadowy, it is the past that lives. In one thing the Castle is an easy first; Edinburgh is the city of beautiful and picturesque views, of sudden and magic effects, and 15 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS simply because the Castle is the highest inhabited spot, you have the best prospect therefrom. Even at the Esplanade, before you enter the gate, you are charmed, but you scarce dare look, or you spoil the better prospect from the Argyll Battery, and when you get there, you feel obliged to pause till you get up above on the King's Bastion. Better take in all that the Esplanade will give you and pick up-on the higher reaches what still remains unseen from the lower. I need not dwell on that view, a word must suffice. There to the north, rising sharply to the ridge and then sinking away for two miles to the sea, are the Gardens and Princes Street, and the ordered sequence of the New Town, and the huge mass of modern building that threatens to fill up all to the shore. And then there are the waters of the Firth, — ^that noble arm of the sea, with, as R. L. Stevenson puts it, " Ships tacking for the Baltic," and no end of other places one might add. And beyond is Fife and a background of great hills. To the east the old town runs down the ridge towards Holyrood, how obvious the comparison to the vertebrate frame, the closes north and south, marking the ribs running off from it ! On the south your eye runs down and up again to the College and all the group of academic buildings, to the open fields beyond, still not quite covered with the rising tide of bricks and mortar. And beyond all round are the hills, " as the mountains are about Jerusalem." Most prominent, because near at hand, the Lion Hill keeps its stately watch and guard over this precious relic of the past, this city of dreams and memories. How i6 TO-DAY AT THE CASTLE these hills ring round Edinburgh ; what character and grandeur they give it ! "I will lift mine eyes to the hills/' so must everyone in Edinburgh say. It will not take you long to walk over the Castle. True, there are eleven acres of it, but only part rivets your attention, and only part is accessible. I remember one recent visit of my own. It was a beautiful autumn day; soldiers were drilling on the Esplanade, tourists were lounging about, and I lounged too and gazed at the monuments. These are to dead-and-gone soldiers of all ranks, from the Duke of York downwards. The Duke of York, modern as he is, is the most ancient of the lot. Crimean wars, Indian wars, South African wars are all commemorated, but not the stirring incidents of the place. The needs of the day were terribly exacting. In that old Scots life men were making history, not meniorials. Everything you see has suffered change again and again. This Esplanade, for instance, is over 500 feet long and 300 feet broad ; it is level, and you walk over the moat and under the portcullis into the Castle from it as from a level, but this is only since 1753. Before that it was rough, untended ground, sloping downwards towards the city, and there was a flight of steps by which you gained the level of the drawbridge. But when the Royal Exchange was built a huge mass of superfluous earth was on hand, and was used to level it tfp. Inside, you are soon in the Argyll Battery. The particular Argyll this commemorates was John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, who commanded the Govern- ment forces at Sheriffmuir. 2 17 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS " Argyll the states hold thunder bom to wield, And shake alike the senate and the field." Thus Pope, in one of those neat couplets of which he knew so excellently the trick. His Grace was a fav- ourite of men of letters ; you remember the beneficent part be plays in The Heart of Midlothian. The Castle is intimately connected with the tragic fate of two other Argylls, namely, the Marquis of Argyll, called Gillespie Grumach, from his villainous squint, which quite spoilt a naturally sanctimonious set of features, and his son, the Earl of Argyll. They were warded in the Argyll Tower, which you reach by some steps on the left. There is nothing but a table of photos in the little rooms of the prison, nothing for the imagination to catch hold of and so call back those mournful scenes of death and ruin. Next comes the King's Bastion, wherefrom there is the view and whereon is no less a person than Mons Meg, that centuries-old fetish of the Scots folk, that idol of the Scots school-boy. " Munsch Meg " (to give phonetically the popular pronunciation) would not claim your particular notice, for 'tis but an old, uncouth mass of metal, were it not for its history. That is lost in antiquity. Once 'twas believed that Meg was a Flemish lass, and Mons recalled her place of birth. (To this effect runs the inscription on the metal.) Others said that it was made by command of James II. for the siege of Threave Castle, the last stronghold of the Douglas, and that it was cast by a local artisan, one M'Kim of Mollance. Meg was the name of his good lady, and it was his humour to trace a likeness between i8 TO-DAY AT THE CASTLE the voice, which you augur was neither soft nor low, of his wife Meg, and the thunder of the gun, and there you have the name a little contracted. The huge piece was dragged into position, a peck of powder and a granite ball, vaguely described as " the weight of a Carsphairn cow," were rammed in, the match was applied, and off went Meg with a roar which shook the firmament. Maj-garet, the Fair Maid of Galloway, was raising with beringed band a cup of wine to her lips, when lo ! enter the cannon ball and off goes the hand, ring and all ! Meg roared once again and the castle surrendered at discretion. Local tradition pointed out the spot where Meg was cast. The two bullets were found and accounted for, nay, the very ring, with Margaret's name on it, turned up in due course, and who could doubt the story after that? Meg was a great favourite with the old Scots Kings. They dragged her about with enormous trouble, and with no very appreciable advantage, to various parts of Scotland, and even into England and back again. She was covered with emblazoned cloth, decked with ribbons, pipes played before her as she was taken up and down from the Castle, and if this soothed her martial soul she was not less susceptible to the more subtle flattery implied in the greasing of her mouth ; for all these things charges appear in the royal accounts. " The great iron murderer Meg " was Cromwell's unflattering account of her in 1650, but Cromwell was an Englishman, and rather brutal in method and speech. In 168 1 Meg, who had served the Stuarts so long, may be said to have 19 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS died in their service, just before they lost for ever the throne of Britain. A salute was fired in honour of James, Duke of York, afterwards James VII. of Scotland and II. of England. It was done badly, or Meg was effete ; at any rate she burst. " Oh wellawins ! Mens Meg for you, 'Twas firing cracked thy muckle mou ! " so sings Ferguson. Yet Meg's adventures were not over. In 1753 she travelled south to the Tower of London, and only came back through Scott's influence in 1829, when with pipers and cheering mobs she was escorted to her old place. Just behind Mons Meg is the little chapel or oratory of St Margaret, the very place in truth where the sainted queen worshipped. It is one of the oldest churches in Britain. It is small, — the nave is little over 16 ft. by 10 ft. It is plain and bare. You see at once that the stained glass is modern ; a Latin inscription tells how, after long and shameful neglect, it was restored by Queen Victoria who, we are reminded, surely not from pride, but that the continuity of Britain and its history might thus be set forth, was herself a descendant of Margaret. There are many places in Edinburgh which lay strong hold on you, none more than this tiny ancient cell perched high on the rock. It has that pathetic touch which tirls " the heart-strings, thro' the breast. A' to the life," and is the peculiar and profound charm, not of this place alone but scarcely anywhere so much as of this place. You move on to the quadrangle. The western side is modern 20 TO-DAY AT THE CASTLE and worthless from our point of view. I ought here to say that the general aspect of Edinburgh Castle is now much as it was when rebuilt after the siege of 1573. That was so destructive that, after the rebuilding, it was mainly new, and it never was seriously attacked by force again. A very old aspect is supposed to be preserved in the towers which constitute the city coat of arms. Some memorable precious bits have endured through the centuries. One is the Parliament Hall. Not so very long ago it was a whitewashed military hospital, but one wealthy Edinburgh publisher restored St Giles' and laudable rivalry inspired another to restore parts of the Castle. And so this place is now beautifully done up, with arms and effigies of men in complete armour of various periods, and targets of bulls' hide and so forth, and these set off the stone floor and oak arched roof and the huge fireplace and the deep recessed windows, and you think it a fine impressive old hall. " Do not touch " is written everywhere. How violently the Scots have swung round from one extreme to another, from callous disregard to over-anxious care ! You learn with interest that deep down in the bowels of the rock are huge cavernous prisons, where for long years those who were hated or feared by men in authority have lain in darkness and sorrow. And here, too, were confined the prisoners taken in the French wars, and what sort of life they led you gather from the lively narrative of St Ives. Here, too, was confined that whimsical gentleman who appears in Scott's Rob Roy as the son of the illustrious freebooter, and in Calriona as 21 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIAN S the father of the heroine, and his adventures in fact were just as exciting as those in fiction, for did he not escape, disguised as an old cobbler, and all through a clever trick of a tall and handsome daughter? You are musing as to what her name really was, when a more august call reminds that you are keeping waiting a more impressive figure than fiction ever drew, for almost next door are the Mary apartments. And they show you the little room where James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was born, the most important event it has been called in the history of Britain. There is still something else to see, for in another room are the Honours of Scotland, the crown, the sceptre, and the sword of state and some other lesser wonders. What a history is theirs! After the battle of Dunbar the Scots authorities easily surmised that Cromwell would presently be hunting far and wide for those treasures whose money value rumour had con- siderably exaggerated. They were snatched off to the Castle of Dunnottar in Kincardineshire, not very far from Aberdeen, a well-fortified place on a high rock that was almost an island. The English discovered their whereabouts, and were soon pressing round the castle, which was defended by Ogilvy of Barras. The place was safe against attack, but it was starved into surrender. In the end Mr Grainger, the minister of the parish, his wife, and the governor of the castle concocted an ingenious stratagem to save the jewels. First a rumour was set flying that they had been taken to the continent by one of the Earl Marischal's family, then 22 TO-DAY AT THE CASTLE Mrs Grainger, with happy audacity, conveyed them from the castle, hid under some bundles of lint which she had obtained permission to remove. At dead of night the minister buried the Honours under the pulpit of his church. He unearthed them from time to time to see that they were safe, to renew the wrappings, perhaps to gloat in secret over his hidden treasure. You envy him those private nocturnal visits to the august gems. He needed something to sustain his fortitude. When the castle gave in, where were the Regalia ? asked the victors in angry amazement. They got no answer. Threats, prison, torture, were all in vain. The jewels lay safe till the Restoration, when compliments and rewards were distributed to all concerned. At the Union in 1707 it was rumoured they were to be taken to England, albeit it was provided by the Act itself that they should be kept in Scotland. And then they were locked up in the huge black kist you see in the room, and people forgot all about them, till at last in 1 8 17 the indefatigable Sir Walter got the Prince Regent to move the government for a commission to search for them. Scott was there when the kist was opened (4th February 18 18), and his emotion proved that he at least thought the matter of national import- ance, and so fitly the Castle continues to guard, as it has done through the centuries, these gems, bright not merely with their own sparkle, but with the greater lustre of august memories, those memorials of the ancient kingdom of Scotland. 33 CHAPTER III ANNALS OP THE CASTLE St Margaret of Scotland — Legends of her Death and Burial — Another Queen Margaret — Her Account of the Castle Rock — The Fortress in the War of Independence — Escape of James II.— The Douglas Tragedy— The Black Kist— Jousting under James IV. — The Burning of Lady Glamis — Mary Stuart in the Castle — The Birth of an Heir — Kirkaldy of Grange and the Siege of 1573 — Crown and Covenant in the Castle-^ Legend of the Phantom Drummer — Death of the Argylls — The Castle at the Revolution — " Bonnie Dundee '' — The Vision of Balcarres — Later Records of the Castle. I HAVE not strictly kept to the present in giving a to-day's impression of Edinburgh Castle. The ghosts are too much for one ; something of history needs must obtrude itself. And now let us leave our own time behind or in front, and turn for a little to some of the chief episodes in the romantic annals of the Rock. I have said something of its mythical origin. At the dawn of authentic history is the figure of St Margaret, the Queen of Malcolm Canmore. According to the ideals of her own age she was well-nigh perfect, and if its ways are not our ways, there is still enough left for genuine admiration. In 1093 she lay dying in the Castle, and to her in her mortal sickness Edgar brought the tale of the death of her husband and son at Alnwick. With a few 24 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE murmured words of resignation, holding in her hand the Black Rood ofScotland, the precious relic of the true cross that Edward I. was later to have for spoil, she passed away. This was in mid-November. And to her children, mourning round her bed, there came news that the Castle was besieged. There was even then in Scotland a national party who were for the old ways, and hated and feared English influence, and that robust pagan, Donald Bane, the brother of Malcolm, was at their head, determined to make short work of everything that stood between him and the throne. He was round the Castle with a huge herd of kerns and gallowglasses. The records preserve for us a glimpse of those savages, with their wrappings of dun deer's hide, the jingling rings of their armour, and their awe-inspiring yells. They were more violent than cunning, under the pall of a miraculous mist — so it seemed to the excited actors in the scene, though it was only that easterly haar which Tennyson and R. L. S., the gifted stranger and the gifted citizen, have, unlike the pious monkish chronicler, combined to curse in the choicest verse and prose, Margaret's body was conveyed away by that very west port sally, long centuries afterwards the meeting- place of Gordon and Dundee, and so down to the Forth, and across the familiar ferry for the last time. Three of her children were afterwards Kings ofScotland, and one was Queen of England, but their fates do not here concern us. We light on a trivial saying treasured up with comic effect. Alexander III. was married to Margaret, daughter 25 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS of Henry III. of England, at York, Christmas, 125 1. The poor child was only sixteen, and the grim and gloomy perch on the Rock not at all to her liking, " A sad and solitary place, without verdure, and by reason of its vicinity to the sea unwholesome," thus she mur- mured to her father. She had complaints even less reasonable ; she was " not permitted to make excursions through the Kingdom" — Ah, little she knew that Kingdom ! What a prize for Border moss-trooper or Highland cateran ! — " nor could she choose her friends or attendants," and then the voice is still. We are not told how this ancient bedchamber question was deter- mined. Possibly she found life in the Castle exciting enough. After Alexander the annals take us through the inception of the iierce struggle for independence. Edward I. got the Castle, then it was taken by Randolf in 1 3 12, and he at once dismantled it. However, the English had it again under Edward HI., though it fell into Scots hands almost immediately. In 1400 Henry IV. besieged it, but he was driven off by cold, and rain, and hunger. History is naturally enough always repeating itself. The Czar of Russia in the Crimean War boasted he had two unsurpassable Generals who always fought for him. Generals Janvier and Fevrier, and so famine and cold and hunger, the very lacks of Scotland, were the best fighters these intrepid defenders had. You turn another page. The Duke of Albany, brother of Robert III. (1390- 1406), was at the Castle one night in the early years of the century. He was pacing the ramparts with some 26 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE companions when a meteor of portentous size flashed its lurid light through the sky. The age believed that the " Heavens themselves show forth the death of princes." You do not wonder that Albany foretold a tragic end to some great personage. He took the best means to fulfil his own prediction. His nephew, the Duke of Rothesay, was in 1402 starved to death in Falkland Castle, and there is no doubt that Albany was "art and part," as Scots lawyers phrase it, in the murder. As relief, there is the comic escape of the infant James H., engineered by his mother Jane, widow of James I. He was stuffed in a box mercifully provided with a few air-holes, and so carted away as luggage. She was off on a pilgrimage to Whitekirk in East Lothian, so she gave out ; as a matter of fact she went to Stirling, and by way of anti-climax presently returned to Edinburgh. Two years later occurred the terrible Douglas tragedy of the Castle, and even the men of that iron age shuddered at the cruel report. William, Earl of Douglas, a lad of sixteen, was the head of that great house. His state , was regal, and his ambition threatened danger; so Crichton, the chancellor, thought.* He inveigled Douglas and his brother to the Castle, and as they sat at meat with the King a black bull's head was placed on the table. In such dramatic fashion was their doom inti- mated to them in symbol. The child King wept and protested in vain ; the boys were dragged forth. There 27 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS may have been some mockery of a trial, but even of that there is no record. They were forthwith done to death in the yard. Hume of Godscroft preserves the rude rhyme which still rises in your memory as you see far over the plain that ancient Castle Rock. " Edinburgh Castell, toun and tour, God grant ye sinke for sinne ; And yat even for the back dinour, Earl Douglas gat therein." In 17 S3 coffin handles and plates of gold were discovered near the scene of the execution. These were somewhat fancifully supposed to mark the graves of the Douglases. Was this strange and useless pomp an uneasy attempt to propitiate the shades of the victims ? Forty -two years pass, and again there is a deed of peculiar horror. Albany, the brother of James III., lay in the Castle under suspicion of treason. He invited the captain of the fortress to supper ; he stupe- fied his gaolers with drink, stabbed them to death, and with the help of his single servant piled them on the huge fire of the room, where they broiled in their armour. This brutality for its own sake, specially if it hid some trick, or insult, is the most unpleasing feature of old Scots life. Yet even Albany had a better side. His servant, descending the Rock first, fell and broke his thigh. Albany carried him on his shoulder two miles to Leith, whence both escaped by sea. The King refused to believe until he had gazed with his own eyes on the scene of the exploit. Yet a little time and James and Albany were completely reconciled, used 28 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE the same chamber, the same table, nay, the same bed. Under James III. popular rumour was busy; miuch was heard of a certain black kist. It was stuffed with jewels, it contained King Robert's sarke — to wit, the Bruce's coat of mail. A less pleasant, and one hopes a less trustworthy rumour credited James with an intention of collecting all the nobles of the king- dom in the hall of the Castle and there making an end of what he could not mend — repeating, as it were, the Douglas tragedy on a large scale ; and then (in 1488) himself was ended at Sauchieburn. His son, the gay, the chivalrous James IV., held many a splendid tournament here. He sat on the south side of the. Rock, above where the King's Stables Road still preserves a faint memory of other days. Then it was all green field, and there the combatants whacked one another, until (such was the invariable course of events) the Scots knight had it all his own way. His opponent lay at the last gasp, when James saved the situation by throw- ing his plumed bonnet into the list, whereat the victor refrained. In sharp contrast to all this feasting and pageantry there came, in 1 5 1 3, Flodden Field, and the reign ended in black disaster, and once more the King was an infant. Before the end of James V. the Castle witnessed another terrible tragedy. On 17th July 1537 Jane Douglas, Lady Glamis, convicted of practising sorcery to destroy the King, was burned to death on the Castle Hill. Even that stern, rude age felt pity for her beauty and her courage and hatred of the vile intrigues that 29 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS wrought her ruin. By a refinement of cruelty her husband, likewise a prisoner, was permitted, or forced, to watch her destruction from his adjacent cell. Next day, half mad, he made a frantic attempt to escape, and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below. And then came Mary Stuart and the modem world. Those bare rooms where once she lived have suffered sad changes. The setting was not unworthy of her gracious presence, for they were splendid with tapestry where the skill of the needle had strangely mingled scriptural and classical history with mediaeval romance. They were cultured with books, even if the -collection was a like curious medley. The catalogue of 143 volumes is still with us. There was Virgil and Livy, Augustine, and other works of devotion, Amadis de Gaul, and Sir Lancelot de Lake. The Lords of the Congregation looked askance at books and tapestry alike: their serious souls suspected the devil beneath this frivolity, Mary's life is most connected with Holyrood, but here in this chamber that now looks sheer down on the sordid life and mean cares of the Grassmarket, though within sight as now of the hills beyond, she gave birth, on 19th June 1566, to her son James. The town went mad with joy ; the cannon on the Rock blared forth notes of triumph ; a thanksgiving was held in St Giles' ; an un- couth rhyme came to be in everyone's mouth : " Howe'er it happen for to fall, The Lion shall be lord of all." This was fathered on Thomas the Rhymer, and 30 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE though tiresome Lord Hailes long afterwards proved it a forgery, what mattered ? It had done its work and vanished ere Hailes was born. It was thought well to intimate to Elizabeth that she had an heir as well as Mary, so James Melville rode to London in four days or so. Why this indecent haste ? Elizabeth must have thought. What she said is historic: "The Queen of Scots has a fair sort, and I am b)ut a barren stock." For once the natural cry of the woman broke the cold reserve of statecraft. At home the nation seemed united, yet the preachers had some dismal croakings. By the devilish art of a Catholic lady, the Countess of Athol, the pangs of childbirth were shifted from Mary to the Lady Reres. A curious variant of the royal whipping-boy tradition ! Knox and his fellows might have bided their time. Mary, alas ! was presently to supply them with cause enough wherewith to croak and fulminate at their hearts' content; there was to be no lack of matter. But Mary passes from the Castle, though Kirkaldy of Grange held it for her for three years. He had been put there by the Regent Moray, but had swung round entirely to Mary's side, and by him was Lethington, the keen-witted politician, who irritated Knox now and again to quite unseemly wrath. The last days of the siege were terrible ; three thousand cannon shot poured into the devoted fortress; it was torn to pieces bit by bit ; the oratory of St Margaret, the Royal lodging on the east, and the Parliament Hall on the south alone were left. There was no food to eat and no water to drink, for the very wells were 31 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS poisoned. There was nothing for it but unconditional surrender. One curious tpuch marked the end. An English f- force had aided Morton's attack, but the Governor arranged with his deadly Scots enemies that they and not the English should enter first. This to save the honour of the Scots' name, well nigh the only thing those mortal foes had in common. Knox, how- ever, retained a strong liking for Kirkaldy of Grange, and had striven to bring him round again to his own side, but failed. It was not the time, nor was Scotland the place, where prisoners or their captors thought of mercy. On the 3rd August 1573 Kirkaldy was hanged " in the face of the sun," as Knox had foretold on his death-bed, and under the shadow of those walls he had so stoutly defended. Knox had mysteriously hinted at some sign of grace at the last. As Kirkaldy swung from his gibbet the sun came forth from a cloud and flashed on his face; he slowly lifted his bound hands and let them fall again. It was believed he had sought and found mercy at this supreme moment. His head and the heads of his companions were stuck high on the ruins. And now for a little the annals show a lighter page. On 17th June 1633 the Earl of Mar entertained Charles I. to a great banquet in the hall. On the next day he was conducted in Royal state from the Castle to Holyrood, where with all the old splendid rites he was crowned King of Scotland, England, France and Ireland. There was one jarring note. An em- broidered crucifix was noted hard by the altar, and 32 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE the Bishops' genuflexions thereto "bred great fear of the inbringing of popery." But the cause of the Covenanters steadily gained strength, and five years after Leslie took and held the Castle for them. And now it was the turn of the Covenanting lords ; a banquet was given to them in the great hall, and a blue banner inscribed " For an oppressed Kirk and broken Covenant" was displayed. The Civil War was a time of peculiar stress and strain, for the nation was profoundly divided against itself. • When Charles was beheaded and Cromwell was moving north, strange visions flashed before the eyes of the people. Meteors formed like swords glittered in the sky ; spectral troops of horse marched across the hills ; and in the Castle a phantom drummer beat the rounds night after night, till Dundas, the Governor, perplexed and dismayed, stood sentinel himself, and with his own ears heard the old Scots march played by invisible hands on an invisible drum, and there sounded in his ears the clang of accoutre- ments and the tread of many soldiers, and the ghostly echoes seemed to pass right by him, and then fade away in the distance, till nothing was heard but the soughing of the drear midnight wind. But neither men nor ghosts stayed the mighty Cromwell ; he won Dunbar ; he took the Castle ; he finally crushed the Royalists at the " crowning mercy of Worcester," and for ten years England and Scotland alike were at peace under his rule. The justice thereof, in the latter country, extorted administration and respect — nay, there was something 3 33 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS like enthusiasm. He was feasted in his life, and after his death the rulers of Edinburgh planned a statue for him in the Parliament Close. But the Restoration came, and they thought better of it. The Dead Lion was burned in effigy, and the Merry Monarch had the monument. You may see it to-day in that same Parliament Close or Square, as they afterwards had it, under the shadow of St Giles; the steed is almost spurning with its hind legs the stone that marks the resting-place of Knox. "Odds fish!" sure Charles muttered with a grin when he heard the story. The next years are sad with the memory of the Argylls. The Marquis had placed the Crown on the King's head, but he went from his prison in the Castle to the scaffold in 1661, and his son, the Earl, was in that same prison in 168 1, and only escaped on the very eve of his projected execution. His fate was deferred, not averted. In 1685 he was taken, after his abortive invasion of Scotland, and placed in his old quarters, which he also left but to die. The Revolution of 1688 followed, and long after Edinburgh, and nearly all Scotland, had gone over to the new order, the Duke of Gordon held out stoutly for King James. All the world knows, for has not Scott preserved for us, in well-nigh the most romantic lines he ever penned, the memory of this romantic period in Scots history ? Claverhouse, with sixty horsemen, rode proudly down (not the West Bow, however, but) the High Street, and left the city by the Leith Wynd Port, and so along the Lang Gait, afterwards the Lang Dykes, and now Princes 34 ANNALS OF THE CASTLE Street. And then he climbed up to the west sally port of the Castle, for his Grace had been watching him with a telescope and had signalled him with a red flag. You can still see that sally port and you can imagine the terms of a conference of which nothing is known, though tradition has handed down one striking phrase. The Duke asked what course he would take: "Where'er the shade of Montrose shall direct me," said Dundee as he descended the Rock. " He waved his proud hand, and the trumpets were blown, The kettledrums clashed, and the horsemen rode on, Till on Ravelstons' cliffs, and on Clermistons' Lee, Died away the wild war-notes of Bonnie Dundee." And so he moves on to his fate at Killiecrankie, his memory enshrined ip the passionate hate and the not less passionate worship of men. In the meantime the Castle held stoutly out. Heralds summoned the Duke again and again, but as they paraded before him in all their finery he pleasantly asked, why had they not first turned their coats ? As he tossed them some guineas to drink the health of James VII. perhaps they were not much disturbed ; at any rate the lost cause was not saved by an epigram. When things pressed a certain John Grant volunteered to go forth to discover if there was any hope of rescue, and when, after two days, he signalled from the Lang Gait a decisive " No," it was felt that the end had come. On 13th June 1689 the Castle for ever was lost to the Stuart cause. The buildings were speedily repaired, and their chief use 35 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS hereafter was as a prison. Here was immediately confined the Earl of Balcarres. During the night of the 27th July of that same year an unseen hand drew the curtains of his bed, and Dundee appeared to his old comrade " as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his laced buff coat and his left hand on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made." He said nothing, but vanished from the Earl who called distractedly after him. At that very hour, so Balcarres afterwards learned, Dundee was lying dead on the far-off field of Killiecrankie. I have quoted this, as the reader may recognise, from " Wandering Willie's Tale " in Redgauntlet, for I have always thought that Scott took his description there from the account of this apparition. No doubt it was but a dream. In a pro- fessedly materialistic book. Letters on the Laws of Maris Nature and Development,hy Harriet Martineau and Henry George Atkinson it is stated as an undoubted fact " that dyingpeople have the power to influence theminds of their friends at a distance, so that they are present, or rather seem to be present before them." I cannot tell ; we are not quite so sure as we used to be that we have de- limited exactly the boundaries of the spirit world. There is little else to say about the Castle. There were several abortive plots to take it. In the Porteous Mob it might have played a great part, but it did not, and the same may be said of the episode of the '45. The residue of the chronicle is indeed small beer. Let us off to Holyrood. 36 CHAPTER IV " AT HOLTROOD The Approach to Holyrood— Charm, Beauties and Memories of the Palace— The Entrance — The Gallery of Kings — The Crowd of Shadows — The Darnley Rooms — The Mary Stuart Rooms — The Secret Staircase— Comments of Visitors — The Graves in the Abbey — Lord Belhaven — Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney and Shetland — Royal Vault — A Legend of Holyrood — Queen Mary's Bath and Croft-an-Righ — The Gardens — The Precincts. THERE is one fit approach to Holyrood, You must walk down the historic mile from the Castle. As you descend the street becomes less prosperous, less reputable. In the Canongate you are in a genuine bit of old Edinburgh. The houses are ancient and infirm ; the closes are frequent, dim, mysterious ; and at the end there is Holyrood, with the scarlet-coated sentinel pacing before the gate, the visible symbol of a rc^al palace. It is iinpossible to purge your mind and consider the place without local association. You have seen it already in fact or picture, and you must have read in history or romance something about it. Here is, how- ever, I fancy the impression of the impossible person to whom it were in every way novel. Interesting, antique place, surely, with some sort of a history ; rooms with queer old pictures and queer old furniture and quaint tapestry on the walls, but nothing magnificent or im- 37 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS posing. From it there is a prospect of a noble hill on one side and glimpses of an ignoble slum on the other ! Ah ! but the Chapel ! Here it is plain that generations of men, high in place and great in wit, are buried, their graves strangely mixed with the graves of humbler folk. The very stones tell their story, for the Chapel is roof- less, and its walks are crumbling, and every pillar is broken, and every line marred, the glorious west front itself but a fragment. Enough remains to show that in distant times men lavished all their wealth and skill on those stones. At the south-east corner is the small, dark door of the vault, where is gathered together the dust of the Royal House of Stuart. Would not the stranger speculate on the history of that house, and the tombs, and the Chapel, so exquisitely beautiful, the very poetry of ruin ? But whatever he might guess, it could not be anything so exciting and remarkable as the simple truth. All that is to be seen at Holyrood is to be seen very quickly. There is a long gallery, and three or four rooms on two floors ; the rest is not shown. This " rest " only dates from Charles II.'s time, and is not of the first interest. Here are the rooms of the Royal Family or their representatives, the Lord High Commissioner or Hereditary Keeper. The gardens are but a few almost bare fields, of scanty extent, that lie round. Compare this with any other palace you know and Holyrood comes off poorly. Versailles ? The idea is ridiculous. Not here do you find endless succession of rooms, rich in gilding and every trick of the up- 38 AT HOLYROOD holsterer's art ; nor those famous gardens, whose fountains are the wonder of the world. Hampton Court ? There too is a coil of rooms, with paintings by famous artists, and the gardens splendid and imposing. Not on such things does the attraction of Holyrood rest. From the window you look on Arthur's Seat and the long stretch of the King's Park, and that is the park of this house ; and the very slums that are on the north side, the shriek of the railway whistle, the smoke of the factory chimney, give edge and point to the picture. Here was unfolded the most romantic story the world has ever heard, and few as these rooms are, you find in them a rarer and higher interest than more pretentious places can furnish. Holyrood, even as show place, is not unworthy of its history. Let us walk through. You go right into the precincts, for the noble arched gate-house that once barred the way has gone since 1753. The fountain fronting the door is never without admirers, and is so crowded with figures that it would take some time to go over it. If you have already been at Linlithgow Palace you will recall its prototype on a simpler scale and of a more battered and antique air. You pass in under the great entrance; the four towers, the courtyard, the covered walk round under the arches need not here be detailed. You turn to the left and walk up the stairs to the first floor, and so into the Gallery of Kings, which runs east and west through the whole of the building. Here are the hundred Scots monarchs. They were all done by Flemish De Witt between 1684 and 1686 at something under three guineas 39 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS a head. You will not think them very good art. Down to Charles II. the old historians count one hundred and eight, and there were still four to come ; that is if we end the story with the Union of 1707. The early ones are quite mythical, and though it has been charitably suggested, in regard to the middle set, that the painter copied some at least from portraits then extant, I don't believe it possible. Why, he could not afford to run about ; he would not have cared to take all the trouble. The portraits have more than a family likeness, they are not without a certain rude force. Fergusius I. — B.C. 330, They had no doubts in those days. This is the founder of the Scots monarchy, the prince who brought the Stone of Destiny from the Hill of Tara in Ireland to Dunstaffnage Castle. That is the stone beneath the coronation chair at Westminster, but it only enters into authentic history some centuries after- wards, when it gets to Scone. His Majesty looks every inch a king, fit founder for a great Empire. There is not another Fergusius till 404 A.D. Achaius takes us on to 787 ; he was a friend of Charlemagne, and according to tradition supplied that monarch with a number of superlatively-educated Scots teachers. With Eugenius I. you are back again in the mist of 357. I will not lay irreverent hands on those poor shadows. Men believed in and were inspired by them. Did not the Covenanters when addressing Charles I. solemnly remind him of the unshaken loyalty of their forefathers to the 107 Kings his ancestors? and had not Shake- speare the same thought in his mind when he makes 40 AT HOLYROOD pass before Macbeth's bewildered sight an august pro cession of phantom royalties? In the centre of the room are the altar pieces that once stood in Trinity College. You pass on to Lord Darnley's rooms, which are on the same floor, the audience-chamber, the bed- room which opens from it, and the little turret in the corner of this last, called the dressing-closet. I will not attempt to analyse the old-world charm of these rooms or the ones above them, which are called Queen Mary's, or guess how much is due to the memories or to the tapestry, the panelling, the pictures, for all combine into one impressive whole. The pictures, to name but these, though oddly mixed, are interesting, even for their history ; possibly some are from the Parliament House, to which they lent grace before the Union. You hope so. Most are of great people whose records mix with those native to the place. That handsome gentle- man is the Admirable Crichton, first of all wandering Scots ; that handsome lady is the Queen of Hearts, Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James VI. and I. It is through her you recall that the present royal family hold the throne. You continue the broad stair- case by which you entered up to the Mary rooms on the next floor. There is a narrow stair in the thickness of the walls running from the basement and com- municating with the first and second floors. A good many years ago I remember going up and down this stair, but it is now kept closed. It was up here that the murderers of Rizzio tracked their prey, and in the south-east corner of the Audience-chamber a brass 41 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS plate marks where the victim was hacked to death. In old days there used to be a huge black mark, " the damned spot" that would not "out," as certain piously believed, whilst others profanely averred it was renewed from time to time by bullock's blood or red paint. It had been shown to Evelyn in 1722. I saw it in the days of my youth, and even now seem to remember exactly how it looked. Here Mary and John Knox had their wordy fights, and as he went from here he found the Queen's Maries amusing themselves, " targeting of their tails," as he with more force than elegance would term it. With a certain gloomy humour he mocked at their gambols. " Fie on that knave. Death, that was presently coming to make an end of all." What the ladies said or how they took it is not recorded, for Knox is his own historian, and he gives both words and actions to himself. From the Presence- chamber to the bedroom is but a step, and there on your right hand is the private supper-room, the tiniest of places, and yet in some ways the most interesting room in the Palace, for here Rizzio was at supper with the Queen when the conspirators burst in on them. It is never far from tragedy to comedy, or even farce. Violat- ing all historical propriety, a block of marble stands in this room. It was roundly asserted to be the altar on which Mary knelt during the marriage ceremony with Darnley. Now the Dukes of Hamilton are hereditary keepers of the Palace. At no very distant date one in residence was served by a French cook, who brought this block whereon he might make pastry ! 42 AT HOLYROOD At last you are in the genuine old part of the Palace — in James V.'s, or, as some would say, James I V.'s Tower. You find the little room, as well as the bedroom, crowded with visitors. The place affects each in differ- ent ways, and you cannot decently exclaim a penny for your thoughts to anyone. Sometimes they save you the trouble. "They did themselves very Well in those days, for, considering everything, it is a good-sized bed- room." So I heard one lady, standing behind me, remark to the other with complacent approval. Yes ! but this was the room of one who had been Queen of Scotland, France, and almost of England — one of the great figures of history. When you leave the staircase for the open air you go a few steps under the piazza eastward, then by a door to the left you enter the Chapel. As you see at once, time, age, neglect, every unfavourable condition has worked for destruction, and in a whimsical, fantastic way. The people whose monuments are spared are by no means the most considerable of the crowd. Thus a square tower by the west doorway on the north contains the effigy of Lord Belhaven. The peer reposes there, very magnificently done in marble, tricked out with robes and gauds of all kinds, and there is a prolix Latin epitaph. The prying antiquarian has dug up some scandalous passages in the life of the deceased gentle- man. One incident may be given, for it illustrates the times. Charles L had a mind to persuade the Scots nobles to disgorge in whole or part their as yet not perfectly-digested share of the old Church lands. He 43 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS sent down the Earl of Nithsdale to bring this about. Now, your old Scots noble held to his lands with the grip of death, and those whose possessions were threatened speedily determined that if fair speech would not avert the danger, they would presently fall on their opponents, "in the old Scottish manner, and knock them on the head." Belhaven was blind, but he was determined to do his part, so he kept firm hold of a King's man with one fist as if for support. His free hand was buried in his robe ; it had a dagger for the other's heart. The measure was not pressed, and the blow remained unstruck. The story has been doubted, and one would scarce have troubled to tell it save for the accident that makes his figure bulk so large in this burial-place of Kings, At the door of the Royal vault you do well to remember that this broken ruin is all that remains of the great Abbey of Holyrood, and that the dust in that vault collected by the pious care of our late Queen is all that remains of so many former dwellers in the palace. There are hundreds of other tombs of very various degrees of interest. One tablet commemorates the life of Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney and Shetland. He officiated at the marriage of Mary and Bothwell. History by no means re-echoed his flat- tering epitaph; most writers on Holyrood favour him with brief contemptuous words in passing. Some names are strangely out of keeping. Thus there is a certain Thomas Laws, Esq., out of Northumberland, who died on i8th December 1812, "one instance 44 AT HOLYROOD among thousands of the uncertainty of life, and the instability of earthly things," and so on, which is all very well. But what on earth is he doing in this galley ? The names of humbler folk from the Canongate are not rare, and are easily accounted for. Here was for some time the Canongate parish church, for the present church and churchyard are comparatively recent, as I tell elsewhere. After all, it was not so difficult at one time to get your bones laid in this famous spot ; to-day it is far other. One or two families still possess the right Here, for instance, is laid a French Duchess and Scots Countess of high and ancient lineage, who died as late as 1895. Let "the violet of a legend blow" around her eccentric memory. The lady had a passion for things connected with Mary Stuart. The story went that she had a suite of apartments in her house at Paris done up after the pattern of those old rooms at Holyrood, and much more to the same or stranger effect. I mentioned her to one of the keepers, and found her memory was green in the Palace. She got leave from the authorities to spend a night in Mary's rooms, and therein, as dusk came on, was safely locked. I was curious : " Had she said anything ? Did she see any- thing ? " The keeper perhaps thought thit he had gone too far. " What could she see ? " he coldly answered, and turned away to supply the stock information as to Rizzio's tomb. I never learned the sequel of the story, or whether the lady heard anything but the shriek of the railway whistle — for the rail is close at hand in that same valley between Arthur's Seat and the Calton Hill. 45 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS But a vigil among the midnight shadows of Holyrood was an eerie experience. The lady now sleeps for ever in the very heart of it all, and so surely has her content ! There are two small outlying buildings within the precincts of Holyrood. The nearest one to the north- west is of two stories and is nowadays used to store the gardener's tools. In popular tradition it is always Queen Mary's Bath, because here she was wont to lave herself in wine, or milk, or water, according to various accounts. Not either of the first two, you judge, for prying John Knox or his kind had ne'er let slip so obvious a mark for the stone of their wit or their argument. And though it is of course possible that she used it for a bath-house it is more likely that this is only an example of the local tendency to attach the memory of Mary Stuart to anything and everything. If you continue your walk along the road eastward of this so-called bath you mark another house on the north-east end of the Palace ground. It is Croft-an- Righ, or the King's Croft. It is called Croftangry in Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate. It now serves to house the gardener. But here when in Edinburgh, and. when on good terms with his sister, there dwelt Mary's half-brother, James Stuart, afterwards the Regent Moray. It seems to date from the fifteenth century, and is worth seeing inside and out. Of the Palace gardens there is little to be said. The luxuriant vegetation of an earlier time, "the parterres and pleached alleys," are long vanished, and even the common grass thickens in that 46 AT HOLYROOD air of factory, and brewery, and railway. A prominent object is a fine sundial inevitably called Queen Mary's, although it bears the initials of Charles I. and his Queen, Maria Henrietta, with the date of his coronation. Although the streets that hem in the Palace on this side are poor and mean, yet they are not without interest. Here and again is a curious old house in a hidden corner, and at every other step you catch a glimpse of HolyroOd, or its Chapel, or the Lion Hill in its overshadowing majesty. 47 CHAPTER V THE STORY OP HOLTROOD The Legend of King David — The Foundation of the Abbey- Fate of the Black Rood of Scotland — The Right of Sanctuary of the Abbey and the Palace— The Thirty-one Abbots— Holyrood a? Palace — Marriage of James IV. and Margaret Tudor — Other Royalties — Queen Mary's Reception — Her Happy Days— The Storm-cloud — Murders of Rizzio and Darnley — Wild Voices round the Palace — James VI. at Holyrood — The Bothwell Escapades — Holyrood after the Union of the Crowns — Palace burned down and rebuilt — The Last Riding of the Parliament — Royal Fugitives at Holyrood — Later days. THIS is the miraculous legend that accounts for the foundation of Holyrood. The 14th September 1 128 was Holy Rood Day. David I., spite his own piety and the memory of his mother, would a-hunting go. Like William the Conquerer, as bitterly described by the Saxon Chronicle, he loved the tall deer as if he had been their father. His confessor remonstrated with him, but down he went from the Castle, through the glades of the thick forest of Drumsheugh, whose memory is still preserved in the name of Edinburgh's most aristocratic street. He lost his companions and was confronted by a fierce hart. He was in near danger of his life, and as he prayed in his distress, a miraculous cross was thrust into his hand, at sight whereof the beast turned tail and fled, or was slain according to another version, and David returned to the fortress. That night a celestial vision appeared in his dreams, and bade him lay the founda- 48 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD tion of the Abbey on the place of his extremity, and hence the beginning of a long story. James VI., centuries after, as he stood by his grave, petulantly girded at him for " ane sair sanct for the Crown." He was prodigal in precious gifts to the Church. The British Solomon had the trick of words with a tang and point and force of their own that fixed them in men's minds and keeps them in ours to-day. But David in sport and faith followed the ideal of his own time, and what can even a King do more ? It seems scarce worth while to break this butterfly of a fairy tale on the wheel of historical criticism. The learned have pointed out that many years pass before the legend emerges, though early in the fifteenth century the arms of the Abbey show a stag's head with a cross between the antlers. The Holy Rood in the new Abbey was in truth the Black Rood of Scotland, which we hear of at St Margaret's death-bed. It had its own adventures but was finally lost to Scotland in 1346 at Neville's Cross, where along with King David II. it fell to the English by the fortune of war. They kept it in Durham Cathedral till the Reformation. Then, as things are apt to do in time of trouble, it disappeared and was never heard of again. It were not difficult to rationalize this story. King David was fond of hunting, the wolf and the wild boar were familiar on that savage soil ; even the stag had a hard life and was a ferocious brute, and the weapons of chase were far from perfect. David must have been not once or twice only in no small peril. It was an age of miracles, and he may well have put down his safety to the direct agency of Heaven. At 4 49 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS all times men have dreamed strange dreams ; and there was a confessor at his elbow to improve the occasion. Honestly enough he found all miraculous and yet obvious. The sacred Rood of the pious mother had worked for the life of her dear son. There you have the whole story. A community of Augustinian canons regular first had its house on the Castle Rock and they were established and endowed in the Abbey. Power was given to those same canons to found a borough between Holyrood and Edinburgh, and so the Canongate rose into being. You must remember that " gate " is really " gait," Scots for a way, just as the Lang Gate-^or Gait — was once a road where Princes Street now stands. Still here and there in this same Canongate, and now and again, as trade-mark or sign, you see the cross between the antlers of the stag. Those are the Canongate heraldic bearing, because they were the arms of the foundation whence it had its being. For motto it had Sic itur ad astra. Carlyle spied this motto above the shop of a breeches maker, and because he would not understand, or chose to ignore the obvious explanation, made it the occasion of pungent, caustic and scornful remarks. Almost as matter of course Holyrood had right of sanctuary. But here one must note a distinction clearly explained by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his admirable little book on the Abbey. The right still exists. If it be useless it is because you don't, since 1880, imprison for debt in Scotland. If you did — and many Scots traders urge a restoration in modified form of the old law — the immunity would revive unless specially ex- So THE STORY OF HOLYROOD eluded. The first right of sanctuary belonged to the place as a Holy house ; the doctrine was rooted fast in the faith and practice of mediaeval times. In Scotland it came to an end with the Reformation. In England, eminently the land of lawyers, it was defined with curious precision. There are hundreds of cases thereon in the old law books. It lasted down into quite modern times. All the privileges of Alsatia, whereof you read so much in the Fortunes of Nigel, were founded on it, and under the first George law-makers were still striking at its remnants. But there was another kind of sanctuary ; because the place was a Royal Palace and you could not be arrested for debt there. The bounds of the two sanctuaries, to call them so, were not co-extensive ; the debtors' refuge did not include the Canongate, which was within the Monastery precincts ; it did the whole of the King's Park, because this same Park was very plainly part of the Royal demesne attached to the Palace. Scots literature of the last two centuries is full of reference to this debtors' sanctuary. Sir Walter, in his Introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, toys almost lovingly with the congenial topic. These Lairds of the Abbey, as they were humorously called, were under the jurisdiction of an Abbey Bailie (a part once filled by Lord Jeffrey's father. The Bailie is only now in evidence on the elec- tion of Scots representative peers), who held a special court to settle their little differences. These fortunate un- fortunates had a privilege within a privilege ; o' Sundays they could not be arrested anywhere, but an they were SI EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS not in bounds by midnight they were fair game for the catchpoll. You grasp at once a hint of exciting adventures and tricks by one or the other side, a whole library of quaiqt romance. Just before and after '80 entertaining anecdotes on the subject were rife in Edinburgh. The first " sanctuary man " (to adopt the ancient English phrase) was Fergus, Prince of Galloway, a leader of the old Scots party, who plotted unsuccessfully against David I. Abbot Alwyn received him, dressed him up as a monk and stuck him with the others. Enter David, whom Alwyn implores for a kiss of peace to his monks and a general act of indemnity for their transgressions. David graciously acquiesces, the matter of form is duly ended, and, presto ! Fergus throws off his monkish dress, and, secure in his pardon proceeds to strut it with the best. David accepted the pious fraud as legitimate and proper : to that strange age the elementof trickseemed irrelevant. Fergus,having escaped this time, rose yet again, again failed, and again sought sanctuary, but now he took the cowl in right earnest. All the Scots Kings were more or less connected with this great religious house, none more so than James II., called James of the Fiery Face, from the red birth-mark on his cheek. He was born, christened, crowned and buried here, and the place still holds such scanty remains of his dust as have escaped neglect, and that desecration which the intemperate zeal of old Scots life was ready in wild ex- cess to inflict even on what its inmost soul cherished, and here now his Queen, Mary of Gueldres, sleeps with him. Down to the Reformation thirty-one abbots held 52 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD sway, but the last of them were mere secular lords. The farce of a " tulchan Bishop," whose name is preserved in a bitter jest of the time (the jests that have come down to us from old Scots life are usually bitter), was here acted on a large scale. Holyrood inevitably drifted from mere Abbey into Palace. These old religious houses were splendid places, positively and still more relatively to anything else in Scotland. Whatever of wealth or refinement or luxury existed in that rude time was to be found in them. Their sacred character protected them, not always successfully indeed, yet to some extent. It was the obvious place for a Scots King to lodge as he travelled. Thus James I. was at a monastery at Perth when he met with his end. And the castles? The monarch was often at Edinburgh or Stirling, but a fortress was a mark for attack ; comfortable housing was not the purpose of its grim walls, and a King, like other folk, loved a change. At Edinburgh, once out of the Castle, whither could he go if not to that splendid foundation that lay close at hand in the valley, and was so bound up with the very existence of his race ? But in time the Prince found that the religious house did not altogether suit. Scotland, spite of every- thing, did progress a little in wealth and culture, and so James IV. was minded to entrust a certain Master Leonard Logy with the building of a palace here. He took some five years to do it, but it was finished in 1503, in time to receive his master's bride, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. This marriage made 53 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the Scots monarchs exactly a century afterwards Kings of Great Britain. Had the Scots clearly foreseen this they could not have received the Princess more splen- didly. The King met her at Dalkeith; he was the pink of courtesy to her and her train, "and he in especial welcomed the Earl of Surrey very heartily." In ten short years they were to meet again at Flodden. The memory of their procession through Edinburgh long lingered ; the Grey Friars met them with relics which they devoutly kissed, the chaplain of St Giles' hugged himself in conscious superiority as he produced the arm bone of that saint. The Cross ran with wine whereof all might drink that would, and no doubt the population, their taste as yet unspoiled by usquebaugh, would and did. And then at the Netherbow there was that strange jumble of classic mythology and sacred history in which the age delighted. There was the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, and Justice tread- ing Nero underfoot, and Prudence triumphing over Sardanapalus, and what not? And speedily on the 8th August there was a splendid marriage. There were minstrels from Aberdeen — of all places in the world — but James IV. was the central figure, and foreign envoys record his handsome features, his long flowing hair, his sumptuous attire. Something of a scholar too! He even spoke the "language of the savages " — an unkindly reference to the Gaelic ! The stranger has something to say of the amiability of the Scots. The people were for once having a good time and everybody was in good humour. 54 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD It was to Holyrood also that James V. brought Mag- dalene, the May-day bride, the fair Princess of France. When she landed she bent down and kissed the soil of her new country. And you remember how another Scoto-French Princess kissed the sleeping poet, Alain Chartier because his lips had uttered so many beautiful things. By such trifles they still hold our thoughts^- a faint, sweet memory ! The poor child withered, in the cold northern air, and within eight weeks of her arrival she was lying dead and buried in the Abbey Church. James had to seek another bride, and in Mary of Guise found one not unworthy to cope with the iron wills and iron wits of reforming and protestant lords. In the next reign came those desperate English attempts to possess the little Scots Queen, that " rough wooing " which fared so ill. At Hereford's invasion, in 1 554, the Abbey and Palace were destroyed. It is thought a part of the spoil is still at St Albans. And then again after Pinkie, in 1 547, Hertford, now Somer- set, picked the bones so to speak, stripped off the leaden roof and took away the church bells. Yet when Mary landed at Leith, on 19th August 1551, in that evil mist which seemed to Knox a sign from Heaven of the plagues that were to blight a distracted land, the damage was already repaired ; Holyrood was rebuilt ; the church had been pieced together from the fragments of its ruins, and served as parish church of Holyrood parish, with John Craig, the colleague of Knox, as the regular and properly-placed parish minister. To wel- come Mary's arrival there was that strange serenade of 55 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Psalm tunes " made by a company of the most honest," says Knox, more concerned with the matter than the manner. Whilst Brantdme, who probably believed with the modern critic that art and morals were two differ- ent things, avers her teeth were set on edge at "the vilest fiddles and little rebecs " as bad as they could be, and the psalms chanted " so unholily out of tune." Ah, indeed, " what a lullaby for the night ! " Mary's diplo- macy rose to the occasion. " It liked her well," at least so " she alledged," records Knox, a little dubiously ; not unnaturally he had his suspicion. But even the critical Brantome had praise for Holyrood. " It was a fine building, like nothing else in the country." After this little comic interlude, on the very first Sunday, the Mass was interrupted by a tumult. The Master of Lindsay vowed the idolatrous priest should die the death, and the Presence-chamber was the scene of interview after interview with John Knox ; and she found a man she could not charm, and he found a woman he could not quell, and you see that no issue but tragedy was possible in this clash of contending passions, and creeds, and interests, and ideals. And then came the fateful year 1565. In February the Queen first saw Darnley, and conceived a sudden passion for the handsome, foolish lad, and when they danced a galliard together a choice couple they must have made. Presently, like birds of ill-omen, Rizzio and Bothwell appear on the scene. On the 29th July of that year she was married to Darnley, and soon the sky grows dark and the storm threatens. But you like to 56 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD think that Mary had pleasant days during those fouryears, spite of the harangues of Knox, spite of the moth-like folly of Chastelard, of the execution of young Gordon at Aberdeen, for those folk scarce touched her life. According to Knox himself there was dancing and flinging of the Queen and her " French fillocks." She had the pleasant company of the famous Queen's Maries — those four high-bred, handsome and spirited girls, whose history Mrs Maccunn so carefully traces for us in her book on Mary Stuart. As Mrs Maccunn points out, these same " fillocks " occupy an inordinate amount of Knox's surely limited time. His second wife, by the way, was a " fillock," of the Royal blood too 1 Martin Luther had never called him a fool, for he also could take his glass of wine. Was there just a sus- picion of truth, one wonders, in the scandalous^ gossip of the priests anent their great adversary ? Yet we need not suppose with Swinburne that Knox was con- sumed by a hopeless passion for the Queen ; it was not an age of decadent or complex emotions. Mary played and sang and even studied — is it not told that after dinner she read Livy with George Buchanan? And she hunted and hawked, and loved to go forth in splendid dress, and liked to hear the people's "God save you, sweet face," and recked not the bitter remarks of Knox as to the " stinkin' pryde of women '' ; nay, it was whispered the Queen wandered in all manner of disguise, sometimes even that of a man, through the streets of her capital at night, and this made "men's tongues to chatter faste." These were 57 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS daring frolics. Possibly she longed to get at close quarters jvith her people, to know at first-hand the life of that little crowded capital of hers. If some skilled observer had but set down for us a faithful record of those wanderings ! Alas ! that none of the masters of romance has used so profitable a theme. But we know the King and Queen agreed ill from the first. Rizzio was thought to have too much influence, and the lords, in their violent, remorseless Scots way, determined to end him, and on the 9th March 1 566 the tragedy, horrible in itself, the prelude to still greater horrors, was enacted. Rizzio was her secretary, her confessor some thought, " an old, crabbed and deformed fellow," but a man of artistic taste, pliant and useful, and Mary was kind to him, as she was to all her servants. The con- spirators nieant to get him away to try him with the quite certain result of death sentence, but a number of causes — the cowardice of Rizzio, the courage of Mary, the passion of the time — made up a horrible yet in- tensely dramatic situation. As we stand in that little supper-room, off Mary's bedchamber, and opening on the secret staircase that leads up from Darnley's apart- ments below, we picture it, with its half-dozen inmates, the music, and the song, and the wine, and the laughter and pleasant talk. Who listened then to the drear March wind that wailed and raved on the near hill, or the unsteady step shuffling on the stair? and then Darnley enters, half-tipsy, and a little fearful, with all his bravado, as he kisses the Queen, and behind him is Ruthven, ghastly pale from his sick-bed, but in full S8 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD armour and with drawn sword. There is no harm to anyone but David, they say, though presently, when Mary tries to call for help, Lindsay threatens to " cut her into collops," and then the room is filled by wild men, with daggers and torches, and the craven Italian crouches behind the Queen and seizes her skirts, and the table is upset, and had not the Countess of Argyll seized the candle as it fell all were darkness. Rizzio w£is dragged away near the door of the Presence- chamber, and there his captors lost control over them- selves. They cut one another in their haste to be at him ; fifty-six wounds were counted in the body, and there was the King's dagger driven up to the hilt, though not by the King himself, that all might know Darnley for an accomplice. " Rizzio is dead. I have seen his body," so a lady took the news to the Queen. " I will study revenge," said Mary, and then her husband staggered in and asked for a cup of wine, and there were bitter words between the pair. Rizzio's body was not allowed to rest ; it was thrown downstairs, laid on a chest, and stripped by the porter, who, after the true manner of the baser Scot, was malignantly interested in the ruin of his betters. " This was his destiny," thus he sourly moralized, " for upon this chest was his first bed when he came to this place, and now he lieth a very niggard and unknown knave." Mary almost immediately talked the silly Darnley over. They fled together from the Palace. Fate led them right over Rizzio's freshly-turned grave, and Darnley was startled into a chance reference. 59 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS The Queen foretold " that a fatter than he should lie as low ere the year was out." Darnley was presently his companion and neigh- bour in the grave, for on the lOth February next he lay murdered at Kirk o' Field. By May there was another marriage in Holyrood, and that was the Queen and Bothwell. Of what share Mary had in the Kirk o' Field business I do not here discuss. Of late years the critical battle has gone against her, Mr Andrew Lang scarcely holds up a wavering banner, the most at least think her a passive accomplice. They find so much to say in palliation that her sin might seem almost venial. The Edinburgh folk had no doubts and no excuses. In the deadest of the night wild voices rang round Holyrood and pierced their way to Mary's ears ; the strongest words in that bitter old Scots speech — words that struck worse than stones — were hurled at her. And then someone with a trick of classical quotation — perhaps her old tutor, George Buchanan himself — fixed a particularly cruel line from Ovid on her gate one night, so that when she fled from Holyrood on the 6th June 1567 she was, you fjancy, glad to be away. That same month, on the last night she spent in Edinburgh, she was there for an hour or two, and never saw her capital or her palace again. James VI.'s connection with Holyrood was intimate and familiar: when he grew up he became on close and friendly terms with townsfolk and preachers. He hugely delighted both by describing the service of the English Church as "an ill-mumbled Mass," a phrase 60 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD the stout Presbyterians of Edinburgh ne'er forgot, though James, whose thoughts under the soothing influence of Episcopal flattery was soon to be far other, had given much to be able to recall it. Like his grandson of the famous epigram, he said wise things though he never did them, save that he and grandson alike had the art of keep- ing their seats on the throne and their heads on their shoulders ; an art in which the Stuarts were now and again singularly lacking. The thorn in King James's flesh at Holyrood was Francis, Earl of Bothwell, for the title had been re-created. He was supposed to be high in favour with the Queen ; he made the maddest raids on Holyrood, to get either at the King or his ministers ; alarming enough, though nothing very particular ever came of them, and Bothwell at length fled the country and died in exile. At one on a July morning, in 1 593, the King rose in terror from his bed " with his breeks in his hand," so Birrel dryly reports. He adjured Bothwell to do him no harm. " No, my good bairn," was the insolent reply. James was not reassured ; he rushed to the Queen's chamber and found the door locked. Then he remem- bered he was King, turned on his intruders, and told them to strike if they durst. And of course they durst not, and help comes, and peace is patched up, not before the citizens were pouring in to James's rescue, for spite occasional quarrels they had a particular though not respectful fondness for Solomon, and King and Queen appear at the window all smiles and bows, and the curtain falls on this roaring comedy — or sorry farce shall we call it, when we think of James " with his breeks in his hand " ? 6r EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Solomon's predecessor and successor, his mother and his son, had their fill of sorrow and evil. They knew well every turn of Fortune's wheel, and they were " sad, bad, glad, mad," and anything else you like, only they were never ridiculous. Time brings on the night of Saturday, 26th March 1603. James was roused and told he was King of England, and in due course and in due state he proceeded south. Once he came back ("like the saumon," as he quaintly phrased it) in May 16 17 and was well received, and on the 28th June he departed not to return. His son was not crowned till 1633. He craved the Scots to send the Honours to London that he might be invested there, but they would not hear of it, and Mahomet had to go to the mountain. There were the usual feastings and splendour ; Charles touched a hundred people for the King's evil. He made Edinburgh into a see, and endowed it with the old Abbey lands; he appointed Hamilton, Hereditary Keeper of the Palace, and the appointment is still in the family. And then Cromwell and his soldiers came, and on 13th November 1650, by accident or design, the Palace was fired, though by great good fortune James V.'s tower stood fast. Crom- well rebuilt it, but his rebuilding was pulled down, and between 1671 and 1679 the Holyrood we know was constructed. Sir William Bruce of Balcaskie was architect and Robert Mylne the builder, and the Abbey church was decorated as the Chapel Royal, and spiritual provision was made elsewhere for the good folk of the Canongate. On James H.'s succession, nowhere did he 62 THE STORY OF HOLYROOD set to work to Romanize more thoroughly than at Holyrood. He adapted the chapel for the Catholic ritual; he revived the order of the Knights of the Thistle, and allotted them stalls therein. When Dutch William invaded the Edinburgh mob rose and sacked Holyrood, and in a few minutes spoiled the chapel. In 1707, the fated year of union, for the last time there was a Riding of the Parliament in Edinburgh, and then Holyrood became twice a place of shadows. The Com- missioner comes no longer to the Parliament but to the General Assembly, while that Parliament is shrunk into a meeting of peers, held in the Gallery of Kings to elect representative members. An attempt was made to re- roof the church in 1758, but it was done stupidly; ten years after the whole thing came crashing down. The mob rushed in to view the ruin, the royal tombs were again rifled, and Holyrood entered on its very worst period. I p£iss over Prince Charlie for the moment. The next King was George IV., with Sir Walter Scott as Master of the Ceremonies. It was a wonderful success, and it first brought the Highlands and Highland dress decidedly into fashion. The abode of French exiled Royalties in this house of shadows has a mournful interest. Queen Victoria showed a certain generous courage when she pitched her tent even for a day or two among those possibly hostile ghosts, but the kindly care which she and Prince Albert gave to Holyrood is not the least of the many claims she has to the gratitude of the north. 63 CHAPTER VI THE HISTORIC MILE The High Street and Canongate — Its Divisions — Romantic Note in Scots Annals — The Old Time Aspect— The Great Invasion — The Closes — Their Strange History — Inscriptions on the Houses and their Meanings — The Changes Inevitable. THE distance from the top of the hill, which is the Castle, to the flat ground at the bottom, where is Holyrood, is about a mile — " the historic mile " it has been called. When you leave the Esplanade you go down the Castle Hill to the Assembly Hall, and enter the Lawnmarket which stretches to St Giles. Still going downwards is the High Street till you come to St Mary Street. There was the Netherbow, and there Old Edinburgh ended. You keep on and the Canon- gate leads you to Holyrood. But since to-day it all forms one continuous street I shall take it as a whole. In its upper reaches the way is broad and spacious, tall, commanding houses rise on either hand ; there is a prospect of hills at the foot beyond Holyrood, and from points on both sides, as you stroll along, you have other views of hills. You are on a ridge, and on the right and left the whole way are a great number of closes, winding, tortuous, mysterious, and the street itself winds so that you grasp at once but a part. It is 64 THE HISTORIC MILE always full of folk ; a busy lot, with their own affairs on hand, but mainly of the poorer class, for it has seen greater and grander days than it can ever see again. Here is the locus of so much of the annals of Scot- land, a theatre of great and dreadful deeds, of heroic and soul-filling memories. The old-time Scots were a factor in the lives of many European peoples, but their country was not. A help to France, a trouble to England, and that is all. But it gained in intent what it lost in extent ; passion was at its highest, energy-at its utmost, but mainly turned against themselves, and from the collision came the strangest, wildest deeds and things. Hence the romantic note that sounds through the whole history of Edinburgh. The High Strfeet, if not so great, is as active as ever. It is in a fluid state, developing, growing, changing, and the old part is rapidly vanishing. Go there with the most recent guide-book in your hand and you find change after change unrecorded. In one or two things the new way differs emphatically from the old. What, then, was this mile of ground like say in 1745 ? Near St Giles' the High Street was encumbered with a great mass of buildings in the centre, called the Lucken- booths, and continuing them was the Tolbooth — the famous Heart of Midlothian — stretching north-west up in the direction of the Castle, To-day you see a heart on the pavement west of the west door of St Giles' that marks where was the Tolbooth's main entrance. It vanished less than a century ago, in 18 17, 5 OS EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS to wit. And then away down at a narrow space, where you have St Mary Street on the south and Cranston; Street on the north, was the Netherbow Port, the Temple Bar of Edinburgh, two solid round stone towers, with a gate between, almost exactly like the walled gate that you find in some of the little French towns. It was demolished in 1764. An excellent miniature of it is carved on the wall of a near house on the north. Smaller structures helped to cumber. The Butter Tron or Weigh-house stood at the west top of the Lawnmarket, and almost in front of the Tron Church was the Guard-house. Then again, save for the closes and wynds — a wynd being an opening larger than a close — the wall of houses was unbroken. To- day a broad road winds up from the west of the Castle to the top of the Lawnmarket. A little way down you can get north by Bank Street or south by George IV. Bridge ; further on there is the North Bridge and the South Bridge, the one crossing at a great height what, was once the Nor' Loch, but is now a railway line and a station, the other thrown over the valley of the Cowgate, Moreover, wynds have been made into fairly broad streets ■ — Cockburn Street, Jeifrey Street, Blackfriars Street, St Mary's Street, the two former leading north and the two latter south. Long ago you could leave the High Street by the West Bow — to-day changed beyond all recognition, though the end of it still joins the Grass- market and retains the old name. Well, unless you went afoot, one scarce sees how you could again get commodi- ously out of the city until you got down to Leith Wynd, 66 THE HISTORIC MILE where is Cranston Street to-day. Beyond the Canongate there was the Watergate, which was really the orthodox exit from the place eastward. The scenic effect of the old street is destroyed by those breaks. But it is much worse with the closes. A close is a passage through or between the houses ; it is arched for a little way, and you soon come to a door on each hand, which leads to a turnpike stair, wherefrom the various floors of the house run off. This is the common stair. The houses were on the flat system ; there were shops in the laigh cellars or basements and in the ground floors, and above the people lived in ascending degrees of height and descending degrees of gentility. Some of the houses are exceedingly tall — veritable sky-scrapers. From the higher stories you had and have wonderful views over hill and sea. The huge tenement was known as a " land " ; insula the Romans had it Proceeding down the close you got through the covered way and into the open air, and you descended by a narrow path wedged in between the lofty perpendicular walls. At last, on the north side, you reached the Nor' Loch, and on the south the Cowgate. Now the close was attractive ; the mass of stone impressed, the long winding way allured, but mbst are truncated almost beyond hope of recognition. The back altitude of the houses differs from their front, because they are built on the slope of the hill, so you may enter on the High Street level and descend apparently into the bowels of the earth, and then emerge on the level again, but now it is the level of the valley, not that of the hill. In the closes there is the piquancy of cohtrast. You know that 67 EDINBURGH A:ND THE LOTHIANS the great ones of the land-r-nobles of ancient lineage, learned judges, grave divines, all sorts of better-class people — lived here on the first or second floor ; there was nowhere else to live, in fact. Only two or three very great and also very wealthy people had mansions of their own, though when they did have them the man- sions were very considerable, with fine gardens and grounds. Now the very lowest of the low and poorest of the poor have here their abode. The fine birds fled long ago. The last development has been to restore one or two of those houses, as Bailie Macmorran's house in Riddle's Court, and Lady Stair's house in the close of that name. But these are only individual cases. Now if you go a close-hunting, sometimes a door peremptorily stops you, either at the street or a little way down ; the whole thing, you guess, has got into one man's hands, and is shut up for private reasons. Again, you will find a complete void where you looked for an historic building ; it has just been levelled, or again it is half down ; or yet again, and worst of all, here is a brand new house with an aggravating air of spurious antiquity about it. There is nothing like a complete close left in Edinburgh. S|ill, there are a great many old houses, and all manner of trades are still carried on therein. You discover an extraordinary number of " loan offices," as they call pawnbrokers, old-clothes shops, lodging-houses — far from model — chimney- sweeps, cobblers. Two interesting historic closes — Covenant Close, on the south side between St Giles' 68 THE HISTORIC MILE and the Tron, and Trunk Close, to the west of John Knox's House — are used merely to hold the implements of the street-scavengers. Undwelt-in dwellings are, frequent ; their broken windows, their blocked doorways, their general air of neglect mark them as ripe for the housebreaker. Advocate's Close and Roxburgh Close, both on the north side of the Lawnmarket, and the White Horse Close in the Canongate, are the most impressive specimens that remain. Though changed you can catch from those what the perfect close was like. You get the true flavour of Old Edinburgh in the space about the Canongate Tolbooth. There is the ancient Tolbooth itself, and the Marquis of Huntly's house, still beautiful in its downfall ; and Moray House, and Queensberry House, each impressive in aspect and story. The pious or moral inscription is still frequent and legible ; the housebreaker and the builder are not so evident. Those inscriptions were no mere flourish, they were charms that warded off the Evil One from the human abode. You will never understand Scots history, you will never understand Old Edinburgh, unless you grasp the fact that the unseen world was a very present reality to those vanished folk. They mainly peopled it with evil spirits, who took the most particular and most malevolent interest in their affairs. Those mottoes were one method by which they guarded themselves. Such is the aspect of things to-day between the Castle and the Palace. You cannot help regretting the loss of so much of historic interest, but most was unavoid- 69 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS able. The Tolbooth, the Luckenbooths, the Netherbow Port, the Butter Tron, the Guard-house stood right in the way ; you could not seriously defend their deten- tion. The destruction of the Cross, 1756, was a bad business, though not so bad as the early restoration of St Giles' ; but, thanks to Mr Gladstone, the Cross is back again, close to its old site just as it was, though with partly new material, and St Giles' has been [^restored again on far better lines. The Edinburgh of '45 was preferable as show place, but men have to live and work there. You cannot keep the Scots capital as a museum of curiosities, and so you had improvement schemes, that drove open streets through long arrays of closes, and battered and made breaches in cyclopean ramparts. Also some earlier changes must be debited to several highly destructive fires ; the last and not the least in 1820. These long-headed Scots folk) pushing and com- peting as eager as the folk of any Yankee township, must destroy and build and progress as the very law of their being. There is still enough to recall the past vividly before us, and with that we must be content. 70 CHAPTER Vir SOME CLOSES AND HOUSES IN HIGH STREET AND GANONGATE A Stroll from the Castle to Holyrood— The Palace of Mary ot Guise-The Free Kirk College— Memories of James's Court— Libberton's Wynd— The Eventful History of Lidy Stair— The Anchor Close— Guy Mannering—Tht Folk of Warriston's Close —The City Chambers and the City Museum— Round about the Tron Church — The Meeting of the Ways — ^John Knox's House — Its Traditions — Strichen's Close and the Bluidy Advocate Mackenzie — The Begbie Murder — World's End Close and the Netherbow Port— A Brief Chronicle of the Canongate — Morocco Land and its Legend— Golfer's Land— The White Horse Close— The Royal Tennis Court and the Early Theatre— Huntly House and Popular Tradition — Moray House and its Memories — St John Street — The Fall of the Canongate. LET us walk from the Castle Gate to the porch at Holyrood and look at some places on the way. I avoid minute detail. In going over the indwellers one is apt to lose a sense of proportion, to forget that whilst Hume and Burns and Scott are of the world and all time, "auld worthy, faithfu' Provost Dick" and Bailie Macmorran are only City folk, and Allan Ramsay, and even Fergusson, only for Scotland. Where there is such a wealth of crop you can neglect all but the finest of the wheat. A little way down on your left hand you pass the back of the Free Kirk College. Here stood the palace of Mary of Lorraine and Guise, widow of James V., where she lived in the middle of the sixteenth century. 71 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Tradition still dwells on the high ceiling and beautiful decoration of the hall, of the long array of windows on the north side and the far prospect they disclosed, and the gardens that sloped down to the Nor' Loch. You will not neglect its successor, the quaint little quadrangle, made up of a college on the west and a kirk — the Free High, as it is called — on the east, the Assembly Hall on the south, and the entrance gateway on the north, which opens on the Mound, and is thus rather of the new than of the old town. It is a symbolical half-way house, for old Scotland lives for us most vividly in certain forms of its faith. This same gateway is adorned with two tall towers, and looking at it from Princes Street you see just behind the steeple of the state church Assembly Hall, at the junction of High Street and Lawnmarket, and not far from the old place of meeting in St Giles'. The view from Princes Street seemed to Dean Stanley a symbol of the dependence of the new forms on the old. It was vacation time as I strolled in the quadrangle, I read the text on the place of meeting, " Praise Him in the assembly of the Elders," and the inscription on the not successful statue of John Knox in the quadrangle. He looked "dour," not to say "sour" enough to justify Browning's unhappy epithet. In life John Knox was the enemy of the Regent, and a certain quaintness has been found in the fact that his statue stands in her very gates. But one effect of the narrow space is to fill Edinburgh in present fact and past history with every manner of whimsicalcontrast. The charger of Charles II.'s 72 CLOSES AND HOUSES statue in the Parliament Close tramples on the grave of Knox, or is only restrained from doing it by the exigencies of the pedestal. Going down the street you pass James's Court, with memories of Hume and Boswell and Dr Johnson, This old place, dating from 1725-27, made havoc in its 1;ime of many an ancient close. It was a daring speculation of James Brownhill, a builder of the time, hence its name. Across the way is Riddle's Court, formerly Bailie Mac- morran's Close. The Bailie had a tragic fate. He was shot in a riot of the High School boys by William Sinclair, ancestor of the Earls of Caithness. Next it is Brodie's Close, called from that interesting malefactor, whom we shall meet again ; and just about where George IV. Bridge and the road it carries run southward was Libberton's Wynd, and in it Johnnie Dowie's Tavern, " Where couthy chields at e'ening meet. Their bizzin craigs and mou's to weet." Among the "couthy chields" were Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Going over to the north side again, you look at Lady Stair's Close. This Lady Stair was grand- daughter of Lord High Chancellor Louden, and was married when young to Lord Primrose of Castlefield, who was scarce sane. Once he advanced with drawn sword to kill her : she saw the reflection in the mirror, and wild with fear, jumped out of the window into the street, and fled, half-dressed, to her mother-in-law. Naturally she would have none of him, husband as he 73 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS was. But she was destined to see him once again, and again in a mirror. He had gone abroad, and apparently was lost, when there came to Edinburgh an Italian magician, who professed to show those interested in the absent what those same absent were doing at the moment. The lady and her friend sought the magician, dressed as servants, though their speech and their hands easily betrayed them. After certain weird rites he exhibited a mirror, wherein appeared a succession of scenes, like a modern cinematograph — a church, a bridal party, a service interrupted at the critical moment by a man with a drawn sword. Then the vision faded, not before the lady had recognized in the bridegroom her own husband, in the intruder her own brother. She marked the day and the hour, and then, as you guess, in due time the brother turned up and described how Lord Primrose was about to commit bigamy with the only daughter of a wealthy merchant in a Dutch town when he was stopped in the nick of time by the brother, who (strange coincidence !) just then strolled into the church where the service was in progress. Comparison showed the day and hour of the vision and the event to be identical. Lord Primrose died abroad in 1706, and his widow had many wooers, chief among them the Earl of Stair, one of the best parties in Scotland. She would have none of him; for she dreaded marriage, but he found means, by a not very creditable trick, of forcing her to marry him to save her reputation. He was a perfect spouse, save when " disguised in liquor," as our ancestors phrased it, when he mauled her unmercifully. 74 CLOSES AND HOUSES Unfortunately the Scots gentlemen of the period were so frequently "disguised" in this manner that the exception seemed not seldom the rule. Once he found her in the morning covered with blood, and like one distracted he was filled with concern and grief, which in- creased when he discovered that he himself was the cause of the trouble. To abjure the bottle altogether was a counsel of perfection too great for a Scots nobleman ; at least he would only take what drink she handed him. Contemporary accounts report, with admiration, his faithful observance of this vow, but perhaps the lady was reasonably liberal. He died in 1747. Funerals were one of the great spectacles of the time, but his was of a complicated splendour, that long lingered in the memories of admiring mourners. His widow survived him twelve years. The Douglas Cause in its own days excited every- body as the Tichborne Trial did in later times. Lord Dundonald told the Duke of Douglas that Lady Stair held certain views. Let him be thought "a damned villain" if he spoke not the truth. Lady Stair was equal to the occasion. She proceeded to Holyrood in full state, and in presence of the Duke and all his satellites she smote the floor with her staff three times, and each time gave the Earl, with the utmost of emphasis, the name he had craved. Scott's story oi My Aunt Margarets Mirror is founded on this Lady Stair tradition. Lord Rosebery restored the house in this close of his forefathers and gifted it to the town. Legends of interest hang round all the closes. 75 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS These legends are mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because the chronicler was then more in evidence. But for centuries before the close teemed with its own busy life, though its records are dim and dark. Once this close was called Lady Gray's, and earlier it had other terms. Even yet, in the smaller Scots towns, the close is named from the chief indweller for the time being. In Edinburgh it was so till some famous character made a more permanent impression, or a time of street nomenclature fixed a transitory ap- pellation. From Lady Stair's Close you could see the window of the room where Burns spent the winter of 1786, though the entrance to the house was from Upper Baxter's Close, which as a separate entty has now vanished. The tavern played a great part — harmful or otherwise — in the life of Old Edinburgh, as it did in the life of Robert Burns. Of his " howf " at Libberton's Wynd, across the way, I have spoken. But further down on the north side, and near Cockburn Street, is Anchor Close, and there at the house of Dawny Douglas met the Crochallan Fencibles — called, it is guessed, from a Gaelic song sung by the landlord — and with them Burns laughed and drank, and they received him with open arms, and he has given them the only thing he had to give, and that was immortality. In jumping from Lady Stair's Close to Anchor Close I have gone over a great deal that deserves notice. We have passed Advocates' Close, where Andrew Crosby, known to readers of Guy Mannering as Councillor Pleydell, lived. Warriston's Close was 76 CLOSES AND HOUSES called after that stern covenanting Lord Advocate, whose courage, a rare thing, well nigh deserted him on the scaffold. When they carried Baillie of Jerviswood along the High Street to his death — he was too infirm to go unaided — he lifted his eyes to Warristbn's wipdow and spoke to his sister-in-law, the Lady Graden, who was with him to the end, of the high talk he had held with her father some twenty years before. John Knox had for long his abode here, as a tablet on the wall reminds. The publishing offices of Messrs W. & R. Chambers, Limited, now occupy most of this close, which is all fresh and so is famous only for its memories. A lintel built into the new part preserves the memory of the family of Bruce, earlier occupants of the close and of sufficient renown in their day and generation. Then there is Writer's Court, famous for another tavern called Clerihugh's, where Colonel Mannering found Mr Pleydell engaged in high jinks of the maddest. Of the Royal Exchange, built between 1753 and 1761, and considered a great improvement in its time, I note that its chief use now is as the City Chambers or Guild- hall, and a rather poor Guildhall it is for a city like Edinburgh. It contains, however, the valuable Corpora- tion Museum, where is collected an enormous mass of material relating to the past of the town. If you want to know Old Edinburgh you must give up many days to the treasures of this collection. Across the street, on the south side, there is much of interest between the Tron and the Parliament Close. Old Assembly Close, where were held those aristocratic meetings, removed 77 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS thither from the West Bow and thence to George Street, was presided over by Nickie Murray, satirized in their day by Goldsmith. Covenant Close is so called because a version of that famous document was signed there, and here the mythical Nanty Ewart, and the real Weir of Hermiston^ to wit. Lord Braxfield, lived, and hard by, in the open space of Hunter Square, near the Tron, was the Black Turnpike, where Mary spent the terrible night after Carberry Hill ; and just behind, in Kennedy's Close, lived and died George Buchanan. The Tron Church marks the crossway over the North and South Bridges, to-day the great thorough- fare between Old and New Edinburgh and the most pronounced break in all your walk. You might call it the central part of Edinburgh, the place where the Old Town and New Town meet, and where the different currents encounter. Towards midnight on the last day of the year a great crowd here assembles to hail the hour with toasts and songs, and to depart in all direc- tions on first footing and jollity bent. Continuing our rapid survey eastward, the next most promising object on the north is the so-called John Knox's house, a charming old place both inside and outside, but your modern antiquary will scarce allow it the title. He proves that Knox lived, as we have seen, in Warriston's Close. The house belonged to a certain John Mossman, an adherent of Queen Mary, for whom he gave his life on the scaffold. Strange that such a mystery should hang over the John Knox topography. It has been denied that Haddington 78 CLOSES AND HOUSES was his birthplace ; the exact locus of his grave is un- certain, but really the house where he lived, whilst he was the best-known man in Edinburgh to friend and foe alike, how can that be doubted ? Is popular tradi- tion to go for nothing ? How curiously little the men of those days thought about themselves apart from the cause on which they were engaged, for Knox himself tells us neither where he was born nor where he lived ! It has been conjectured that he spent the last years of his life here, and here he died. This theory gets us out of a difficulty, and enables us to retain our belief in Knox's study, and so forth. The Free Kirk bought the house ; it is a sort of Knox Museum, furnished after the style of the period, and full of objects of interest. Among theni the rushlight that is older than candles ; the tirling pin, which served the purpose of a knocker ; the hour-glass, wherewith he probably forgot to regulate his sermons ; the panelling that is perhaps older than his time. Across the way, and continuing from the Tron there is Strichen's Close, formerly Rosehaugh's Close, where dwelt the " Bluidy Advocate Mackenzie, that for his worldly wit and wisdom was to the rest as a god." Further east is the Blackfriars Wynd, or Street as it is now called. Here was Cardinal Beaton's palace. Up this alley, in a glitter of torch-light and gleaming swords, went Queen Mary from Kirk o' Field to Holy- rood, on the night of 9th February 1 567, the night of Darnley's murder, the turn of Fortune's tide with her, while Bothwell's accomplices were creeping down the 79 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS adjacent alley of Toddrick's Wynd to Kirk o' Field on their murderous work. In South Gray's or the Mint Close was the old Scots mint. Tweeddale Court, a little way eastward, was the scene of a remarkable murder and robbery on 13th November 1806. The victim was William Begbie, a bank messenger, and the booty was ;£'40oo, of which ;f 3000 was afterwards found at no great distance. The murder was done in the midst of a crowded locality, without the least suspicion, and the murderer was never discovered, though his identity was conjectured with some probability. The neighbouring World's End Close recalls an older and still more grue- some tragedy. It was once Standsfield's Close, after Sir James Standsfield, an Englishman, and proprietor of cloth mills near Haddington. He was murdered by his son, as noted elsewhere. Here in the old days, or at any rate nights, we had been sharply brought up by the Netherbow Port, with which, or with the keeper thereof, we needs must negotiate ere we passed through. Probably that is why the close had its odd later name — the World's End, This quaint old gate was, as noted, removed in 1764, and save that the street is narrower you pass on into the Canongate without stay or hindrance. The Canongate of old was not Edinburgh at all. In Catholic times it was under the Abbey of Holyrood, Then the Earls of Roxburgh were its over-lords or "superiors," in the terms of Scot's law. In 1636 this superiority was acquired by the Magistrates of Edin- burgh, and now the town spreads all round and far 80 CLOSES AND HOUSES beyond it. Once it was adorned with three crosses : that of St John, at the head of the present St John Street; the Market Cross, the shaft of which still remains at the Tolbooth; and the Girth Cross, lOO feet west from the Abbey Strand. This last had three steps and a pillar, and marked the western limit of the sanctuary. The most striking thing to-day in the Canongate is the Tolbooth, with quaint tower and spire, and all manner and touch of French detail. It stands midway on the north side, and right and left are places, the centre of stpried tradition. One house has a legend, commemorated by Scott in the ballad of the " Friar of Orders Grey " in Rokeby, of a clergyman taken at dead of night to give ghostly comfort to a dying woman. The worthy divine found the lady as well as could be expected of one just delivered of a child. He ventured to hint as much, but was sternly admonished of his task, which he performed with fear and trembling. Betimes next morning the house flared to the sky, and the clergyman learned, with sinking heart, that the daughter of the owner had perished in the flames, and though there was suspicion of a fearful deed, yet the authorities did not rashly interfere with family matters in those days, and nothing definite was known or done. And then you pass Morocco Land, adorned with the figure of a Moor, to which the surrounding grime has added superfluous blackness. There is a romantic story attached, how in the depth of the great plague year, 1645, a pirate ship appeared in the Forth, which 6 81 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS turned out to be an Algerine rover, commanded by an old Edinburgh fugitive boy, one Andrew Gray. He came to destroy, but stayed to marry the provost's daughter, whom he cured of the plague, by love, magic, or eastern charm ; but he had vowed not to enter Edinburgh, and so he dwelt in Morocco Land. Also there is Golfer's Land, won by John Patterson in James VIL's time by a truly royal game of golf; and there is the site, at any rate, of my Lord Seton's lodgings in the Canongate, which you connect with Roland Graham and charming Catherine Seton. Quite near is the White Horse Close. It was well known as the regular starting-place for a journey to London. From here a band of Scots nobles were riding forth to join King Charles L at Berwick when the populace rose and hindered all except Montrose. This was known as the " Stoppit Stravaig." A stravaig is an old Scots word for a haphazard march or excur- sion. The White Horse Inn, where Dr Johnson put up, was not here but at St Mary Street, at the Netherbow ; the Watergate, it is said, took its name from the pond attached to the older inn. Beyond the Watergate, and within the Palace grounds, was the Royal Tennis Court, long since vanished. Early theatrical representations were here, and it is possible that Shakespeare himself may have trod that stage. In later years, when the Duke of York, afterwards James y 1 1, and II., came north to set up Court for a^ little at Holyrood, he brought with him a troupe of 82 kiiini;iik(;h, ihk CANfiNKAXE 'inijinm H CLOSES AND HOUSES players. Devout men in the Canongate were mightily incensed, but time has not preserved their outpourings. In a quite different quarter, among the actors left in England, there was also considerable irritation, and as they had Dryden for a mouthpiece their abuse is classic. Glorious John mocked merrily at those ancient themes — Scots pride and poverty. Actors of a certain sort have all gone north to Edinburgh : — " With bonny blue cap there they act all night For Scotch half-crown, in English threepence hight." As a Scots pound only made one English shilling and eightpence, the gibe was near enough the mark. The poet goes on to hint that supernumeraries and door- keepers may very well be pressed into service and palmed off as competefit performers in the ignorant north. But it would never do to give the natives a sight of gorgeous clothes. " Laced linen there would be a dangerous thing ; It might perhaps a new rebellion bring, The Scot who wore it would be chosen King." Near the Watergate was Luckie Wood's, one of those famous old Edinburgh taverns, whose memory lingers in the verse of Allan Ramsay : — " She gaed as feat as a new preen. And kept her housie snod and bien, Her pewther glanc'd upo' your een Like siller plate ; She was a sonsie wife and clean. Without debate." On the south side there are matters of equal interest. 33 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Huntly House, with its quaint gables and its profusion of inscriptions, is always for me a lesson on the value of popular tradition. The street arab here is a bit of an antiquary, though of an uncritical kind. If you stop to look at a house, he, with a possible tip in view, is sure to supply you with extraordinary information. "There," I was once told, "is the Tolbooth" (the Canongate Tolbooth was indicated), "where Efifie Deans was tried for her life, and there is Huntly House, where Lady Jane Grey lived when she was in Scotland." Lady Jane Grey never was in Scotland, and the house was not built until after her young head had fallen on Tower Hill. But the tradition is cui;iously persistent, and is supposed to have arisen from some confusion with another Lady Jane. Efifie Dean's prison was, of course, the vanished Heart of Midlothian. Queensberry House and Milton House are fallen on commonplace, not to say sordid, days, though they still impress by their mass. The former was the scene of a peculiarly atrocious murder by the lunatic heir, whilst most of the family were away at the Parliament House engaged in the Union negotiations ; at least that is the popular tradition — perhaps it is not true. One can at least hope that the gruesome details are mythical. Queensberry was on the unpopular side, and the Edinburgh mob was mad with rage, both from national and civic patriotism — and those old Scots were terrible haters, had absolutely no bounds to their resentment. 84 CLOSES AND HOUSES The mention of the Union directs us to the adjacent spacious and imposing Moray House. In its garden was a summer-house, where the Treaty of Union was signed, or half signed, for the Commissioners were rudely disturbed by the mob and driven elsewhere. Here Cromwell lodged, and here, it has been rumoured, the resolution to execute the King was made. The balcony in front recalls one of the most dramatic scenes even in Scots history. Upon the i8th May 1650, Lord Lome, the son of the Marquis of Argyll, was wedded to the Earl of Moray's daughter, and there they stood after the ceremony when there passed a procession through the Watergate and up towards the High Street. It was the captive Montrose, bound on a cart, led by the common hangman, with every circumstance of ignominy, to his doom. The cart was stopped in front of Moray House and the mortal enemies confronted one another. Tradition errs, or Montrose comported himself with patient dignity that made him come off not second-best from that ordeal. Time soon brought its revenge. The two Argylls and Warriston, one of the guests, before very many years, trod the same Via Dolorosa, suffered at the same place of death. After this other things seem tame, but you may remember that Playhouse Close and Old Playhouse Close are connected with the struggles of the Drama in Scotland. Here, on 14th December 1756, was pro- duced Douglas, by John Home, minister of Athelstane- ford, and a nice pother the Church made about that now quite neglected piece. And St John Street cannot 8S EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS pass without a word, for here lived Smollett some little time in 1766, and here he gained those life-like im- pressions of Edinburgh reproduced in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. Here resided James Ballantyne, and here he was wont to give those famous supper- partiesj when he would bring forth and read something that "outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine," and that was nothing less than the choicest portions of a forth- coming Waverley. Finally, on the west side, and, as far as you can judge, little if at all changed, is the meeting-place of the Old Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Freemasons, which received Burns with open arms and crowned him Poet-Laureate. When the Court left Scotland in 1603 the decay of the Canongate began, and after the Union in 1707 this was accelerated, though till the New Town rose across the valley itjiad not lost all pretension to gentility ; but now is its Nadir. Gasworks and tanpits touch with acrid odour the air, already none of the sweetest. Its dingy and noisome closes are the haunts of " broken men, wasters and sorners," as the old Scots Acts branded the ill-starred in life. The movement towards better things that is evident in the High Street and round the Castle has not yet reached here. Are those frowsy jades or bloated hags that hang listlessly around the close " fits " the rightful successors of the gay and frolicsome ladies, the subject of many an old song, many a courtly stave, that rings in your head as you pace the stones ? " As I came down the Canongate I heard a lassie sing." 86 CLOSES AND HOUSES But to-day the daughters of music are mute, and again : " The lasses o' the Canongate, Oh, they are wondrous nice ; They winna gie a single kiss, But for a double price." Time has blunted the point of that hit which remains obscure. And where, too, has gone the elusive and seductive Bonnie Mally Lee? " And we're a' gaun east and west. We're a' gaun agee. We're a' gaun east and west, Courtin' Mj^ly Lee." Her very ghost has shivered, and fled those grimy ways. The most terrible thing in the Canongate are the faces of the women. And in odd contrast, almost over- head, is the great park and hill and silent nooks at hand, yet how far removed ! And still nearer and closer and on the same soil is Holyrood. Nature, history, letters, romance are there in the very grime. 87 CHAPTER VIII ROUND ABOUT THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE The Parliamfent Close as Centre of Edinburgh Life— Its Old- Time Aspect — The Luckenbooths — Memories of Allan Ramsay and Creech— The Old Kirk or Stinking Style— The Krames— The Tolbooth : its History ; its Details — A Famous Prison— The Purses — The Bluegowns — ^The Parliament House — Portraits of Famous Lawyers — The Courts — The Advocates' Library — French Influence — History of the Parliament House — Old Customs— A Changed World. ALL through its history the daily ordinary life of Edinburgh has centred round the Parliament Close or Square, as the gentility of the eighteenth century preferred to call it. And it still does so. Destroy Holyrood and the Castle and town life would go on much as before ; not so with the Close. St Giles' forms its north side, and that takes always the head place in the Church life of Edinburgh. The south side is the Parliament House, where once the legislative business was, and now the judicial business is, done. In the shadow of St Giles', to the east, is the Cross, the official navel of Edinburgh. And to the north and north- west of St Giles' once stood the Tolbooth and the Lucken- booths, now gone for ever. Here has been incessant change, so that it is difficult to trace exact sites, and well nigh impossible exactly to follow all the transmutations. St Giles' at least — however altered — covers the same ground, and with that as landmark let us look round. 88 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE To the north of St Giles' there stood, till 1817, a mass of building planted right dowij, " dropped down," it seemed, as Scott says, into no wide part of the street. That left a narrow road on the north part, and a narrow passage between it and the church on the south side. Begin at the east end. Here were the buildings called the Luckenbooths, an irregular, picturesque mass of houses. On the ground floor were shops, with dwellings above, and from the fact that the shops were covered in was derived the name Luckenbooths. With their irregular heights, their frequent timber fronts, their gables, and odd bits of masonry, they gathered into themselves the picturesqueness of Old Edinburgh. The eastmost shop was once Allan Ramsay's ; he moved there from the sign of the Mercury, that old house on the north side of the High Street which some of us remember standing just a little below the North Bridge opening, and here he sold his poems, and other folks' poems, and kept a circulating library of plays and novels, whereat the devout shook their heads and fore- boded ill results to the youth of the city. Here, too, he chatted with Gay and Smollett and whatever other man of letters, stranger or citizen, strolled in, and for sign had figures of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Haw- thornden, and throve steadily, though modestly, as was his wont. Later on the place was known as Creech's Land, because William Creech held it. He was a great man in his day, was an active and prosperous publisher, and more than once Lord Provost of Edinburgh. He has a niche in the temple of fame, because he was a 89 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Burns' publisher. Their relations were a little strained at times, for Creech was close-fisted and not prompt in producing statements when the balance was against himself. Yet Burns has some nice things to say about him, and his name is " married to immortal verse " in a highly complimentary manner. Now, if standing on the north side of the street you desired to reach the great church, you needed not go round the intervening Luckenbooths. There was an arched passage through the middle of them called the Old Kirk Style, or more commonly the Stinking Style, a term that too plainly explains itself, and through this you attained the interior by a con- venient porch. The place was of evil renown in other ways. In 1526 the Lairds of Lochinvar and Drumlanrig set on Maclennan of Bomby, and in broad- daylight slew him ; and the stain of blood on their romantic names is only the deeper that they were never called to account. I have said there was a passage between the Luckenbooths and the church ; this was called the Krames, from the numerous little open booths that were plastered against the walls. Not the least of the evil deeds of the restorers of 1827 was that they shore off chapels, and indeed every sort of projection from the level of the old church wall ; it was in these projections that the Krames found their place. Once they were important marts of linen and woollen goods, and even of gold and silver vessels, but latterly they were devoted to toys and such like small beer, and the place in day- or night-dreams was much in the thoughts of the 90 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE children of Old Edinburgh. At the eastern entrance to the Krames there was a short flight of steps called the Lady Steps or Our Lady Steps. The name was originally taken from a statue of the Virgin which stood in a niche, no doubt empty since the Reformation. Sir George Mackenzie derives the name from a then modern noble lady of by no means so good repute ; Sir George is a respectable authority, but one is glad to believe that the weight of evidence is against him, unless the steps had a double meaning and derived from both, which is not impossible.' Terminating the Luckenbooths to the west was the Tolbooth. It stood to the north-west of St Giles, and finally consisted of three parts ; first was an old build- ing, massive, ancient, grim and imposing. It was thought to date from 1466 and to have been built by James III, as a chapter house or provost's residence, or for some such like purpose in connection with the Collegiate Church of St Giles. You know how badly off Old Edinburgh was for space, and this was used as a Parliament House and as a Law Court, and for other important meetings. In Latin it was called the PrcR- torium of Edinburgh, or in English the Tolbooth, and in Queen Mary's time the western part of it had become ruinous; so in 1561 she addressed to the magistrates some strong words on the subject, urging them to pull down and rebuild. Funds were scanty so they were at their wits' end what to do. However, they preferred to make a new Tolbooth, which stood at and was attached to the south-west end of St Giles, and this in its time 91 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS was used for Parliament House and Law Court, and so forth till the present Parliament House was built, when it was left to the City fathers for their Council Room, until they migrated across the street to their present quarters in the Royal Exchange. Finally they stuck on to the western side of the original Tolbooth another building, which was apparently finished in 1641. It was of plain rubble work and not at all so impressive or remarkable as the part to the east. A small addition was again added to the west part of this. It was an affair of only two floors, the ground floor being used as a shop. It had a flat roof, on which a frequent gallows was erected for the ending of some of those malefactors wherein Old Edinburgh abounded. When Parliament and Law Court were housed elsewhere the Heart of Midlothian, as the folk called it, was used as a prison ; the newer building as a debtors', the older as a criminal hold. The door of entry was on the south side next the church; at the turret (containing a turnpike stair), in front, stood a private of the Town Guard, and there was another in the hall. Here the common criminal was allowed to run about much as he chose. For decoration there was a board containing some passable verses beginning: "A prison is a house of care." These have been traced to an English source, and were indeed written for the King's Bench in London. There was also a pulpit, wherefrom it was reported Knox had held forth. You proceeded by the stair to another hall on the next floor, where the more desperate felons were held secure, those condemned to 92 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE death being chained to an iron bar in the centre of the room. (Thus was retained our old friend the Deacon.) If Old Edinburgh was crowded and unclean, this was its worst spot in every way ; fortunately the records are not voluminous. We have poked enough into the corners of this strange old place of grimy and romantic memory. This was the building that the mob stormed on the famous night of 7th September 1736 and dragged Jack Porteous to his doom. The door and the lock seemed monuments of massive strength, but it was in seeming only. If a man had powerful friends or a well- filled purse he got away from the Tolbooth with surpris- ing ease. These old Scots laws pressed most heavily on the poor and the unfortunate. Life was held cheap ; a criminal was destroyed because they did not know how otherwise to dispose of him. The place was so strongly built that its demolition in 18 17 caused the housebreakers no little trouble. Scott got some rare pickings from the ruins and you may still see them at Abbotsford. A prick on the topmost north gable of the old part carried the head of some illustrious criminal ; Morton, Montrose, Argyll, each in turn looked down in this ghastly fashion on the once familiar street. Surely a subject of sober reflection to the prominent statesmen of the day who needs must pass by so often ! There was only 14 feet of space for the traffic of the city on the north side of the Tolbooth. The spot here was named the Purses, or the " Puir folks' Purses," where the Bluegowns or Bedesmen received their annual dole. Each had a roll of bread, a tankard of ale, a blue gown 93 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and a curiously-made leather purse, and then they went to hear service in St Giles'. The ceremony was after- wards transferred to the Canongate Kirk aisle, and then it vanished ; but you remember Edie Ochiltree in the Antiquary, and in romance the Bedesman lives im^ mortal. Out of all this curious mass of building but one tangible thing is present to-day. A little beyond the west door of St Giles' the stones of the street take the form of a heart, to denote the chief entrance to the Tolbboth. Now walk across the square, push aside the swing- ing doors, pass along the lobby, and so into that spacious and ancient hall which still retains the name of Parliament House. It is 122 feet in length and 49 feet in breadth. You are most impressed by the pinriacles and open beams of the noble roof, and whether you admire .or not the quite modern (1868) stained glass window, at least the subject was inevit- able— ^obviously the foundation of the College of Justice by James V. on 27th May 1532. But the hall is full of interest. True, the old portraits of the Kings and the tapestry on the walls vanished after the Union, but there are busts and portraits of many famous judges and lawyers, chief among them the almost kindly- looking " Bluidy Advocate Mackenzie," and the sternly- scornful "Bluidy Braxfield." I am taking popular names and portrait impressions, and though I am quite sure that Raeburn has his "Braxy" all right, I am very far from sure that Kneller gives you the real " Mackenzie." Then there are busts of Lord Presidents 94 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE Dundas and Blair, Duncan Forbes, and so forth. This hall is only the salle des pas perdu of the Scots Bar. The Courts open off the hall or the lobby. There sit the Lords Ordinary or Puisne Judges, as they say in the south, in one direction, the Inner House (or Appeal Court in two divisions) in another. From time to time you see rushing across the hall at a great rate, with several agents or doers, as they call solicitors in the north, at their heels, the half dozen men at the Scots Bar who have got enough to do. Desperately busy, no doubt ; still, you remember that subtle touch in Chaucer's description of the Sergeant of Lawe, "And yet he seemede besier than he was." So much for the half dozen, but what of the half hundred who very plainly have nothing to do at all, and the others who do not even put in an appearance ? You will find some of them in the library downstairs, as down, down you go — room after room piled with books in apple-pie order, perfectly catalogued, for this is one of the great libraries of Britain, with a right to a copy of each new work. It was Mac- kenzie who founded this. Almost his last public act -in the stress and storm of the Revolution was to inaugurate the Advocates' Library in a stately Latin oration. Nobis kcec otia fecit, very neatly quotes Mr Taylor Innes, of the same persuasion, but by no means of the same way of thinking in Church or State, as umquhile Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, whose dark and gloortiy memory seems to me a little too oppressive in this same Laigh Parliament House, 95 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS for it was here that he and his fellows of the Privy- Council examined and tortured with boots and thumbi- kins and what not the Covenanting prisoners. A Scots advocate occupies one of the desirable positions of life ; he has an excellent position, none better or so good in Edinburgh, the literature of the world at his com- mand, something romantic about his calling. Ah, yes, but has he a calling at all? The ingenious R. L. S. has some very pertinent remarks on the final dreari- ness and hopelessness of that daily promenade in this ancient hall of many memories. On the spot you think most of the old judges, scholars like Kames and Monboddo and Hailes and Tytler; great jurists like Stair and Dirleton and Erskine ; and more than all of the great carousers, Newton, Hermand, Gardenstone and so forth. The stories about them are endless, how they drank all night and judged all day with equal zeal and relish, and their biting, if often coarse and witty sayings, with the twang of the old Scots speech about them, still live in the memories of men. Portly, full blooded, they look real in their pictures on the wall, yet I fear they would think those courteous and learned gentlemen who have succeeded them I'ather a milk-and-water lot, if they were to step out of their frames and revisit the scene of their labours. If you look in at one or other of those Divisions you will not be much edified, for the terms of Scots law seem strange to a layman's ear, especially if that layman be from the south. You will note that the robes are very fine ; they remind you of 96 THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE those of thQ judges in the Appeal Courts of Paris, and you solve the riddle of this, as also of many a law term, by remembering old French influence and the old French league. In 1639 the Parliament Hall was finished ; the out- side had a quaint, old Gothic front, which you can only now see in pictures, since in 1829 it was concealed tinder a classic dressing, with piazza, sphinxes and so forth, as you have it to-day. Those were great times in Edinburgh when the old Scots Parliament met ; there was the Riding of the Parliament, the open- ing procession from Holyrood of the nobles and burgesses in all their splendour. In the hall there was the great throne at the south end for the Sovereign or his Lord High Commissioner, the ranges of benches on either side for the nobles and barons, and the lower ones in the centre for the commissioners of boroughs ; and on the table was solemnly laid the glittering Honours of Scotland, the Crown jewels that you have seen in the Castle. When a bill was passed it was touched with the sceptre by the Commissioner and so made valid law. When, on the 22nd April 1707, the estates adjourned to meet no more, others besides the Lord Chancellor Seafield might have called it " the end of an auld song." There is still the Lord High Com- missioner's walk when he opens the General Assembly, but it is no disrespect to the right reverend and right honourable to call this but the ghost of the past. In modern times increasing wealth has called for other buildings. The Writers to the Signet have their 7 97 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS library at the west corner of the square, and hard by the S.S.C.'s, which are another species of solicitors, have edified their house. Now and again the hail wakes to something of its old life, but always I fear less so. The King's birthday was of old celebrated with great state. There were loud rejoicings : the " Auld callants" of Heriot's Hospital dressed the statue of King Charles with flowers, the old Town Guard were drawn up in the square, and, as the health of the King was drunk in the hall, they fired off their muskets in a royal salute, and then the populace, as at a signal, went for them with angry glee. The mud of the streets soon defaced their uniforms ; sticks, stones, fists, anything came in handy to hurt with. The High- land blood of the old soldiers was up in a minute; they laid about them, sometimes with deadly effect, but always with the same result. They were swept from the streets ; the peace, and many things besides, were broken ; there were scenes in those saturnalia such as modern Edinburgh never dreams of The Hogmanay merrymaking at the Tron is not even a shadow of it. After all they are better forgotten. Let us draw the curtain 1 98 CHAPTER IX IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET An Impression of the Grassmarket — Its Present State — Ports- burgh— The West Port— The High Riggs— The Castle Wynd —The Story of the Macgregor— The Highlander in Old Edin- burgh—The Irish Invasion— The West Bow— The Grime of Old Edinburgh— Dame Jean Bethune — The Place of Execution— The Heads of Criminals — The Covenanters — "Famous Guthrie" — The Porteous Mob — The Burke and Hare Murders — Ferocity of the Time— The White Mice of Tanner's Close. MY last impression of the Grassmarket is in the late dusk of a summer evening. The folk were at rest after their day's labour. At each "stairfit" women with shawls on their heads or their backs discussed the affairs of their neighbours and their own ; men lounged and smoked at the Bowfit well ; clothes hung up to dry from far-off windows in the tall lands did duty for banners and tapestry ; the sound of revelry came through the open door of the White Hart Tavern, and from many a "howfT" with a less pretentious history but of quite as ancient an appearance. There was the Castle Wynd by which you could climb straight up to the Castle — a mighty mass that loomed exactly over you in the darkness. Then as I moved idly about there was a note of music ; a piper came marching along from the Cowgate, playing some Scots airs, and the children deserted their games on the pavement and thronged dancing and singing at his heels. The dark- 99 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS ness and the accident of the hour were kind, this was the life of the place for centuries. Not then the time to take stock of the much that had gone and the little that remained. The Grassmarket is an oblong lying exactly south of the Castle in the hollow, for the ground rises im- mediately again to the High Riggs. In earlier days it was more of a square, when buildings connected with the Corn Market took up some of its west side, but these are now removed. Of old the Flodden wall ran southward across it, and there was a gate, the famous West Port, and you read the name there to-day, though gate and wall are alike vanished. Not altogether, however, since there is a little bit of the latter at the passage called the Vennel, which steeply ascends the High Riggs and takes you towards Lauriston and the Meadows. Everything is interesting and curious about the Grassmarket. At the north- west corner there is King's Stables Road, where was the great tilting-ground. And then the street opposite, outside the West Port, has its own memories, though of another kind. Portsburgh Square, which is neither venerable nor impressive, reminds that here stood Wester Portsburgh, the trade suburb of Edinburgh in one direction as the Canongate was the Court suburb in another. In the days of the wall the. West Port was the only exit from Edinburgh in this direction, and all manner of royal processions, as well as the daily business of life, passed by it through the Grassmarket. Portsburgh Easter and Wester, the former lying away lOO IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET by the Potterrow, have of themselves an interesting history not here to be traced, but the very names of the ways are suggestive. The High Riggs is now a street, but it recalls the old-time name of the ridge and of High Riggs House, where the ancient family of Lawson had their seat, and the name of one of them is still perpetuated in Lady Lawson Street. To the south of the Grassmarket, Heriot Bridge leads to what was once the chief entrance to George Heriot's Hospital, and to the east of that again there stood the famous Greyfriars Monastery, whose memory Old Greyfriars and New Greyfriars Church and Churchyard still in some sort continues. The Monastery came to a swift end at the Reformation, and Royal and noble entries were no longer graced by attendant friars bearing sacred relics to be kissed by fair and Royal lips. On the north side I have said the Castle Wynd climbs straight up to the Castle. Wreckers and improvers may do what they like, but they cannot alter the fall of the ground, and if youtoil up it to-day you will feel just as the old-time citizen did as he climbed up and up its infinite ascent. On this Wynd was built an early Gaelic chapel, where the Highlanders went to hear service in their own tongue. The first pastor was a Macgregor, though, as the clan name and dress were proscribed, he had to content himself with the base English translation of Robertson and the prosaic modem attire instead of the magnificent kilt. The time will come, no doubt he muttered, and in 1787, when the proscription was removed by Act of Parlia- lOI EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS ment, the time did come. Clad in the correct garb of his clan, and rolling the euphonious Gaelic like a sweet morsel under his tongue, his reverence proudly paraded the length and breadth of Edinburgh, the admired of all beholders, a Highland butterfly suddenly developed from an apparent Lowland grub ! For a long time the Highlands supplied Edinburgh with certain classes of its population ; the City Guard, or " Town's Rottens " (rats), were Highlanders ; the caddies, the linkmen, the hewers of wood and drawers of water generally were from the glens. This Celtic blend gave a distinct flavour to city life. You meet it again and again in the pages of Fergusson. In the railway epoch the Highlander well-nigh vanished ; his old trades were gone, and whatever be the reason he disdained the work of the mere navvy. Then an enormous hQSt of Irish descended on Edinburgh ; they filled the Cowgate and the Grassmarket, so that these became Hibernian colonies, and modified with foreign touch the lower life of the city. But that again is changed. The Irish have done their work, and though they still hold posses- sion of some subordinate fields of labour there is not a continual large immigration. Jilst as there are two exits to the west of the Grass- market, there are also two to the east ; that to the north begins with the famous West Bow. Of old time that was a steep and tortuous alley, which ran in the form of an Z from the Bowhead, at the junction of the Lawn- market and Castle Hill, to the Bowfoot at the north-east end of the Grassmarket ; a bit of it still remains at the 102 IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET bottom. You go along it some way, and then, where Victoria Street begins, you turn sharp to the left and climb by a succession of stairs to the Lawnmarket. These stairs must pretty nearly follow the old route, but the high, gloomy, impressive houses, with all the quaint features of old Scots architecture, are clean gone, and it is only from the antiquary that you pick up details of the Templar Lands at the foot, of the old Assembly Rooms and Provost Stewart's Land on the west side, or Mahogany Land and Major Weir's Land on the east. Scott has rendered the " Sanctified bends of the Bow " classic, though Bonnie Dundee did not, as a fact, ride down them on his way to the West Port. He left Edinburgh by the Netherbow and Leith Wynd, as we note elsewhere ; and Scott, who must have known the truth of it well enough, took him right through the quarters of his Covenanting foes for the sake of effect in contrast. One reputation the West Bow had, how- ever, or at least one of its inhabitants had, and that was cleanliness. Old Edinburgh, whatever its virtues, was not a dust-hating place, it was a well-known reproach ; witness the ponderous pleasantries of Dr Johnson. The Edinburgh citizen was not without excuse. The standard of material comfort in old-time Scot- land was a low one ; you could scarce expect otherwise in a poverty-stricken country. You might hope for better things from the capital, but the capital had its own peculiar difficulties : the want of space, the dark, narrow closes, the tall lands to which water had to be conveyed in insufficient quantities, for the stairs were a 103 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS terrible climb, by the caddies ; the difficulty of getting rid of refuse by other than the simple expedient of splashing it down into the public street, after the brief warning oi" gardy loo" supposed to be a corruption of the French "^«rr^ a I'eau," though Mrs Winifred Jenkins, in the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, renders it not inaptly as '' may the Lord have mercy on your souls." These are gross and palpable facts which I need not amplify ; it is more amazing, perhaps more instructive, to catch from chance phrases the ideas on this matter of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Dr Hugh Blair, he of the Rhetoric and the Sermons, known in name and neglected in fact by all of us, was remarkable for what was deemed a foppish attention to his person. His con- temporaries noted with amazement the remarkable and continual cleanliness and propriety of his dress. The fact is thought worthy of commemoration in the sketch of him in Kay's Edinburgh Portraits. The wife of that eminent Moderate, Dr Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk ("Jupiter" Carlyle), was afflicted with rheumatism in her teeth. She brushed them too often, he opined ! In 1764 a furnished house on the High Riggs is ad- vertised for occupation " with genteel furniture, perfectly clean." The Edinburgh ideal in this respect was a lady who lived, circa 1770, at the Cruick or Bend o' the Bow, and whose memory is preserved by a quaint old jingle: — " Dame Jean Bethune at the Cruick o' the Bow, Caumed her steps as white's a doe ; She had a nose as lang's a flail, Sair gien to steer her neighbours' kail." 104 IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET It was the greatest compliment an Edinburgh husband of humble rank could pay to his wife regard- ing the condition of the house : " That caumstaining would please Dame Jean Bethune." Alas, there was another apothegm, " the clartier the cosier," which not unfairly, one fears, represented the practice of old-time Edinburgh. The most memorable associations of the Grass- market are gloomy ones. In opposition to the practice of modern times, the death penalty was inflicted with the greatest publicity obtainable, and the law made what use it could of the body of the malefactor. The head especially was too precious an object to let go ; it was affixed to some public gate until it dropped to pieces, or perhaps a change of political senti- ment — for your martyr and your traitor were oft in- terchangeable terms — led to its honourable burial. The Tolbooth, the Netherbow gud the West Port were provided with spikes, which were rarely without this garnishment. There was a certain gradation : if you were a very great person — a Montrose or an Argyll — your head went to the Tolbooth, " by merit raised to that bad eminence " ; if you were a little less remark- able, the Netherbow was good enough for you ; whilst were you but a common ruffian the West Port was the appropriate spot. Not that this order was exactly observed. In 1487 Robert Grahame, one of the assassins of James I., was here spiked. In 1515 there was commotion in the city, and an object lesson seemed to anxious civic rulers the one thing needful. There- 105 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS fore the head of Peter Moffatt, described as " ane great swearer and thief," was set up. Fully a century and a half goes by, and heads are again in demand. Those of three Covenanters had for some time adorned • the spikes, when of a sudden two are missing, removed for proper burial, it was surmised, by those who deemed them the salt of the earth. The unseemly blank was not allowed to continue. "The Criminal Lords," so Fountainhall assures us, " to supply that want, ordained two of their criminals' heads to be struck off and to be affixed in their place." From about 1660 till 1784 all ordinary executions, that is, those by hanging, took place at the north-east corner of the Grassmarket, at the spot where it is joined by the West Bow. Ari ancient rhyme, preserved in a note to Guy Mannering, pithily records the criminal's last progress from the Tolbooth, hard by St Giles', to the place of execution : " Up the Lawnmarket, and down the West Bow, Up the big ladder, and down the short tow." It was here that a long succession of Covenanters went " to glorify God in the Grassmarket," in the phrase of Rothes, though not surely of him alone. The Scots have always had the fame of a determined people, but never were they more determined than in the cause of the Covenant. Instances of courage and heroism are so common as to become in the end monotonous. When a band went to their death, lots were drawn as to who should be the first victim, and the one selected received the token with passionate exclamations of joy. When 106 IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET James Guthrie went to his doom, and the cloth was drawn over his face ere they threw him from the ladder, he caused it again to be lifted, that he might yet once again before the end declare the testimony of his devotion to the Covenant. This is the " famous Guthrie " of the famous Covenanters' Monument in Greyfriars. There was a strange scene that followed in St Giles'. There, as devout women dressed the headless trunk for the tomb, a pleasant young gentleman "poured out a bottle of rich ointment on the body, which filled the whole church with a noble perfume." Some of the ladies dipped their napkins in the blood, to the great indignation of one of the opposite side. It is worth recording that the " bluidy Mackenzie " himself, having still his name to make, was counsel for the prisoner, and seemed more concerned for the failure of his efforts than did his client. I can only mention the case, in 1724, of " Half-hangit Maggie Dixon." The epithet reveals the history of her imperfect execution. The story tells of her revival as t she was carried away in a cart, and how she lived long after, a well-known character of Old Edinburgh, none the worse for her ghastly experience save a certain crick in the neck, the origin of which was too obvious to need detailed explanation. One more execution here must be noted. This was the scene, in 1736, of the Porteous Mob. Scott has told the story so fully, both in the text and notes to the Heart of Midlothian, and again in his Tales of a Grandfather, that the briefest mention must suffice. Porteous, Captain of the City Guard, presided at the execution of Wilson the smuggler. Wilson 107 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS had almost become a popular idol. Smuggling to the Edinburgh mob, since it involved cheap brandy and a hit at the hated English Government — in 1736 the Union was a very recent sore — was rather a virtue than a crime, and Wilson, moreover, had shown self-devotion in aiding the escape of a comrade, a heroism of a kind affecting to the mass of people. Finally, Porteous had treated him with unnecessary cruelty, and too appre- hensive of a riot had caused his soldiers to fire on the people. He was tried for murder and condemned, but was reprieved by order from London. The mob, however, broke into the Tolbooth, and hung him from a dyer's pole at the place of execution. Romance and art have embellished the scene. The street "crowded with rioters, crimson with torchlight, spectators filling every window of the tall houses, the Castle standing high above the tumult against the night and the stars," were the decorations of a scene of itself sufficiently impressive. A little less than a century afterwards a set of murders, hard by this fated spot, arrested the attention not merely of Edinburgh but of Europe. The exact scene was Tanner's Close, a foul alley on the north side of the West Port, at the corner of the Gra^smarket^ Here the Irish Thugs — as they were well called — Burke and Hare, throttled victim after victim. It was a case of cumulative horror ; stories of body-snatchers were rife, and the ponderous iron coverings we see in Old Greyfriars to protect the graves enable us to imagine the fear that strove thus to guard the remains of the loved lost ones. 108 IN AND NEAR THE GRASSMARKET Perhaps the thing was exaggerated, but it was keenly felt as a terrible outrage, and when the rumour arose that remorseless science was taking its toll from the living through the foulest of agents, you may imagine the horror and indignation aroused. The victims were stupefied with drink, then choked, and then sold to the doctors, of whom Knox of Surgeons' Square was the most famous. Their number was computed as between sixteen and thirty, and the period of operation about nine months. The sum received was some ;^I2 to ;^I4 for a subject, a very considerable sum in 1828, now near a century ago. At the trial and conviction of Burke, the crowd, still unsatisfied, roared " Where are the doctors?" When the murderers of James I. were exe- cuted, the Papal Legate, afterwards a Piccolomini Pope, said, " he knew not which was more terrible, the crime or its punishment," and here you can scarcely say which was more barbarous — the criminals or their judges. The Lord Justice Clerk Boyle, in sentencing Burke, regretted that gibbeting chains had gone out of fashion, but expressed some satisfaction that he was to be publicly dissected, and a wish that the skeleton might be preserved, "that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes." The city held high carnival on execution day, and the yells of the mob round this scaffold were never forgotten by those who heard them. The body lay in hideous state, and endless thousands poured to see it ; finally it was cut up and put in strong pickle and small barrels for the dissecting-table, part of the skin being 109 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS tanned. The Scot evidently still deserved his reputa- tion as a good hater. The commoner folk found, and probably still find, an unholy attraction in the grimy romance of the story. The fate of handsome Mary Patterson and daft Jamie Wilson, and the Italian boy, Lodovico, never fails to charm. The little white mice which the latter had exhibited in the Grassmarket long haunted, so it was averred, the grimy corners of Tanner's Close. no CHAPTER X ABOUT THE COWGATE Present-Day Aspect of the Cowgate — Its Former Splendour — "The Palaces of the Cowgate" — Its Early History — Candlemaker Row — The Society— The New Town to the South— The Darien House and the Darien Scheme — Last Days of Fergusson the Poet — The Potterrow — Discovery of the Casket Letters — The Horse Wynd — The Countess of Galloway and her little Oddities — The College Wynd and its Memories — Sir Walter Scott — Guthrie Street — A Cowgate Anecdote — Edinburgh Fires — Hope House and its Inmates — Tam o' the Cowgate — The Philosopher's Stone — Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld — The Palace of Cardinal Beaton. THE Cowgate is, even for Edinburgh, a place of picturesque contrast. As far as a public street can reveal its story to the casual wayfarer, you come here on the bedrock of poverty and want. The shops are of the fried fish, rag-and-bone, " clouted shoon " variety. Residenters are — God help them ! — pulled down by poverty and vice. The frequent public-house is an agreeable contrast, even though, like an evil growth, it draws strength from adjacent ruin. Not historic interest, not the memory of great names, not all the mystery of the past, disguises the havoc of those dark alleys that open on either side, even though you spell on the wall, familiar as a household word, the story of the world's romance. And of this place Alexander Alesse wrote in 1530: Vi'a vaccarum in qua habitant patricit et senatores urbis ubi nihil humile aut rusticum, sed omnia magnifica. Here was the patrician quarter, its buildings begun in III EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the fifteenth century, a fashionable suburb just outside the old city wall of James II., an exclusive quarter, " The palaces of the Cowgate," as the folk of Edinburgh called them, were the abode of the best in the Scots capital. After Flodden it was borne in on those gay -folk that their splendid houses were in danger. It was all very well for the people of a border village to get off to the hills with their thatched roofs, and watch with indifference, nay, with a certain ironic amusement, the vain efforts of the " auld enemy " to inflict tangible harm on the hovels of mud. But here this same "auld enemy" would have the unwonted and pleasurable experience of finding something worth the lifting, and so in frantic haste — the fragments of stone even to-day tell us that — the Flodden Wall was put together, and My Lord and My Lady breathed again as they sat in their palace or walked in their terraced garden. I garner a fact here and there from the history of this famous street. The interest lies in the past. Unless you are an im- provement commissioner, or a City missionary, you will not linger in to-day's Cowgate. Not that the present street is dirtier than ever it was. There is extant a certain ordinance of the magistrates, temp. 1518 — its zenith for honour — anent the " dichting of the calsey," which gives one " furieusement ct penser" The Cowgate is of small compass. It is less than half a mile long, and runs between the Grassmarket and the foot of St Mary Street, though beyond that the South Back of Canongate continues on to Holyrood. It lies at the very bottom of the valley, and is crossed at a considerable height by ABOUT THE COWGATE George IV. Bridge and the South Bridge, each carrying a broad and busy roadway. I think the Cowgate is quieter and more orderly than it was. Thirty years ago I remember passing one night in a house hard by George IV. or South Bridge, I forget which. For hours after I went to bed I heard, from the very bowels of the earth, sounds of more than Norse festivities, deadly combats and wails of lamentation, as from the depths of some dread Inferno. But then, and long before and after, the Cowgate was the last word for all that was most hopeless in all Edinburgh. Where it leaves the Grassmarket is Candlemaker Row, running south by the east side of the Greyfriars Churchyard. A few years ago this row was a choice bit, but here, as elsewhere, all has suffered change. Once this was the great approach to Edinburgh from the south ; hereabouts were many places of entertainment. In the Palfrey's Inn, at the Cowgatehead, it was noted in 1780 that thirty or forty carriers had their head- quarters. The RaJ) of Dr John Brown's story put up at the Harrow Inn here, and Paterson's Inn was an- other famous hostelry. If you follow the Candlemaker Row southward it will lead you into Bristo Street. Here was the Bristo or Society Port in the Flodden Wall. Society, by the way, was a little district which is ended in Chambers Street, though a quaint wee bit survives west of the old College. It was so called from a society of brewers, dating from 1598. It was once a fashionable quarter. The projected development of Edinburgh towards the north in the eighteenth century* 8 113 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS had many difficulties to meet, and once or twice hung fire, and it was asked, Why not push south ? Therefore were built Brown Square, which has also gone into Chambers Street, and George Square, which still exists and still retains its old-world charm though for some occult reason it is now given over to the dentists. Hard by Bristo Port, just within the wall, there stood the Darien House, the offices where the Darien scheme had its practical working out. Edinburgh, in a far truer sense than Oxford, is the " home of lost causes," and none is stranger than this. Who could guess that this was but the faint vision of what was to be two centuries later? There is something affecting about the disastrous failure of the premature attempt to beat the sword into the ploughshare. No fault of the Scot that it failed ! Do you wonder that they raged at English jealousy, that they hung unfortunate English sailors, that they passed the Act of Security? Read the pitiful yet heroic story and you will understand. It were vain to bewail either the lost causes or the lost houses of Edinburgh ; if you did your eye would never be without tears. I suppose the Darien House had to go with the rest. If any enemies of the scheme sur- vived in after years they must have thought it appro- priate that it ended as a madhouse. In a sort of annexe thereto, called the Schelles or Cells, died poor Fergusson the poet. He was but a lad. His undoubted genius never had its fair chance. The last scene accentuated the sordid tragedy. He perished, calling in wild frenzy on his mother, whom the harsh regulation of the house 114 ABOUT THE COWGATE denied at that hour to his embrace. The only pleasant thought is of that stone in the Canongate Churchyard and Burns' kindly homage to his memory. When the Recording Angel weighs and balances the deeds, good and evil, of the sons of men, that one act of kindness is more than enough to atone for all the rash and hot- headed pranks of poor Robin. Bristo Street meets the Potterrow, which runs east of and makes an angle with it. It is a shabby street now, and there is no monotonous tale of degraded splendour to tell, for it was never other than shabby. It has its place in Scots history since here was un- earthed, on a certain day in June 1567, the famous Casket that held those famous letters. I have no intention of discussing yet again the authenticity of these documents. If you wish to make up your mind whether they were Mary's or no you must fall to study of the works of Mr T. F. Henderson and Mr Andrew Lang. Hard by Candlemaker Row there once stoodlhe Horse Wynd, for whose disappearance you must again call Chambers Street to account. It is a little odd that so great an admirer of Old Edinburgh as William Chambers should, by his improvement scheme as Lord Provost, and even after his death, be mixed up with the change of old into new. Why should he of all men play the child of Babel and raze to its foundations the city he loved ? Because, you believe, he saw that the claims of the living and of to-day were superior to those of the dead and yesterday. If it seem hard that here and there some particular house was not saved, it 115 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS was because if you began making exceptions there was no end of them. Horse Wynd, albeit its name, was once a highly fashionable quarter. To live here was a certificate that you had blue blood in your veins ; but I am not writing another edition of Douglas or any other Scots Peerage. I will only mention Catharine, Countess of Galloway. She was far too great a lady to stir out except in her coach, and that must be drawn by six leaders. As in Old Edinburgh everybody was in literal touch with everybody else, it happened not seldom that the heads of My Lady's horses were at the door of the house she proposed to visit ere My Lady was in her coach and ready to start. The wits of the time had much to say, in the Holyrood Ridotto and elsewhere, on the tricks of Lady Galloway, but My Lady's coachman was for sure equal to the occasion. There was such a cracking of whips and prancing of horses, and frenzied running hither and thither of lackeys, as gave this progress of ten yards all the ^clat of a journey of ten miles. Next you see written up at the end of- a short and dingy alley, " College Wynd," the most famous and interesting passage in the Cowgate, This was once the Wynd of the Blessed Mary in the Field, and led to Kirk o' Field. You remember that as the scene of the Darnley murder and how the Town's College was built on the site, and quite naturally the old name got altered to College Wynd, and though only the stump of it remains I am thankful for that small mercy. And here Oliver Goldsmith was in 1752 ; and here in 1771 the great and good Sir Walter was 116 ABOUT THE COWGATE born ; and up this on Sunday, the 5th August 1773, toiled, or rather rolled, Dr Samuel Johnson, escorted by James Boswell, Esquire, and the Very Reverend Principal William Robertson, on his way to view the College. Lest you think that Chambers Street swallowed up everything, let me add that Guthrie Street is re- sponsible for much of the Horse Wynd and College Wynd. And if you ask why they did not retain the old names, the answer is that the whole place has been so mauled about and muddled that to have done so would only have made error darker. Dr Guthrie's memory is connected with a Cowgate anecdote good in itself and illustrative of the place. He had climbed to the top of a tall land on some charitable visitation. Entering the room, he perceived a huge sow, of which the family were obviously proud. " However did you get that great animal upstairs ? " said the Doctor, pant- ing from his journey. " Ay, but it never was doon ! " was the conclusive reply. Another anecdote, or rather phrase, is of an earlier day and a higher social scale. Across the street you have a back view of the huge mass of buildings which now comprises the Parliament House, and you can try to trace where the Back Stairs led from the Cowgate up the steep slope. Here on the Cowgate was the Meal Market, where in 1707 a huge fire burst out. Now, besides the various burnings by the " auld enemy " already noted, Edinburgh was raked by some terrible conflagrations. One in 1824 did fear- ful havoc to the Parliament Close and all the buildings down to the Tron, so that Salamander Land (where 117 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS now are the Police Buildings) was well nigh the sole survivor. The Tron steeple and bell alike were de- stroyed. The bell dated from 1673, and was the "wanchancy thing" cursed by Fergusson. Drinking- quaichs were made from the molten metal, a trans- formation that had vastly delighted the poet. I do not know whether the 1707 fire was a worse business, but according to Forbes of CuUoden, in a letter to his brother preserved in the CuUoden Papers, it was the most terrible he had ever witnessed, "notwithstanding that I saw London burne." And again : " All the pryde of Edinbro is sunk ; from the Cowgate to the High Street all is burnt and hardly one stone is left upon another." He notes that there were "many rueful spectacles," such as " Corserig, naked with a child under his oxter, happin' for his life." How to beat that for word- picture? The old Scots of an educated man had some- thing uncanny in its force. The spelling of the future Lord President, however, requires riddling. The un- fortunate referred to was Sir David Hume of Crossrig (1643- 1 707), from which place he took his title as one of the Senators of the College of Justice, and so was a Lord, albeit a paper one. He had a wooden leg, whence the " happin'." " Naked " means, no doubt, in his night- dress. An Edinburgh fire must now be a long way distant from the Cowgate before it renders such spectacle again possible. Some of the great houses of old times had their root, so to speak, in the Cowgate, whilst their upper stories were only a little back from the High Street. 118 ABOUT THE COWGATE Hope House, which gave way to the Edinburgh Free Library after a life of much the better part of three centuries, was the most noted. Here dwelt Sir Thomas Hope, King's Advocate under Charles I., a strong Presbyterian, a great landowner, and something of the scholar. The house was plastered all over with curt Latin apothegms, "Tecum kabita," "At hospes humol' and the like, commingling moral emblems with anagrams on his name. The stock anecdote concern- ing him is that he had two sons on the Bench, hence he was allowed to wear his hat whilst pleading, a right retained by his successors. A ludicrous nickname of King Jamie's preserves the memory of another states- man of the period just before. Where there is now the south pier of George IV. Bridge there once abode in considerable splendour Tam o' the Cowgate, King's Advocate, Lord President of the Court of Session, and first Earl of Haddington, to give but a few of his titles. A mass of more or less authentic anecdote has gathered round this old-time statesman. One evening as he sat over a bottle of wine, a babel of youthful voices and the bicker of a strenuous fight surged round his mansion. Tam's ears were not so old as to have forgotten what the sounds meant. The lads of the High School and the College were at deadly blows, and the High School was getting much the worst of it. But my lord was an old High School boy. He sallied forth in dressing-gown and slippers, and rather, you fancy, by the majesty of his port than by the weight of his arm changed the fortunes of the night. The 119 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS College faction were driven pell mell from the Grass- market and fled through the West Port. Tam secured the yett, returned to his wine, philosophically reflecting that a night in the fields would be an excellent sedative for too impetuous youth. One other story. Tam acquired wealth at a rate that seemed miraculous. 'Twas said he had found or discovered the Philosopher's Stone. You fancy how King James's mouth opened and his eyes well nigh started out of his head at this prodigy. Here was something to stir the mettle of the cutest witch-finder in all Britain. My Lord did not deny the soft impeachment. There was a secret, he confessed, but let King and courtier dine with him and all would be plain. They did dine, and then Tam with rich humour rolled out a set of the driest and most commonplace maxims in the copy-book : " Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day ! " " Labour conquers all things ! " with other masterpieces of the trite and the obvious. How Solomon's jaw must have fallen as he listened ! This was in 1617, and it was not till twenty years after that Tam, with his usual sagacity, took himself away from days of increasing darkness and evil. Hard to bid good-bye to so many worthy and entertaining people. The most fascinating remains, for opposite Niddry Street there once stood the town house of the Bishops of Dunkeld, and here Gawin Douglas lived in 1515, and you are sure he wrote and read much, though seven years afterwards he was put to rest in the Savoy Churchyard. Patria sua exsul, said his epitaph with pathetic simplicity. You remember the famous 120 ABOUT THE COWGATE mot uttered to Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, who just before the fray of " Clean-the-Causeway," in 1520, in talk with Douglas, smote his breast, the while protesting his peaceable intent, "Your conscience clatters," said the poet, with a happy play on the double meaning of the word in Scots, as the concealed coat of mail rung under the blow. He is better known, I daresay, by this story than by his admirable trans- lation of Virgil and the charmingly original prologues, for how few of us have the key of that long-disused court Scots? At the foot of St Mary Street, across the way, a tablet on a commonplace corner house tells you that here was the palace of Cardinal Beaton. But we are now come to the Cowgate Port, or at least where that used to be, and though there are curious pickings in this South Back of Canongate and St John's Hill and the Pleasance, we leave them untouched. 121 CHAPTER XI KIRK O' FIELD, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE HOSPITALS The Way to the College— The Buildings— The Academy of James VI.— An Historic Site— Kirk o' Field— The Note of Scots Tragedies — The Story of Darnley's Murder — Brief Annals of the University — Its Recent Growth — Inner Life of the Scots Student — Its Trials and Triumphs — Altered Conditions— The High School and Site of the Old Infirmary. A Literary Interlude — George Heriot's Hospital and its Fellows — A City of Schools. THE street that runs by the Tron Church, that convenient centre point of all Edinburgh, begins at the Register House, crosses the ravine by the gigantic North Bridge, jumps the Cowgate valley by the South Bridge and proceeds by a short ascent on its way past the University. Here we will stop. Let us take our place at one of the booksellers' windows on the east side of the street. You see before you, across the way, a huge building of massive stone, built round a quad- rangle ; within is a covered way by which you may walk round and round ; from it the large class-rooms on the ground floor open out. If you ascend one of the numerous stairs you come upon another set of class- rooms. These are like others of their kind ; in each is a raised platform, a desk and a chair at one end, and rows of benches rising from the floor so as to make an amphitheatre and fill up the rest of the room. On the south side is the library, the reading-room, the senate hall and so forth. In session (or, as they say in the 122 KIRK O' FIELD south, "term"), as the bell clangs forth the hour, the whole place hums and throbs with life; streams of young men pour forth from every direction and cross and recross in every way. A babel of tongues, a rush of feet for five noisy minutes and then quiet. The human currents drain off to the different class-rooms and the quadrangle is deserted. This is changing classes. You note that the students have neither caps nor gowns. The University, though not a mushroom institu- tion of the last half century, is one of the youngest of the great European schools of learning. The Academy of James VI. is still its proper title; the Town's College was long its popular name, justified by the fact that for some centuries the Town Council were its lords and patrons. The buildings are nothing like as old as the name would imply, but before I in brief tell their story I wish to direct your attention to the historic ground on which they stand. There was once the Ecclesia SanctcB Marim in Campis, otherwise Kirk o' Field, known to all time as the scene of the Darnley murder. The Kirk has its history before Mary and Darnley, but it has no great interest or meaning for us to-day. It was called in Campis because it was beyond the old walls, which, you will remember, did not even include the Cowgate. The house of Kirk o' Field attached to it, but a little way distant, was built just on the wall at the north corner of Drummond Street, a few yards from where you stand by the bookshop window. Indeed, a door in the wall led right into the kitchen. It was a little house of two stories. 123 EDINBURGH AND THE LGTHIANS The top entered by the outside stair, as you see it still in many an old Scots house. It held but four rooms or so. The Kirk had fallen into swift ruin since the Reforma- tion, and the house itself was in no good repair when Darnley was brought there from Glasgow on the 31st January 1567. The tragedy so terrible, so momentous, so impressive, must here be briefly recalled to notice for the hundredth time. Why were all Scots criminal tragedies so impressive and romantic? The actors seem to have crowded them, as if of set purpose, with striking wealth of picturesque detail. It was the shock and conilict of elemental passions, the violence of the time, the striking character of the scenery, which, whether town or country, made a weirdly appropriate background. Darnley was sick, well nigh to death, of a horrid disease ; he lay in one of the upper rooms of the house ; Mary was in constant attendance, a loving and devoted wife to all seeming. She meant to have passed the evening of the 9th February with him, but there was a masked ball at Holyrood preparatory to the marriage of Margaret Garwood, one of her attendant women. As the evening fell she returned there, attended by a gallant band with torch and sword— a very jewel set in ghastly night! Darnley had some dim presentment of the coming tragedy. Ominous 'warnings had reached him from various sources; he had read strange matters in the faces of the Thanes. Ill at ease in mind and in body he passed the final hours of his life. His last known act was to read one of the penitential psalms. Some 124 KIRK O' FIELD of the verses had a startling appropriateness. In Holyrood the dance went on. At midnight Bothwell crept from among the revellers, hastily changed his rich ball dress for some plain stuff, and was soon knocking at the Netherbow Port demanding admitt- ance into the silent city for the friends of My Lord Bothwell. " What do ye out of your bed at this time of night?" was the random but pertinent query of the grumbling keeper. None of the five answered ; they soon reached the house and joined the other con- spirators. One Hepburn of Bolton, a friend and namesake of Bothwell, lighted the match ; they then locked the doors, withdrew and waited. The match was slow and Bothwell fretted. How deadly that dread vast and middle of the night ! Would that match never burn its way? Exactly at two o'clock a wild light flared to the sky ; the whole house rose solid from the earth and then burst into pieces with a roar that shook with dread at least one of the conspirators — poor timid French Paris, lured from the gay warm south to his destruction among those northern wolves. "I never felt as I do now," even Bothwell murmured, perhaps realizing dimly that he had brought about one of the world's great historic tragedies. This at least forthwith ensured. Every human being in Edinburgh was awake on the instant, but there is no record of crowded streets, or a curious mob pressing towards Kirk o' Field. " No rash interference in the quarrels of great folk" was a maxim impressed on the minds of those honest burghers by every day's experience. Bothwell was I2S EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS allowed to return as he came with not a question. He retired to what can scarcely be called his rest, presently to be summoned, and to hear with such surprise as he could assume the story of the deed which was in fact his own. Darnley was found dead in the garden, and it was soon whispered with no mark of burning on htm. It was thought he was strangled as he tried to escape. Not even the superfluous wealth of powder had availed to touch him, living or dead. It was exactly eleven months since Rizzio's murder. Mary's prophecy had been fulfilled ; ere a year was gone a fatter than he should lie as low. In " hugger-mugger " Darnley was "greenly interred" well nigh in the next grave to the other. I return to the more prosaic records of the Uni- versity, whose story I tell in a few dates and a few words. In 1558 Reid, the last of the Romish bishops of Orkney, gave Scxao marks to the city to found a University. The other three Scots seats of learning had their beginning in papal bulls. It is only just to point out that even in the fourth and youngest, and always most essentially modern, the old faith had its «hare. In 1566 Queen Mary drew up a charter for the foundation, but in the subsequent troubles it came to naught. In 1582 her son, by his charter, really founded it, and the small and quaint buildings of that period rose on the present site. James VI. gave it little else but this charter, and for long years the poverty-stricken University lived on, cherished indeed by the Town Council, who appointed the professors. It was not till 1 6th November 1789 that the foundation stone of the 126 KIRK O' FIELD place, as it now appears, was laid, and it was not till 1S34 that Playfair, with some modifications, completed Adam's original design. Twenty-four years afterwards the Scottish Universities Act remodelled the organiza- tion of the University, and took away from the Town Council the all powerful influence which they had hitherto exercised, and exercised, it is only just to say, on the whole, sanely and wisely. Since then it has had its full share in the rising tide of Scots wealth ; its students have reached 3C)00; splendid new buildings for the Medical School were erected, 1878-91, to the south-west of the old structure, and between them is the great M'Ewan University Hall, called from its donor ; and there is a new Infirmary, 1870-80, conveniently near the Medical School. As late as 1887 a dome was placed on the old building, thus completing Adam's original design. Altogether the place is as complete and perfect of its kind as you shall anywhere find, and there are endless new professorships of every subject under or over the sun ; and what is there that you would like to learn that the University of Edinburgh cannot teach you? And now the Carnegie Trust has given to the Scot, almost for the asking, a college education. You can only wonder and admire how the devout dreams of mediaeval bishops and passionate reformers alike (for whatever their faults and feuds they were one in their zeal for the advancement of learning) have been fulfilled in our own day by American jirenmasters and local brewers, and indeed men of all denominations. In old Scotland they would have said, 127 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS " It is the hand of God," and whatever your creed you will contemn the selfish nobles who sneered at the devout imaginations of prelate and preacher alike, for these last had lofty ideals which the wealthy commoners> nobler than the nobles in after ages, made realities. This is an outside view of the University. What of its inner life ? The typical student is not in the majority nowadays. For many are law and more are medical^ and some are science, and it is among the residue who look to the Kirk, or perhaps teaching, as their calling that we find what has usually been accepted as the student of the north. There is a charming paper by the late Professor Veitch, in Edinburgh Essays, on the feeling of a student of philosophy when he entered Edinburgh and Sir William Hamilton's class, devoted to that subject. The motto on the wall, " On earth there is nothing great but man, in man there is nothing great but mind," struck the confident note most likely to appeal to his youth. But of all University cities Edinburgh ought most to stimulate the imagination of a native. Here is the theatre of his country's past. What better place wherein to explore that past or be fired to exertion in any field ? There is a fascination that Scotsmen have felt in metaphysical studies ; many eminent philosophers have called Edin- burgh their own town by birth or adoption. She has not yet lost the inspiring tradition, she has yet eminent men among her teachers or writers. Again, for those destined for the Kirk and faithful to its traditions, Edinburgh is the sacred city, the city of the Covenants, 128 KIRK O' FIELD of the Assemblies, still more, the city of the martyrs. And not less those inclined to pour new wine into old bottles, to try old dogmas by modem scientific tests, have here found, for the last half century, an ever- growing, strong, daring, inquiring, sceptical spirit, that with startling rapidity tears off their old spiritual vesture and leaves their minds in a state of bewildering, though it may be pregnant, disorder. Can we doubt that many who came here to learn were moved by high impulses to rich and profitable exertion in various fields of activity ? There are other types less plesisant to contemplate. The Scots student was left, and to some extent still is left, curiously alone. He lives where he likes and as he likes ; he goes to lectures, and he often has a mere nodding acquaintance with those who sit next to him ; he retires to his solitary lodgings and sits there over his books, and one day is like another. It not rarely happened that he was badly educated to start with, and a man of no real ability. Scotland used to be, and still is, though to a less extent, a land of many sects and many churches. Those who ministered therein were numerous and had poor stipends, for which an early settlement in life and a certain position possibly compensated. Thus there was a great demand, and the supply was not of the first order; many a mediocre young man studied for the Church. Till recently there was no entrance examination ; our student passed through the classes and learned very little during his seven or eight years of college training, for such it needed to make a minister. The only heroisnl about 9 129 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS him was a stoical endurance of cold and scanty commons, for he managed to subsist on an incredibly small sum, little more, if more, than a shilling a day, and Edinburgh is not a cheap town, far from it, but a little goes a long way if one lives like a prisoner in his cell Sometimes even the small standard which the little country kirk required was not reached, and the man became what is known as a " stickit minister," a being whom kail-yard romance has endowed with wondrous virtues, but who is mostly a very dull dog indeed. Times have changed for the better. The elementary schools are more organized, the secondary inore plenti- ful, and there are entrance examinations which help to keep off the useless and the unworthy. But the lonely life is still too frequent, and sometimes it drives men to the bottle, and that has destroyed some of the finest and most genial natures in Scotland ; a painful subject, at which it is fortunately unnecessary for us here to do more than'hint. Now athletic sports are more in evidence, and certainly for good, and the Students' Union and Uni- versity Settlements, established in some of the historic houses in the High Street, must have brought many men together, and will do so still more in the future, though again the enormous diversity of studies may,in someways, prevent this union. Take itall in all, this great University ought to have a splendid future, as it has an illustrious past. There, if anywhere, the student should live^ " Nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy tales of science and the long results of time." 130 KIRK O" FIELD It were tedious to speak in detail of the other educa- tional institutions of Edinburgh. Chief is the High School, dating from 1519 at any rate. Once it stood on the site of the old Infirmary, a little way to the east of the Univer- sity. There Scott and a hundred other famous men fought and studied. In 1825-29 it was re-edified in the Doric style, on the south slope of the Calton Hill. I cannot leave the buildings of the old Infirmary with- out referring to one incident in its career memorable for all who love English letters. W. E. Henley was a patient for twenty months in the place in 1 873-75. There R. L. S. visited him, "And the poor fellow sat up in his bed, with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheer- fully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's Palace of the blue air." In the series of poems — In Hospital, Rhymes and Rhythms — Henley has re- corded his impression. I think he never did better work. Here is realism without grossness, charming verse on a subject difficult to touch. Among the most famous of the etchings is Apparition — the portrait of R. L. S. drawn from the life. Henley's account of their first meeting was given some fifteen years afterwards in the lines to Charles Baxter which he added on collec- tion and re-publication : " Do you remember That afternoon — that Sunday afternoon ! — When, as the kirks were ringing in And the grey city teemed With Sabbath feelings and aspects, Lewis — our Lewis then, 131 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Now the whole world's !— ^and you, Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came Ladeii with Balzacs, (Big, yellow books, quite impudently French) The first of many times. To that transcendent back-kitchen where I lay So long, so many centuries — Or years is it ! — ago ? " I pass on to George Heriot's Hospital in Lauriston, built 1658-60, a peculiar Scots mixture of French, Flemish and Italian, blended to a harmonious whole. It is said that, save in one case, no two of its two hundred windows are decorated alike ! You remember it is called after "Jinglin' Geordie," as the British Solomon delighted to nickname his favourite gold- smith, he who followed his master from Edinburgh to London, and in both cities made money which he devoted to this foundation. The present entrance from Lauriston only dates from 1833 ; before that you entered by Heriot Bridge from the Grassmarket. There is, moreover, a long series of hospitals, as these foundations were called, an infinite variety of schools endowed and unendowed, and parts of the University are repeated over and over again throughout the town. Edinburgh is a city of schools. " Every man gets a mouthful and no man gets a bellyful," sneered Doctor Johnson of Scots education in his own time. The shaft had enough truth to wing its flight ; but now whilst every mail has his mouthful a great many have their bellyful also, and the lack of it in any must be counted to them for unrighteousness. CHAPTER XII ARTHUR'S SEAT AND OALTON HILL The Hills of Edinburgh— Arthur's Seat and the King's Park— A Royal Demesne — St Margaret's Loch and Dunsappie Loch — St Margaret's Well — Whinny Hill and its Memories — Muschat's Cairn— The Ballad of the Hill— The Hunter's Bog— The Radical Road— The Duke's Walk— Duddingston Village— The Sheep's Head — Duddingston Kirk — An Artist Minister — Cauvin's Hos- pital — Duddingston Loch — Its Winter Aspects— Word Pictures by R. L. S.— The Lion Hill— The Legend of King Arthur- Salisbury Crags — St Anthony the Hermit — May-Day Dew — The Calton Hill — Its Monuments — The National Monument — Calton ail — Its Story — History and Traditions of the Calton — Word Pictures in Sartor Resartus. Tai VPi ''T^HE essential charm of Edinburgh is the hills. A Fortunately for her you never can spoil, or even greatly change, those landmarks. Two require special notice. The Castle is not one — it is the very root of the City ; and as for Moultrie's Hill, as it was anciently called, or Bunker's Hill, as it was lately called, from the news of that battle coming when a local fight was in progress between two builders on it, or St James's Square as it is to-day, though the biggest height, even in its present shorn state, in the New Town proper, yet you do not, in the north, count such things real hills. The two I mean are just outside the City. They have influenced Edinburgh, yet are not exactly of Edinburgh. These are Arthur's Seat, with the King's Park that lies round it, and the Calton Hill. The King's 133 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Park by Holyrood is about five miles round, and in Arthur's Seat rises as high as 822 feet. James V. and Queen Mary enclosed and improved it, and how grate- ful you are to them ! Most places in Edinburgh get worse and lose some interest with the advancing years ; not so this favoured spot. Perhaps you regret its old- time trees, but they are so long gone that their very memory is forgotten. Then of old certain noble keepers had assumed rights and certainly abused them. One rudely groped in the very bowels of the mountain for stones wherewith to repair the London streets, others enclosed and marked portions off for their own profit, but they were all bought out, and a very well- executed road, called the Queen's Drive, was run right round it, and two little lochs — St Margaret's, near Holyrood, and Dunsappie, right up on the shoulder of the hill — were made, and you would never guess of your- self that they were anything but natural. People may say what they like about the charming solitude before the Drive, but even as it is, on the very Drive itself, just about Dunsappie Loch, watch when there is no one else in sight and you would think yourself in some remote Highland glen. A little bit away from St Margaret's Loch, and just opposite the Palace, is St Margaret's Well. In 1862 this was removed from Restalrig, and an ugly engine-house or something of the sort now holds its field. The old spring that had supplied it for centuries dried up, but it is now fed appropriately enough by the waters of St David's or the Rood Well. Another well stood on the south side of Arthur's Seat, 134 ARTHUR'S SEAT AND CALTON HILL just under the remarkable rocks known as Samson's Ribs ; this was the Wells o' Wearie. The very name had a fatal attraction for the minor Scots poet. His artless and plaintive numbers flowed copiously but dully. I spare the reader. And then in 1820 they drove a railway tunnel right by the place, and the poe- taster fled in horror, and perhaps the muse was consoled rather than vexed. The hill, however, like Prospero's Island, is full of noises. Look over a chart, see how crowded the place is with names that echo in your mind. There is Whinny Hill, on the slope of which, in the summer of 1 564, Mary gave a magnificent banquet in the open air on the marriage of one of her courtiers, who were always her dear friends and faithful servants. Probably the extreme Puritans thought eating in the open air a brazen, graceless and godless proceeding, but there is something pathetic about it to us who know what succeeded all Mary's rejoicings. It was three years after her home-coming from France, and even yet she had not quite grasped the Scots climate. The city of the rain-cloud and the east wind is no place for al fresco entertainment, but there are some fine Edinburgh days, and these the very perfection of weather. Near the exit from the park at this corner is Muschat's Cairn, raised to the memory of a lady murdered here- abouts by her spouse in 1720. The peccant Muschat was caught and hanged with all possible celerity. You remember in the Heart of Midlothian how Jeanie Deans meets the escaped smuggler at this spot, and how Madge Wildfire is made to give warning of the 135 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIAN S approach of the officers by strange scraps of songs. Fine scraps indeed, yet the. hill has one of its own, one of the very best things the Scots muse ever did. "Now Arthur's Seat shall be my bed, The sheets shall ne'er be pressed by me ; St Anton's Well shall be my drink. Since my true love has forsaken me. Martinmas wind, when wilt thou blaw. And shake the green leaves aff the tree ? O gentle death, when wilt thou come? For of my life I am wearie.'' A love-story of Queen Mary's Court is the facile tradition, and the learned again will have none of it. A certain Barbara Erskine, daughter of the Earl of Mar, married to the Earl of Douglas, was badly treated, and this is her song, or was suggested by her story. Well, the noble hill has its noble poem at any rate, and others besides the lady, or even beside the old- time hermit, have sought Arthur's Seat to fight all sorts of mental battles with themselves. Reuben Butler went to the road round the base by the Salisbury Crags the morning after the Porteous Mob, and Scott himself, and Hume, and all the great, and indeed all the little men of Edinburgh have walked there in more or less anxious thought. Young Weir of Hermiston "goes to another part of the hill, to wit, the Hunter's Bog, after the dispute with his father caused by the condemnation and hanging of Duncan Jopp. Thus too has been found in the Park a place where a half-believing Christian has oft faced a too-sceptical Apollyon, where, in fact, 136 ARTHUR'S SEAT AND CALTON HILL the student has had it out with himself in every species of difficulty and worry. But to-day he needs must choose his ground delicately. The horn of the hunter does not sound in the Hunter's Bog, but the " petulant pop " of many bullets on many targets is a pest and a worry, not merely there but over much of the hill. It is a nuisance one could well wish abated, but unless the marksmen should wing a Royal Prince, or perhaps a covey of tourists, I fear, I fear! You can walk safely and commodiously by Salisbury Crags, since a road called Radical Road was carried round them in 1820. Scott instigated the scheme, to give work to a populace starving and discontented — hence the name. A line of trees between Muschat's Cairn and Holyrood formerly marked the Duke's Walk, so called because James VII. and II., when holding that title he adminis- tered Scotland, loved to pace this ground. Beneath the deep gorge called Windy Goule are Duddingston Loch and Church and Village. The whole three are yet wonderfully unspoiled. It is one of the useful functions of crowned heads and landed gentry to keep such things unspoiled. Duddingston was a great resort of old-time Edinburgh citizens; it boasts one ancient tavern, " The Sheep's Head," to wit, renowned for its preparation of that peculiarly Scots dish, and the citizen took a daunder on the hill in summer, or threw the curling stones on the loch in winter, and here he could refresh himself after his playful tpil. The Queen Mary legend is conspicuous by its absence from " The Sheep's Head," but tradition reports that her son, 137 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS King James VI. "of happy memory," as the Bill of Rights says, was wont to play skittles here. Rather a humble sort of royal game! The Fortunes of Nigel were written in vain or you believe him addicted to cock-a-leekie, and from that to sheep's head is no great step. King James, we know, loved to crack a bottle of wine with Jinglin' Geordie in his booth, hard by St Giles' Kirk, and like enough, when wearied with those often troublesome Edinburgh folk, he was glad of a country excursion to Duddingston. In front of the village kirk there is a loupin'-stane, to assist the obese and aged to mount their more or less mettle- some steeds. Of old time, if you did not walk to the kirk you must ride, for the old Scots roads scarcely admitted of vehicles, except for show, and hard by, fixed in the walls, there still remains the jougs — that archaic punishment for the scold and the slanderer. The Rev. John Thomson, the Scots landscape painter, was minister here from 1805 to his death in 1840. He is always known as Thomson of Duddingston. Now the manse garden runs down to the loch, and at the end of it he built himself a bower, or rather a studio, which he pleasantly named Edinburgh. As fame increased, so did his visitors, and he found them a nuisance. Interruption in the composition of a sermon might pass, but in the composition of a picture ! How then to maintain privacy, avoid offence, and spare the conscience of his servants ? These were in- structed to give the invariable answer that he had gone to " Edinburgh," and in truth he was at " Edinburgh " ! 138 ARTHUR'S SEAT AND CALTON HILL Such at least is to-day the tradition, Duddingston contains one of those hospitals which are not rare in and about Edinburgh. It is a plain but pleasant enough building at the corner of the road to Portobello and Jock's Lodge. Louis Cauvin, its founder, made a considerable fortune as a French teacher in Edinburgh. You suspect some judicious speculation in land. There must have been scope for that in the early years of last century in this neighbourhood. He left curious directions as to the walling up of the door of the vault ; perhaps he had the fear of the resurrectionist in his mind, perhaps it was only his version of Shake- speare's curse. The hospital was opened in 1833 for the education of a limited number of children, chiefly the sons of teachers. The educational authorities have already considerably diverted it from its original pur- pose, perhaps wisely, yet scarcely in accord with the wishes of the founder, scarcely in encouragement of others like minded. Your modern well-to-do Edinburgh citizen despises Duddingston and its humble pleasures. But in hard winters, when the loch is frozen, there is a skating carnival all day, and almost all night, on the ice. In a letter of 23rd December 1874 R. L. S. touches off the scene : " Duddingston, our big loch, is bearing, and I wish you could have seen it this afternoon covered with people, in the driving snow flurries; the big hill grim and white and Alpine overhead in the thick air, and the road up the gorge, as it were up into the heart of it, dotted black with traffic." This is on 139 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Monday, and on Tuesday he goes again : " If you had seen the moon rising, a perfect sphere of smoky gold in the dark air above the trees, and the white loch thick with skaters, and the great hill snow-sprinkled overhead ! It was a sight for a King." Here is an evening piece from the next day: "The little booths that hucksters set up round the edge were marked each one by its little lamp. There were some fires too, and the light and the shadows of the people who stood round them to warm themselves made a strange pattern all round on the snow-covered ice, A few people with torches began to tread up and down the ice, a lit circle travelling along with them over the snow. A gigantic moon arose meanwhile over the Kirk on the promontory, among perturbed and vacill- ating clouds. The walk home was very solemn and strange. Once through a broken gorge we had a glimpse of a little space of mackerel sky, moon-litten on the other side of the hill, the broken ridges stand- ing grey and spectral between, and the hill-top over all snow white and strangely magnified in size." Stevenson was twenty-four when he drew these wonder- ful pictures. Did not he lose in ease and force what- ever he gained in precision ? Arthur's Seat is the image of a Hon lying at full length ; the likeness is startling from places like Portobello and its vicinity. You learn with surprise that the idea is quite recent. Have our eyes changed, it has been asked, or has the landscape ? " It is like a camel," says Maitland in 1750. Why he did not see 140 ARTHUR'S SEAT AND CALTON HILL the lion you don't know ; possibly the way the ground was divided by hereditary keepers may have obscured this. The antiquary has some diverting speculations as to the name, about which popular tradition makes no bones at all. Arthur's Seat is from Arthur the British Prince ; maybe he sleeps under that mighty crest, with his sword, Excalibur, by his side, until in the fulness of time he come again. And the rocky cliff to the west, known as Salisbury Crags, is named after Earl Salisbury, who accompanied Edward III. in his Scots invasion. I have spoken of the Englishlike names of " Edinburgh " and " Arthur,'' and here is " Salisbury." Your antiquary despises such rule-of-thumb solutions. My Lord Hailes and his fellows are all for a Celtic, or even dark Pictish, word. Their method is this; — They get a Gaelic synonym for the Hill of Arrows, or something like, and they give it a good twist one way, and Gaelic spelling is by IK) means a fixed quantity ; then they give the word Arthur, or Salisbury, or what not, a good twist the other, and presently you discover a remarkable resemblance between them. There are no buildings on Arthur's Seat,^ and fortunately there cannot now be. In 1783 a certain Dr James Graham had all but got leave to plant a house right on the top ; perhaps more money, or more power, or more trying and he had carried his point. In those days Edinburgh was so rich in situations that it could afford to throw away even the finest. At any rate it did not much care, but we cannot spare a pro- spect like this, and all the power of Royalty guards the hill for us. Except towards Duddingston and Porto- 141 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS bello the place is already thick beset ; a few more years and the solid phalanx of houses will ring it round on every side. Yes, but they cannot touch it ! Of old time the hill had a dweller, and you still see his dwelling. Right above St Margaret's Loch is the ruined Chapel of St Anthony, and Hermitage of St Anthony, and Well of St Anthony. The chapel is a mere shell ; neglect, and the weather, and perhaps a succession of petty buifets from Presbyterian iconoclasts, or mere mischief-makers, have ground it down stone by stone, and even the antiquary knows nothing of its history, though he guesses it had to do with the founda- tion of St Anthony of Leith, and perhaps held a light to guide the mariner on the Firth. The situation was ideal. You had the key of both worlds. At your feet was the Palace and the busy capital, and beyond was the Firth, where the keel was frequent even in early days, but you had only to turn your back and go a few steps and you were lost in the silence of the hills. You might go a long way and meet no one save a wander- ing shepherd, except it were Beltane Day, that ancient heathen festival, whereon the young folk of Edinburgh were wont, as they still are, to climb in the early morn- ing to the summit of the hill to wash their faces in the May Day dew. The Calton Hill is 355 feet high. Its south-west side is abrupt and rocky ; in other directions you can descend it. Calton is plainly a non-Saxon word ; it is said to mean the hill covered with bushes, and of old was called Dow Craig, or the Black Rock. To-day it 142 ARTHURS SEAT AND CALTON HILL is gained with no let or hindrance from Princes Street, but less than lOO years ago, that is, before the Regent Bridge spanned the deep valley or gorge of Low Calton, you had to wind, and descend, and climb again ere you could reach it therefrom. To the stranger it must share with the Castle the place of pride as landmark. As you pace eastward along Princes Street it is right in your , view, nay, you pass through its very bowels by a railway tunnel to reach Auld Reekie. It is now quite a creation of the New Town. The odd jumble of monuments strikes the stranger : the strict classic, and mixed classic, and wildly Gothic ; the old and new, though not the newest observatory ; the Dugald Stuart Monument, the Burns Monument, must not be detailed, though the little Temple that forms the last is " no that bad," as they say in Auld Reekie. You must go to the Canon- gate churchyard to see the High School at its best. From there, with a sunset effect, it is most beautiful. The dream of stone on the Thames is a Parliament House; the magic Egyptian Temple at Brussels is a Palais de Justice ; this is only a school, and only a new' school, as far as the building goes, and these things don't fire the imagination. No, I think the High School has never had sufficient justice done to it. Thus seen it is the supreme architectural effect and glory of modern Edinburgh. There are two pretentious and costly structures on the Calton about which it is hard, honestly, to make up one's mind or purge the soul from prejudice. The first is the National Monument. When, after Waterloo, the minds of men were uplifted, 143 EDINBURGH AKD THE LOTHIANS it was determined to commemorate the victory by a great monument — nothing less than to reproduce the Parthenon. The pillars cost ;^iooo each, but only twelve were completed. Funds failed and the thing stuck. It has ever since been a laughing-stock. "Scotland's pride and poverty" it was called, but it was not a mere question of money. The great war was too much connected in people's minds with a system of government and dissolute and selfish rulers to excite real national enthusiasm. It were easy to- day for many a wealthy Scotsman to complete it; perhaps it will be, and re-dedicated to something else ; but then is it not better as it is? Is not the look of ruin a distinct advantage ? Ah, but the sham of it all ! and that is what imagination boggles at. And what to say of those feudal towers and stem walls and frown- ing ramparts that wind round so much of the Calton Hill and make up the Calton Jail? The unsophisti- cated stranger, it is believed, invariably takes it for the Castle ; it looks incredibly ancient, and how to tell its grime is only railway smoke? It was built between 1 79 1 and 1796, and Robert Adam was the architect He was a famous man in his time, and to him we owe the Register House, and the University, and the Adelphi in London, in which latter city he did well, and finally achieved a Westminster Abbey funeral. The times of its building were the dark days of our struggle with France, darkened because all the sympathy was not on one side, and the Edinburgh mob thought a second Bastile was rising to cow them. But how to 144 ARTHUR'S SEAT AND CALTON HILL think nobly of a jail, and how to be just when you once took it for a castle? Had it beeni some great historic monument restored, perhaps we would all have thought it very fine indeed. A modern gaol may be tragically horrible, but it is also dismally comic, and under no possible aspect romantic. And it was successor to the Heart of Midlothian. The place was not ill-chosen ; quite close to it, between there and the Canongate, stood in pre-railway days the House of Correction at Paul's Work, and you can derive it from this, and not from the more memorable building in the High Street, if you please. But enough of the Calton of to-day. The history of the Calton and its Burgh of Barony, which clustered at the foot, is long. Of old witches danced nightly on its bare top, and a fairy boy from Leith acted as their drummer. West of the hill stood the Carmelite Monastery of Greenside. It was after- wards used as a house for lepers. A gallows reared its gaunt form at the very gate, and thereon was strung up any inmate who showed his nose out of doors. And on one part people were burnt for heresy, and on another Sir David Lyndsay's pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis was acted ; and again there were tournaments and joust- ings and all manner of knightly sports, and down that steep hillside, on some far-off bright morning, Bothwell dashed his horse and jumped madly into the lists, to the great admiration of Mary, who loved bravery above all things. Here, in other years, to wit in 1798, Rowland Hill preached to io,cxx) people, and here must end 10 . I4S EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS those desultory memorials. You get tired of hearing places in Edinburgh vaunted for their view, still, that from the Calton ranks very high indeed. You see every- thing from it, except the hill upon which you stand. No doubt, as R. L. S. observed, that is a considerable loss. It is most striking at night from the different elevation of the lights, the dim contours of the town, more than all the great masses of hills that loom in the darkness. I doubt if Sartor Resartus is much read at present, but it has some brilliant passages. One of the very best is the description of the sleeping town in the third chapter of the first book. I think it is Edinburgh taken from this spot. The Rue Saint Thomas de VEnfer (in the seventh chapter of the second book) is Leith Walk. Carlyle had the same experience there as his hero had in the street with the evil name, and Leith Walk is close at hand, and Carlyle was here many a time and oft, and the place fits the picture, and that after all is the only thing material. 146 CHAPTER XIII THE NEW TOWN AND THE SUBURBS BY THE SEA The Growth of New Edinburgh — Its Beginning — First Plan of the New Town — How far it was realized — A River in the Valley !— The Railway— The Beauty of George Street— A Royal Figure — Princes Street — Its Defects and Qualities — The Modem Athens — New Town Interiors — ^A Lack of Historic Interest — The Citizen of the New Town — Newhaven and its Fisherfolk — The Port and Pier of Leith — Glories of the Edinburgh Margate — The End of the Seaside Suburbs. THE beginning and substance of modern Edinburgh is the New Town. Many a citizen, who gazed from the Castle Hill or his own back windows across the Nor' Loch at the Lang Gait or Lang Dykes and Bearford's Park that make the Princes Street and George Street of to-day, may have reflected that here was the building site of the future. But they were terribly poor in old Scotland, and they were terribly concerned about all sorts of things that were to them more important than fine streets and houses — the right to the Throne, the right Faith, crossed and re-crossed with private quarrels, so that they could merely hold on to what they had. That unlucky Darien business of itself set back the clock of enterprise for ever so long. As things settled down after the '45, Edinburgh at last burst her bonds, outran the Flodden Wall in various ways, and in 1765 began the North Bridge that spanned the Nor' Loch, and enabled you, on a nearly level street 147 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS to walk over to a fresh civic world. James Craig, the nephew of Thomson, the poet, planned the New Town as a series of exact parallelograms ; that shape was predestined. The evils of the old, its crowded, shut-in closes, its irregularity, its wearisome declivities, must not be repeated ; here was to be ample space and light and air ; the classic rather than the Gothic ; the systematic rather than the romantic. The New Town was certain to be a violent reaction in stone from the old. It still consists of those great, regular parallelograms with regular gardens in the midst of the spaces, and regular houses, for the most as like one another as two peas. The New Town proper lies between Princes Street and Queen Street Gardens, and St Andrew Square and Charlotte Square. To-day this is but the centre piece of much building. It is about as long as the Old Town, and, roughly, about as broad. At first it must have seemed sufficient to double what already existed, especially as the south side early showed a desire to rival the north. For instance, you had Brown Square and George Square, to which last Walter Scott's father, a perfect type of the reputable citizen of his time, flitted from the College Wynd. The original New Town was finished about 1800, but since then it has grown con- tinuously, so that now the whole land, right down to the sea, is well taken up with rows of streets and great institutions, of which the Fettes College is, perhaps, the most striking. It absorbed a number of villages or little communities of one sort or another that stood on the ground. Thus, at the end of the North Bridge, 148 THE NEW TOWN where is the Register House, was Moultrie's Hill, and then there was Silvermills and Broughton, and near by, Picardy; and on the Water of Leith — now clear as a Highland stream, though not long ago little better than a sewer — Canonmills and the little village of Dean, on which you look down from the lofty Dean Bridge. All these places have long histories with much entertain- • ment for the minuter kind of antiquary, and little for anybody else. Various changes took place within the New Town itself; for instance, Princes Street was once a row of uniform houses with sunk flats, and there were successive alterations in the hollow which was once the Nor' Loch. Alexander Smith has said Edinburgh would be perfect if you could only dash a river through that deep gorge where to-day you only dash railway trains. Something like this was part of Craig's design. The Nor' Loch was to be set a-flowing and was to connect at the east end with a canal, which, in its turn, was to connect with the Firth, and up this great ships were to sail, and Leith was to be dished for ever as a trade centre. This fond dream vanished in thin air. I don't know whether it ever was possible ; it was never really tried. The trains had to come, and there was their appointed path. And the general eiifect ? We must put down this railway in the hollow to the bad. It is very prominent, and railway lines must be ugly : — " it is their nature to." There are many good things to balance this evil. Regularity and order have their attraction. Spacious streets intermingled with green gardens are pleasant to see. George Street, with St 149 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Andrew's Square to the east and Charlotte Square to the west, and its long line of straight, handsome houses between, is a very fine street indeed. It is perfection of its kind. You see it best on a Sunday forenoon, when all the good folk are at kirk and it lies empty to the day. The Trajan-like column to Melville in the one Square, the Prince Consort Memorial in the other, and the various statues at the intersection of the streets are all effective. George IV. at the Hanover Street junction, on these empty days, rules the roast. Chantrey never did better ; there he is, every inch a king, and the first gentleman in Europe without a doubt. William IV. scarcely counts, and it was a misfortune for George, who counted in his time for a great deal, to be succeeded by a monarch the very pattern of the domestic virtues in which his portly Majesty was so singularly lacking. You impute a certain air of bravado, though of the most Royal kind, to the stone figure, with his sceptre much in evidence. The very inscription is insolent : " George IV, visited Scotland in 1822." It seems an odd thing nowadays, when Scotland is the happy hunting-ground of Kings and Princes, to make such fuss about a Royal visit, till you remember that since Charles I.'s time no King, having actual possession of the throne, had come north. On the other hand. Princes Street is not, as some have said, the finest street in Europe. As mere street it does not equal George Street, and although the gardens are well enough, the statues to Edinburgh's very worthy sons are, to speak plainly, only so-and-so. On the other ISO THE NEW TOWN hand, the Scott Monument is beautiful in itself and suitable for its purpose. The Princes Street houses are now of all sizes and shapes, and if some may be called handsome none is strikingly so. It is the evil of that regular style that you can always go one better by increasing the size; also, all minor streets are inferior editions of the best, and when you have once seen that best, what is there after worth the looking at ? There is not that infinite diversity which attracts and stimulates in every part, ay, in every nook of the real Old Town. One thing in Edinburgh obviously saves the situa- tion on almost every occasion, and that is the prospect. It is the singular charm of the Castle Rock and the long slope to Holyrood that each is not only a centre from which you gaze on diversely fair and beautiful things, but, itself seen from afar, composes the most enchanting of pictures. The Castle Rock is not to be spoiled ! Crowned with the very fool's cap of a hideous huddle of barracks, vexed at its base with engine smoke, it remains unconquerably majestic, still the Maiden Castle not to be overcome. It gives to Princes Street a glory not properly its own. The Calton Hill closes the view to the east, and that again is impressive, spite its mad jumble of monuments. It is now an old saying that Edinburgh is like Athens in more ways than one. " Why not make it more so ? " said the architects, as they raised that quaint ruin called the National Monu- ment, and the Grecian temples on the Mound, and many another building. Whatever be the points of likeness in one thing, the comparison signally breaks down. 151 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS " Most ambrosial air " could by no stretch of the imagination apply to the Edinburgh atmosphere/ with its easterly haar and its days of endless drizzle. Finally, a part of Arthur's Seat must be included among the hill prospects from Princes Street. You have but to follow one of the cross streets northward and you lose the Castle and its rock only to gain a surprising near view of the sea and the Firth, with its continual procession of great ships, and the hills and shores of Fife. A stroll on a summer evening in the northern parts of the New Town is an experience of beautiful and inspiring prospects. Of the interiors of New Edinburgh, I will only observe that space is a tradition of the New Town. The dining-room of a house in (say) Drumsheugh Gardens will strike you as large, the drawing-room as endless. A change, indeed, from the narrow quarters of 150 years ago. " Happy is the nation that has no history ! " Happy, but not glorious or splendid, or even interesting. The New Town has no real history. By 1765, when they began the North Bridge, the history of Scotland, in so far as it was not merely one of the units of the British Empire, was over. Nothing could happen, and nothing did happen, and if this was true of Scotland it was also true of Edinburgh, its capital. The only exception, small but real, is the Disruption, the central incident of which by a mere accident came off in St Andrew's Church near the east end of George Street. A little earlier, or a little later, the memorable General Assembly of 1843 had met in the appropriate spot — that is, in the 152 THE NEW TOWN High Street, but the old place in St Giles' was done away with, and the new one at the head of the Lawn- market, begun in 1842, was not finished till 1844. An odd little trick of Fate thus cheated the historical proprieties. The only associations of the New Town worth the mention are connected with the dwellings of famous men — mainly of famous literary men. David Hume and Robert Burns, and Walter Scott and R. L. Stevenson are the names that most readily occur to mind, and the first three of those have more to do with Old than New Edinburgh. A certain interest attaches to the house of Blackwood and its famous magazine, still in a so vigorous age that you do not think of it at all as old. That belongs to the New Town, first to Princes Street, but much more to George Street, which is now, as it has long been, the headquarters. But all this is but the shadow of life, tame and thin after the particularly full-blooded existence of former days. It used to be said everybody lives in the New Town. To-day this is far from obvious. Improved means of locomotion, suburban trains, motor cars and what not have made distance of less account; there are suburbs of fine houses in every direction. Nay, in Ramsay Gardens, on the slope of the Castle Rock and in touch with Castle Hill, are some new and good houses of a superior class, and one or two University settlements have again brought a touch of higher life to the old places. Still, if you could cross-question the individual members of the hordes of tourists that throng the Castle and Holy- rood, and peer curiously into the dark closes that lie 153 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS between, as to where he pitched his tent, Princes Street, or a stone's throw from it, would be the inevitable answer. Scots character, like Scots history, is made up of violent reactions and contradictions. The folk of the New Town are as different as may be from the old High Street residenters. These were of sharp, brief, caustic speech ; these swore horribly, quaffed liquor, what would seem to us incessantly, and were of such sudden, passionate fits of temper that it is told the fire-irons in the old Edinburgh houses were invariably chained down, to prevent their use in a chance brawl. Also they neglected the conveniences and proprieties of life in the most scandalous manner. But the formal houses, and large spaces, and settled ways of our own day, have framed the newer generation in another mould. Your Edinburgh citizen strikes you as a quiet, precise, form.al person, of careful manners and cautious utterance, neat and conventional in his dress and ways, walking by the letter of the law, moving in sets and castes, with the horror of the strange, and is what an earlier day would have called "genteel." Convention is in the very marrow of his bones ; his life is humdrum from begin- ning to end. He will keep up appearances to the last, and is given to the state and ceremony of the wealthy on quite insufficient means. This is not a popular or engaging picture, but he is not, it is whispered, counted by his fellow Scots a popular or engaging person. This is the sum and substance of hostile criticism. At the most it is only true of a type, and there are many types 154 THE NEW TOWN in Edinburgh. Some know how to combine the vigour of the old without its coarseness and the refinement of the new without its formalism. In this city of courts and schools and kirks, wherein the common industry is the learned one of printing, the average culture is high. Your scratch Edinburgh crowd would pass a competitive examination far better than any other miscellaneous lot in the kingdom. Each one would answer well in history, theology, philosophy, and each one, like the Sir Pertinax of the old unkindly comedy, would have his " modicum of Latin." Learning is, and has always been, loved and honoured for its own sake in Edinburgh. I must say some words on one or two spots on the Firth. Granton, the most westerly of these, is a new place, only dating from the late Queen's reign, and a sort of rival port to Leith. Further east is Newhaven, once a quaint old village, the home of those fishwives whose peculiar dress, and the heavy creel on their back, supported by a strap across their forehead, makes them still the most picturesque figures in the streets of the Cclpital, where they are no rare sight. Though there is the usual amount of rebuilding at Newhaven, some of the old Scots two-storey dwellings, with outside stairs and quaint gables, remain. You see women at the windows weaving the nets in which their husbands and brothers catch the fish they seek nightly. Wester Close is the most characteristic. Still a distinct community, they live, marry and die in their own little circle ; they are said to have peculiar beliefs, peculiar ways, even peculiar speech. Charles Reade, English as he was, is iSS EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS thought to have got very near them in his Christie Johnstone (1853). I fear you will wait in vain to hear a fishwife of genius expound the true inward life of the community, and I fear peculiar Newhaven will soon lose its salt and become as deadly insipid as all around. How else, when the electric tramways roar through it with incessant din, and long lines of undistinguished houses crowd on it from every side ? It is still possible to catch a glimpse of its quaint ways, and to recreate yourself with the historic fish dinner, at the Peacock, the Anchor, or some other of its numerous taverns, but how long this will be possible it is hard to say. You pass on to Leith, the Port of Edinburgh, and " sair hadden doun " in former days by the rulers of the capital. You could fill pages with its history. The Pier o' Leith is famed in Scots song, and even in Scots law, for the Pier and Shore of Leith were regular places for proclamations of outlawry and what not, and in its obscurer byways there are still traces of old build- ings ; a door here, a window there to catch your eye, if you be curious of such matters. Many a famous person landed here and passed on to Edinburgh. Queen Mary, most famous of all, disembarked on the 20th August 1560, at 8 a.m., for it was an early age. But the Pier on whick she set her foot has long vanished. In 1779 Paul Jones was in the offing with three ships, and caused no little bother among the honest burghers. Leith Races, of which Fergusson sung so blithely, are now held at Musselburgh. Leith Links, whereon the Duke of York, afterwards James VII. and II., played the half-mythical 1 56 THE NEW TOWN game of golf that gave Patterson the Golfer's Land in the Canongate, are to-day quite unsuitable for this classic diversion. But I will not pick out any more plums from the historic pudding. To-day the stranger will find little to interest him in all the busy ways of Leith, it serves but foil to the glories of Edinburgh. A walk by the seashore takes you past what are, or were, the sewage meadows of the Edinburgh Corporation, and are still in any case unsightly enough. And so on to Portobello, always in view of the Fife coast on one side and the Lion Hill on the other. Portobello is the Margate of Edinburgh. There are Marine Gardens that excel in attractions the Hall by the Sea. The Pier, however, is deserted, the automatic machines there look as if for ages they had not distended " their ponderous and leaden jaws " to the open sesame of a penny, and the marvellous landscape and seascape find few admirers ; but the Pro- menade is thronged, and reminds rather of Southend than Margate. Farther on is Fisherrow, once another Newhaven, and the " honest town " of Musselburgh, and Levenhall, and Morrison's Haven, and Prestonpans with its coal and beer. And you may ride by tramway right on past the fishing village of Cockenzie to Port Seton, and only there will you say Edinburgh ends, and that is because the land beyond is not to feu and there is in the meantime no possibility of further planning and building. 157 CHAPTER XIV THE CHURCHES OP EDINBURGH The Churches— St Giles' before its Last Restoration— The Old Church— The Vandals of 1829— The Crown of the Steeple— The Legend of St Giles — The Reformation Changes — Varied Uses for Old St Giles— The Chambers' Restoration and its Effects— A Note on Present Aspects — Jenny Geddes and her Work — The Preachings of Knox— Other Churches— St Cuthbert's— St Mary's Cathedral— The Barclay Church — Old Greyfriars' — Dr Lee and Dr Robert Wallace, and their Work — The Tron — The Canongate Church — Memories of Trinity College and Trinity College Hospital — Their Destruction — The Dust of Mary of Gueldres — ^A Long Controversy — Rebuilding of Trinity College — Its Present State — Memories of the Magdalen Chapel — Its Present Use — Its Peculiar Interest. IN its pre- Restoration days St Giles was cut up, as many an Edinburgh man remembers, into various separate churches. There were the old high-backed pews, np organ, the ordinary lofty pulpitj but the whole was nobler and ampler than the ordinary Scots kirk, and it was im- possible to sit there unaffected by the memories and the ghosts that crowded round. For over 1000 years there has been a church in this place ; there is a long succes- sion of building and pulling down, and of fresh destruc- tion and re-edification, still you may cherish the pleasing fancy that a little bit of the old part remains to-day in some unexpected corner of the huge fabric. St Giles' may say, " I was wounded in the house of my friends." Neither English invader nor Knoxian iconoclast was so bad as the restorer and the improver. A Norman door- 1S8 THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH way on the north side of the nave, a gem of rare beauty, was smashed in 1797 ; and a thorough-going process of restoration in 1829 destroyed almost everything charac- teristic that could be easily got at. Fortunately the pinnacle Crown of the steeple, one of the striking archi- tectural effects of Edinburgh, was left alone, and there it stands, as it has for centuries, the dot on the i, the finis of the whole pitiful and romantic tragedy of Old Edin- burgh. Why St Giles ? you ask, and no one can tell. The Saint was born at Athens and lived and died in France. By some forgotten accident he became patron of the great Edinburgh church. The legend tells how a hind pressed by the hunters took refuge in his woodland cell ; that is the hind which appears as sinister supporter of the City Arms. Do not mistake it for the native Drumsheugh beast that pressed so hard on good old King David. Preston of Gorton, in 1454, brought the arm bone of St Giles from France, and in gratitude a noble burial-place was edified for him in the church. Do you not see the Preston aisle to this day ? The festival of St Giles was on the ist September, and on that anniver- sary a huge image was borne in stately procession for the veneration of the faithful throughout Edinburgh till the reforming mob laid violent hands thereon, dragged it through the mire, soused it in the Nor' Loch, and made it centre piece in an ardent bonfire. After the Reforma- tion the church suffered a more than sea change. Rough partitions divided it in every direction, and there was a High Kirk, and an Old Kirk, and a Tolbooth Kirk, and a Little Kirk, and the General Assembly met in this corner ; 159 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and a Police-Court was in this nook, and the quaint name of Haddo's Hole reminds that here was a prison and Gordon of Haddo one of the captives. This low part here was just the place wherein to teach a few bairns, and in that dark corner why should not the executioner store the implements of his dreadful trade, especially as he lived just at hand in the Old Fishmarket Close ? The Montrose vault seemed providentially fitted for a coal cellar ; and the Regent Moray's tomb, round which the higgler and the gossip and the vagrant thronged, was a convenient place to fix for the payment of bills. " I dined with saints and gentlemen. E'en sweet Saint Giles and the Earl of Murray." So ran the Scots version of the Barmecide feast of the Elizabethans with Duke Humphrey in old St Paul's. The difficulty is to say not what St Giles' was, but what it was not used for. The nineteenth century changed a great deal of that, and at least it was all used for Church purposes ; but there was much to be done when patriotic William Chambers took the matter in hand. As he sat in all the glory of civic dignity, in the "laft" of the High Church, as they called the gallery in old Scots, he tells us, in words which recall a famous passage in Gibbon, that the idea of restoration entered his mind, and it is only due to the worthy Provost to say that he spared neither time nor trouble nor money. The last years of the century saw the work full and complete, though they are still at it, since as I write a chapel for the i6o THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH Knights of the Thistle is rising from the south-east side of St Giles' on to the Parliament Close. Surely a great gain, and yet it is hard to please everyone. Crowded with Scots memorials it does not strike you as Scots at all, at least not the Scotland of yesterday or to-day, though it may be of to-morrow. Perhaps those in power can do no better, but they have set themselves to imitate English methods. The plate has become the offertory, there is a noble " kist o' whistles," and a service-book, and three or four curates at a service. St Giles' is crammed with interesting memorials. On the north side is the Albany aisle and St Eloy's Chapel, with its memories of the Hammermen and the Blue Blanket ; opposite is the Moray aisle, the burial- place of the good Regent ; and the Preston aisle recalls the adventures of the arm bone, and the Chepman aisle reminds of the great printer. Montrose rests there under the most splendid monument in all Scotland, and a tablet on a pillar recalls that Gawin Douglas, the sweet singer of an iron time, was once Provost of St Giles. After all that, the two names most present to the crowds of Scots pilgrims that throng what is now called the Catkedral Church throughout the holiday season are those of a great Scotsman and a little Scots- woman : John Knox and Jenny Geddes to wit. No need here to tell the story of the attempt to read the Collects, part of the prescribed service, by Dean Hannay on that memorable day in 1637, and how Jenny, the market-woman, sent her faldstool straight at the reverend head, with the pungent phrase : " Deil II 161 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS colic the wame o' ye, fause thief; wad ye gay Mass in my lug ? " You remember the tumult that followed, in which Scots Episcopacy went swiftly to pieces. Jenny was a character of Old Edinburgh ; they say she gave her stool to the , Restoration bonfire. Why not ? The Bishop, not the King, was her pet aversion, and she was nothing if not thoroughgoing. In life and death Jenny was a prominent figure. Even Burns called his mare after her. Knox sleeps just outside. He preached twice a day, not seldom thrice, to everybody who really made up Scotland in his own time. Ah ! those biting, passionate words which still seem to burn out of the printed page, how they thrilled and awed with the passionate voice and the no less passionate gesture! Well that those shadows of the past do not take bodily substance to-day. Ten to one Jenny would be hurling faldstools or what not at the head of the service reader, with Heaven knows what forgotten words of archaic Scots,- foul, bitter, pungent as the gutters from which they were raked. As for Knox, before the end he wrote, "the world is weary of me as I am of it," and to-day it would be still wearier of his stern measures and his intolerance and his passions, and he would feel a stranger in his own kirk, and leave testimony against that spirit of compromise that builds a temple to every god, that erects one tablet to Jenny Geddes and another to Dean Hannay ; one monument to Argyll and another to Montrose, and generously lauds the virtues alike of Papist and Puritan and Prelatist. How 162 THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH excellent our charity and toleration, but "Lib'ral shepherds give a grosser name,'' and our sterner fathers had ascribed it all to Pagan indifference and scepticism. St Giles is only one, though the most important, of Edinburgh kirks, and the city is a city of many kirks, and many of them deserve more than a word of notice. St Cuthbert's, under the Castle, ought to be old and famous for its site and its history, but it is comparatively new, and positively ugly, like the packing case, as Scott said, of the more elegant Episcopal Church of St John's close at hand. It is called after a saint born by the Tweed, and had so big a jurisdiction that most modern Edinburgh parishes are carved out of it. A little to the north is the modern Cathedral of St Mary, averred to be the most important ecclesiastical building in Britain since the Reformation, but it is scarce thirty years old, and its only interest for the student of Edinburgh is that it preserves as pendicle the mansion- house of East Coats, a splendid example of the Scots style of 300 years ago. You do not expect to find all the Edinburgh kirks models of beauty. The vivacious Professor Blackie described the Barclay Church, away at the north-west corner of Bruntsfield Links, as figuring a number of hippopotami joined together. The phrase hit the njark near enough to stick. Greyfriars again, though on a famous site, has no ancient history save for its Yard, even though Principal Robertson and many another famous divine were its incumbents. Two movements which have almost revolutionized the 163 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Church of Scotland, if they had not their origin, received powerful impulse from two incumbents of Old Grey- friars. Some half century ago Dr Robert Lee was minister there ; he believed that the barren simplicity of the Presbyterian order, its extempore prayers, its tedious sermons, were unsuited to the newer time. He introduced a Service Book and fought for many other innovations ; he bore himself gallantly in the years of controversy that followed. If the conflict shortened his life, the daily service of St Giles is obvious proof that his cause triumphed. A far more daring and wider movement was helped forward by Dr Robert Wallace, his successor. He was the extreme of Broad-Church- men, daring, gifted, scholarly. I recollect the interest with which a band of us, who were then students, pressed into the afternoon services, Sunday after Sunday, to hear doctrines that we had been brought up to believe fundamental and unquestionable subjected to searching and powerful criticism. The old metal took strange shape in the agony of the crucible. Your Scots Broad- Churchman had hitherto been rather a namby-pamby fellow, who nibbled at minor matters in a mock heroic fashion that lent itself to easy ridicule, but this seemed David Hume in the pulpit. There were other influences, and as the new generation grew up all the Scots churches became more liberal in thought ; a vague phrase, but I cannot find a better way of expressing an obvious fact. What will be the position if the flocks become as advanced as their pastors ? Perhaps these same flocks will solve their difficulties by leaving the churches severely alone ! 164 THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH A little way down the High Street a landmark in the traffic that runs between Old and New Town is the Tron. It is the opposite of St Giles' ; it is ugly and clumsy and of no great historical interest. It gets its odd name from the Salt Tron, which of old stood hard by, and was thus distinguished from the Butter Tron at the head of the Lawnmarket. And still further down, out of the Old Edinburgh boundary and under the slope of the Calton, is the Canongate Church. When James II. determined to reserve Holyrood Kirk for a Chapel Royal, Holyrood parish became Canongate parish, and this great bam replaced the sculptured glories and memories of Holyrood. Now the Castle, perhaps because it was Royal Demesne, was part of Holyrood parish, and so is ecclesiastically in the Canon- gate, and that is why for many a long day deceased soldiers were laid to rest here. This curious fact is recorded on the monument to them, whereof the sentiment is so much better than the expression. The geography strikes you as odd, but not odder than that Nova Scotia (for legal purposes only) is situated on the Castle Hill ; thus baronets could take corporeal seisin of their lands without the then considerable difficulty of crossing the main. So in England, also for legal purposes, they placed the Island of Antigua in the parish of St Mary, Islington. But we wander from our kirks. I must still notice Trinity College and the Magdalen Chapel, both of importance, both far from obvious to the tourist, or perhaps the New Town resident. A new street runs from the Netherbow or end of High Street ; it is i6s EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS called after the famous critique and lawyer, Lord Jeffrey. It goes north towards the railway, then sweeps round to the west, and so down hill. You note in passing a kirk to the left. An ordinary Edinburgh type it seems. Easterly haar and railway smoke are sovereign to confound the new and the old under a common cover- ing of grime, and it may not strike you that the gargoyle or the pinnacle is other than a cheap modern copy. They are genuine antiques, for here be the carted, or transported, remains of a great Scots mediaeval founda- tion, the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, founded in 1462 by Mary of Gueldres, for not only was there a church but a hospital. The railway lies in the valley, and in your own time you have rushed from platform to platform in that -distracting Waverley Station with the cares of the instant all supreme in your mind, the last place for antiquarian talk or thought. Yet dig down in fancy through some forty feet of railway em- bankment, and there is the site of Trinity College and Trinity hospital, which rose for 400 years under the Calton Hill or Dow Craig. Its foundation stood strong on an old Roman causeway that you might get at if you went still deeper, and there was a nave and a tower, but the design remained incomplete as the foundress died a year after the work began. There were many burials of folk great in these long-distant days, and their dust, spite of various removals and transmutations, still lies below. Even when the place was adapted, in the rough-and-ready fashion of the period, to Presbyterian worship, the beauty of the sculptured stones charmed 166 THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH the eye. It was taken down in 1848 after a long con- troversy, for the time was gone when you could destroy at your will, and without protest, the monuments of Old Edinburgh. When the breakers got to the lofty ceilings they found those columns that looked so solemn had another aspect. The whole roof was crammed with grotesque, leering iigures. That strange, mediaeval buffoonery had here one of its most remarkable ex- pressions. Knox himself had never mocked more freely at the Mass than did those forgotten masons with their grinning images. The controversy ended not with the destruction of the hospital. Mary of Gueldres was buried in this her own foundation. The remains were disinterred and duly conveyed to the Royal vault at Holyrood. The pious task was scarce done when another Mary of Gueldres' body turned up amidst the ruins ; and if the learned Daniel Wilson stoutly main- tained that the first was genuine, the at least equally - learned David Laing was strong for the second, and who could decide on such a question and between two such authorities? Again the railway company had been forced to pay ;£' 18,000 as compensation ; the stones of the church were numbered with a view to rebuilding, and for years they bleached on the Calton Hill. How much was to go to church, how much was to go to college ? First the Scots Courts held that it must all go to rebuilding, and then the House of Lords would only allow ;^7000 for this ; and when the kirk was built as you now see it, in 1871-1872, many stones were lost. But the apse of the old church at any rate is still behind 167 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the more modern building, only it is sideways and not endways. It is almost invisible. You get an imperfect glimpse from Chalmers' Close, which runs to the west of it. The hospital was never rebuilt, though com- pensation is paid in pensions or allowances. On visiting the church I found a great bare hall which contained one bicycle ! " Was it used for anything ? " I asked. The attendant said something about meetings which I scarcely credited. He took me to the vestry and showed me some beautiful pictures of the old college in the days of its later glory. This was the end of four centuries of splendour, and thirty years of pamphlets and poems, witty or otherwise, and contro- versy in court after court — a superior bicycle shed ! The mocking irony of those old masons was clean out- done. Is reverence for the past in Edinburgh not al- together thoroughgoing and complete spite the almost excessive care now lavished on Holyrood and the Castle ? The suspicion becomes stronger if you take the Magdalen Chapel after Trinity College. It stands on the south of the Cowgate, close to where it joins Candlemaker Row. It was the pious foundation in 1503 of Janet Rynd ; she left it to the corporation of Hammermen and dedicated it to the Magdalen. Here these same Hammermen held their meetings for many years, and here you see again and again their sign of the Hammer and the Crown. And here John Craig, Knox's colleague, preached in Latin till he could re- cover his native tongue, clean forgot in his long exile. Here a General Assembly, that of 1578 to wit, 168 THE CHURCHES OF EDINBURGH had their meeting, and in 1661 the headless body of Argyll rested for a period ; his head, you know, was on the Tolbooth. A long list of old-time benefactions is inscribed on tablets of wood hung upon the walls, and in the windows are a few pieces of pre-Reformation stained glass ; a rare thing in Scotland, preserved, it is said, because the windows looked on a garden, the proprietor of which was not an out-and-out adherent of the new order. The chapel has come into the hands of a Medical Mission. Not a bad end for the old hospital, you think, but it looks dusty and dirty, and I wish it were better kept. I don't know how many bicycles I counted in the vestry, and when I looked for the table on which Argyll's body had reposed I was told it had lately been taken to the Advocates' Library, where it is as much in place as Trinity College in Jeffrey Street, though the why and the wherefore of the removal seems hard to spell. They still show you the tomb of the foundress with its quaint, simple, old-time inscription, and though no sweet and solemn requiem be breathed over her dust in the stately Latin tongue, yet here are gathered the young barbarians of the Cowgate to learn sweetness and light from the pages of the Shorter Cate- chism, and Janet, if she takes note of such things, is, you hope, passably contented. Though I could wish the whole place were less dingy, it has so pathetic an appeal that I would urge, whatever you neglect in Edinburgh, do not neglect to spend one short hour in the Magdalen Chapel. 169 CHAPTER XV THE GRAVEYARDS OP EDINBURGH The Graveyards of Edinburgh in Edinburgh History — The Burial-place of Knox — The Greyfriars, a Gift from Queen Mary — Memories of the Covenant — "Bluidy Mackenzie" again — Emblems of Mortality — The Resurrectionist^A View from the Canongate Cemetery — Adam Smith — Robert Fergusson — David Hume's Monument on the Calton — A Note on the Philosopher — The Graveyard of St Cuthberf s— The Weight of Mortality. MEDITATIONS among tombs are not, according to the experience of mankind, heartsome or delightful. Perhaps Edinburgh affords an exception to the rule, perhaps not, but the question is irrelevant. In this city of the past and the distant the graveyard occupies a predominant place. If you study Auld Reekie to any purpose you will be often in the visible presence of her dead. The very names of their resting- places form a long list. Of pre-Reformation burying- grounds there is little to be said. Holyrood is still the privilege of the few. The stone that marks the con- jectural grave of Knox in the Parliament Close reminds us that the greatest of old-time Edinburgh cemeteries was between St Giles and the Cowgate — " Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers." Knox, as some would say, the greatest of Scotsmen, was almost the last of those buried here. A few years later and he had lain in Greyfriars, given by Queen Mary in 1 566 as at some convenient distance from the town. And in 170 EIllKi;UK(,H CASI'I.K KUO.M GRKVI'-RI AKS CllUkCl I N'AK I) THE GRAVEYARDS OF EDINBURGH going to it you pass the site of St Ninian's in the Cowgate, and ere you enter you catch a glimpse of the old College buildings to the left, and that is Kirk o' Field, And once there were graveyards round these two chapels, so that all that is keenest and highest in Edinburgh of to-day lives and works over the bones of its earlier citizens. But turn to the right and walk through Greyfriars. What strikes you most ? Probably the view of the Castle rising steep and sheer from the Grassmarket. You are in a crowded place ; the tombs push and jostle one another, stone is packed on stone. You see how high the ground rises above the adjacent Candlemaker Row. Once it stood level or below it. Centuries of mortality have packed it thus upwards, and here lie the leaders o<" their race by right of birth or right of brain. Hence those ponderous domes and temples, the sonorous Latin of those interminable in- scriptions. A notice at the gate gives you a list of great men that lie there. Before all here is the grave- yard of the Covenant. On the flat gravestones by the entry copies were spread, and crowds thronged to sign, some with blood drawn from their own veins, with tears on their hard, stern cheeks, and invoking in passionate voice the name of their God. Standing there to-day you compute by visible signs the price they were to pay for it. At the foot you could almost throw a stone to the place where the martyrs of the Covenant were to glorify God in the Grassmarket. To the south-west, in a spur of the churchyard, those taken after the Pentland Rising of 1666 were confined in the open air for over a 171 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS year. In another part is the Martyrs' Memorial, which tells, in rude verse, of their sufferings, and heartily execrates "the Prelatists abjured," who wrought their earthly ruin. To add the emphasis of contrast, there on the south side is the classical temple, the splendid tomb of Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, "the Bluidy Advocate Mackenzie," in Scott's phrase, or, to use the plainer but not less graphic words of one of the perse- cuted, " that excommunicate tyrant, George Mackenzie, the advocate." You may be sure, had the signatories seen all before them as plain as you see all behind you, they would have signed with equal ardour, with the same stern devotion to their ideals. They earned the reward of fearless, resolute men, they gained their ends, their cause triumphed, their faith was established at the Revolution. There was a wreath on the Martyrs' Monument the last time I passed there, and if there was none on Mackenzie's at least it had lately been refurbished ; thus " that noble wit of Scotland," as Dryden called him, is not left altogether to popular hate. And in this age of universal tolerance no one now shouts through the grating in half-frightened derision the famous couplet : "Bluidy Mackenzie come out if ye dar. Lift the sneck and draw the bar." You realize the stern, crude realism of old Scots religion as you stroll through Greyfriars ; the skull and cross- bones were, perhaps, merely conventional, as the figure with the inverted torch (at least a more beautiful symbol) among the Greeks, but an elaborate, full-sized 172 THE GRAVEYARDS OF EDINBURGH skeleton grins at you from the walls of the church, and not far off a long inscription urges on you the shortness of life, the wrath of God, the enormity of punishment, the exceeding small number of the elect, and other such seasonable and heartening reflections. You would not find modern sculpture or words after this fashion in con- temporary epitaphs ; the fashion of thought has shifted. Dean Stanley, in this very Greyfriars, eloquently des- canted on the virtues of peace, love and toleration. "Greyfriars," he said, "like his own Westminster, was the burial-place of reconciled enmities." Ah, not even in death did those old Scots forgive and forget, and if those that now fill their places seem to do both is it not that they are careless and their ideals other and more material if not lower? Scott discovered, though Jie scarcely realized, that Covenanter was far better literary stuff than Cavalier, and if kailyard novelists have worked the mine till the ore be of the thinnest, yet it has kept alive the memory of a tradition. But the years before the Covenant and the years long after are hinted at hM-e at every turn. Those heavy iron gratings you see over some of the graves were to save the bodies from the resurrectionists. Greyfriars gives another piquant and altogether different contrast. Mean houses surround the churchyard, mean clothes hang out to dry at the windows — tattered ensigns not of the illustrious dead but of the baser sort of the living. R. L. S. has pictured the scene in words too well known for quotation. If you take cemeteries in turn you will next get to the Canongate, and again you find a crowded yard, and 173 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS stately tombs, and historic names, and houses abutting on the sacred soil. As background you have on the north the Calton Jail, that mock or imitation Castle, but right in the foreground is the new or present and strikingly beautiful High School. The officer will show you the grave of Adam Smith. The inscription puts the Theory of the Moral Sentiment before the Wealth of Nations, but I won't discuss the why and the wherefore. On my last visit we moralized together over the neglected state of the tomb ; you make out the inscrip- tion with some difficulty. It is but a plain gravestone against the wall towards the Canongate. At that very time there was an election on hand and the pros and cons of the doctrine of Free Trade identified with his name were in the mouths of all men, and the tomb was sinking into neglected ruin. Adam Smith and his friend David Hume, perhaps, have talked it over in the shades with a gentle, cynical smile, for surely the description of the perfectly wise man which Smith gave to his dead friend was true of both. I followed the attendant to another tomb, and it was in much better condition, for the cult of Burns at any rate is not dead in the land, and this was the stone and the verse that he gave to Fergusson. The attendant, however, had other reasons. He called my attention to the superior character of the stone itself and the careful cutting of the letters. Perhaps Burns' generous action roused the very craftsr men to a touch of shame. Why had they left this tribute to a native to be paid by a stranger, not rich, and from the other end of Scotland ? Robert Forgusson 174 f THE GRAVEYARDS OF EDINBURGH is of Edinburgh clay every bit, though fashioned to the shape of genius. I have spoken of Hume as the friend of Smith. If you choose to climb the Calton Hill you will find a burial-place on its lower slopes, and there is a round tomb, simple yet imposing, that would not be out of place on the Appian Way. The inscription is merely, "David Hume, born 26th April 171 1, died 25th August 1766. Erected in memory of him, 1768." You notice just above is a cross and a pious inscription. Do not be surprised or shocked, they belong to another member of the family. Around are other classical or semi- classical monuments. It is again the story of crowded space and eminent names and costly funeral furniture. Hume is the one very great man buried here, but there are no wreaths. Often as I have visited it I have never found another pilgrim ! Among the numerous "public monuments of Edinburgh there is none to this mighty thinker. The populace of the day took a certain interest in his interment, but it was not of a flattering kind. They visited the cemetery afterwards, expecting to find a rifled sepulchre. Satan, it was confidently believed, would come, or had come, in person to remove the body of his very own. Not without a certain horror the citizens for years watched the figure of an elderly gentleman with broad face and benevolent smile and a somewhat corpulent habit of body though his life was simplicity itself. Day by day he trod their streets, as familiar as the Tron Kirk or the Crown of St Giles. As the years went by the step became less active and the corpulency more accentuated, but there was always 175 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the same placid smile, with a depth of humour and irony which none probed. True, he was hand-in-hand with Principal Robertson and "Jupiter" Carlyle and John Home and Hugh Blair and a dozen other moderates ; but then they were moderates and so almost as bad as he was, and their comfortable theory, that his scepticism was only a very far-fetched and ill-considered pleasantry, was not, be it said to the credit of ordinary Edinburgh intelligence, universally accepted. Meanwhile he was known as the author of some philosophic essays which had no popular vogue, which indeed have never been popular from his day to this, but were to act with deadly effect on the master minds of Europe. To awaken Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," to set a whole series of philosophies a-going, to give certain phases of faith the rudest shock they had ever sustained, not to mention the composition of the standard history of England, was no mean achievement. His work was done, and when his expected hour came he went quietly away. The citizens of Edinburgh are wise in their generation. A marble bust, say in Princes Street Gardens, would spoil all proportion. Hume with brave Dr Livingstone and respectable Adam Black and kindly Dean Ramsay ! The giant among mediocrities ! The result were positively indecent. I will not prolong my meditations among the tombs, yet I cannot leaVe unmentioned "the crowded yard. There at the west of Princes Street," the graveyard of St Cuthbert's. You have another fine view of the Castle, and right above you is the sally port, with its memories 176 THE GRAVEYARDS OF EDINBURGH of St Margaret and Dundee and Gordon. A true city graveyard this! Tramways grind along the Lothian Road on one side, the traffic of Princes Street hustles by on another, and a main line of railway burrows beneath the graves of the dead, and engines shriek and whistle within their very precincts, as if to waken the untold generations that in other times climbed the Kirk Brae, which you can try to pick out amidst miles of streets, and sat under godly and learned divines who held forth in St Cuthbert's Kirk, and who finally went to sleep with their flock in this huge yard. You have hardly the patience, amidst all the din and rattle, to pick out De Quincey's resting-place and reflect that the alien wanderer is the best-remembered citizen of this abode of the dead. I will not drag you further, O reader ! to the buria:l ground of Buccleuch Parish Church, or to Warriston Cemetery, or the Dean Cemetery, or the Grange Cemetery, though many a name in those places is still a household word in Scotland, ay, and far beyond it, because I feel that in the end too grievous is the weight of mortality ! 12 177 CHAPTER XVI TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS Scots Crime and Criminals — Case of Major Weir — The West Bow again — Its Saints and Sinners — Weir's Early History and High Position — The Legend of His Staff— His Confession — His Apprehension and that of His Sister — Their Conduct in Prison— Their Trial and Condemnation — End of the Major on the Gallowlee, and of His Sister in the Grassmarket — The Growth of the Legend — After History of Major Weir's Land — Major Weir in Literature — The True Significance of His Story — The Deacon and His Close — His Early History and Reputable Position — His Secret Vices — His Associates — The Robbery of the Excise Ofifice— The Deacon Escapes to Holland — He is brought Back — Incidents' of the Trial— The Verdict of Guilty— The Last Scene by the TolboQth^The Deacon's Bravado — His Portrait — Reflections on His Life and Career — The Play of Henley and Stevenson. '"T^HAT marvellous country," says Froude of -L Scotland, " so fertile in genius and in chivalry, so fertile in madness and crime, where the highest heroism co-existed with preternatural ferocity, yet where the vices were the vices of streaigth, and the one virtue of indomitable courage was found alike in saint and sinner." The criminal records of Scotland, especially those of Edinburgh, illustrate this quotation. They are strange reading, with a horrible fascination of their own. Here are two instances, the very pick of the bundle, united by no other bond than that both are inexplicable to the verge of lunacy. The first is the case of Major Weir, which had for admirable theatre the West Bow. 178 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS It is commonplace steps to-day, most of it, common- place dwellings, commonplace everything. How not to regret that old impressive street, lined with great, tall, gloomy houses, set off by " roundles " and " pends," and wynds and closes, and like devices of old Scots architecture ? Here for the better part of two centuries stood one dismal mansion marked by a striking turret, half in ruin and uninhabited, because of the accursed shade of Major Weir. Even yet, R. L. S. assures us, "Old Edinburgh cannot clear itself of his unholy memory," and that memory still haunts the place, modern as it is. In the years that followed the Restoration there was none of this evil tang. The West Bow was the chosen abode of the strictest of the strict, the true blue upholders of the Covenant. " Bow- head saint " was a cant term of the time. Among the saints {temp. 1669) who so eminent a professor as Major Thomas Weir? A reputable and well-known citizen, he lived in his house there in peculiar strictness and sanctity. He was come of good landed folk in the west, had risen to his rank in the army, and had been appointed to the command of the City Guard. It was not a time of half measures, but Weir's treatment of such Royal prisoners as fell to his charge was even then noted for its harshness. He had care of Montrose just before his execution ; he held him strait, he showered on him a wealth of vituperative epithet. He was "dog, atheist, traitor, apostate, excommunicate wretch." Even Weir had his gentler hour. He was much sought after by those of his own sect ; devout women EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS reverenced him as " angelical Thomas." " His vast and tenacious memory " gave him complete command of fit scriptural expression ; his fluency was wonderful; his gift of extempore prayer was the admiration of the elect; people came forty or fifty miles to hear him. He refused to preach (that, quoth he, was the province of those specially ordained), but he prayed "with great liberty and melting," leaning on the top of his Staff, which might well-nigh seem a part of himself. An impressive figure ! A tall, thin man, with lean and hungry look, big, prominent nose, severe, dark, gloomy countenance, which grew yet more gloomy when one of the conform- ing ministers crossed his path. Then, with expressive gesture, he would draw his long black coat tighter about him, pull his steeple-hat over wrathful brows, and turn away with audible words of contempt. And as he went his Staff, with an indignant rat-tat, beat the stones of the street. That Staff was to become in after years a terror to all Edinburgh ; it was of one piece, with a crooked head of thorn wood. When curiously examined afterwards it was seen to have carved on it the grinning heads of satyrs. And so, for many years, the Major lived on in t^ie very odour of sanctity, in his turreted house in the West Bow, with his sister Jean — or, as some would have it, Grizel — Weir. In 1670 the Major was between seventy and seventy- six, and a few quiet and safe years seemed his certain portion before he went to his honoured rest. Presently Edinburgh was startled by the report that he had con- fessed himself guilty of horrible and loathsome crimes, 180 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS and had with terrible cryings and roarings demanded condign punishment. The affair seemed so incredible that he was judged out of his senses — a theory still in favour with sceptical inquirers of to-day. Sir James Ramsay, then provost, sent physicians to report. His own sect also visited him, and a horrid certainty gained ground that the confessions were substantially true. The ofKcers were ordered to secure him, and he and his sister, the accomplice of his crimes, were presently safely lodged in the gloomy old Tolbooth, which you will remember was a little way down the Lawnmarket, just where it joins the High Street. His Staff was not forgotten; his sister had implored the guards to keep it from his grip. Carefully looked after, and gingerly handled, it was lodged in the Tolbooth as securely as its master. The town was in an uproar. All sorts and conditions of men "flocked thither to see this monster and dis- course with him upon his horrible crimes," and the attitude of the prisoner was such as to increase the morbid interest and excitement to the highest pitch. All he said but whetted a curiosity that could not be satisfied. " Had he seen the Devil ? " eagerly demanded a certain honest divine, named John Sinclair. " He had felt him in the dark ! " was the mysterious reply. To another ghostly adviser he asserted, "that Satan had appeared in the shape of a beautiful woman." He went so far as to describe the very scene of his crimes. It was a spot in Fife, and the curious preacher rushed off to inspect, " No grass grew there," was his quite tame report. Indeed, to ears prepared for blood-curdling i8i EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS horrors, nothing could be less satisfying. He refused to confess or be absolved. He roundly declared " that he had sinned himself beyond all possibility of repentance, that he was already damned." And to one of the city ministers who persistently urged him he responded: "Trouble me no more with your beseeching me to repent, for I know my sentence of damnation is already sealed in heaven, and I feel myself so hardened within that if I might obtain pardon of God and all the glories in heaven for a single wish that I had not committed the sins with the sense whereof I am so prevented, yet I could not prevail myself to make that single wish." And again, " I find nothing within me but blackness and darkness, brimstone and burning to the bottom of hell." Here and elsewhere we seem to hear the wailing of a lost soul. The stern Calvinist accepts with a certain terrible fortitude his place among the souls elected to perdition. Yet one officious divine was not to be denied, he was deaf to every refusal. " Sir, I will pray for you in spite of your teeth and the devil your master too." Weir needs must listen in gloomy silence. The accused were tried on 9th April 1670 before two Judges of Commission, a Court specially constituted, it would seem, for the purpose. Sir John Nisbet of Dirleton, the Lord Advocate, prosecuted. His task was an easy one, for brother and sister were indicted together and both admitted their guilt. It is impossible to reproduce here the records, or even to name the charges, though the English law ,of yesterday would have taken cognizance of but one of them. 182 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS Weir was not directly accused of any dealings with the powers of darkness. There is only an incidental reference to the supernatural in the accusation. Of such trials the end in any event was a foregone con- clusion. Both were adjudged guilty and Weir was ordered to be strangled at the stake on the Gallowlee, between Edinburgh and Leith, on the Monday following — the nth April. The Edinburgh mob had an extensive and peculiar acquaintance with every judicial atrocity, but never had the most regular attendant at the ghastly spectacles such a feast of morbid horrors. Weir was stubborn to the last. "When the roap was about his neck to prepare him for the fire, he was bid say ' Lord be merciful to me.' ' Let me alone, Iwill not. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.' " It would appear the strangling, from malice or accident, was ill done, but the curtain must fall on the scene> The Staff was consumed in the fire with its master. It gave "rare turnings, and was long in burning," so the curious observers noted. His sister also was condemned to death. Besides being an accomplice in her brother's crimes, she was charged with consulting witches, necromancers and devils; likewise she entertained a familiar spirit at Dalkeith to spin for her enormous quantities of yarn. She was softer metal than the other and confessed copiously. She had been transported from Edinburgh to Musselburgh and back in a coach and six, which "seemed all on fire," with much more to the same effect. The only thing definite was the extraordinary 183 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS quantity of yam. She was wont in prison, when earnestly solicited, to "put back her headdress, and seeming to frown, there was an exact horseshoe shape for nails on her wrinkles, terrible I assure you to the beholder." She was hanged in the Grassmarket the day after her brother's execution. Excitement and suffering had shaken wits never of the strongest. On the ladder she groaned out a pious commonplace of the time : " I see a great crowd of people come hither to-day to behold a poor old miserable creature's death, but I trow there will be few among you who are weeping and mourning for a broken Covenant." She tried to throw off her clothing that she might die with the greater shame. Bailie Oliphant, the presiding city dignitary, much scandalized, ordered the hangman to be quick about his work. This last roughness irritated the poor patient, who roundly smacked his face. Thrown over, she got hold of a rung of the ladder with one of her hands, and grpesomely protracted the inevitable. Weir's epitaph was written in various fashion. " Thus did the holy justice of God eminently shyne forth in detecting such wretched hypocrites." Then a wild rumour arose in the west that the Major had gone to Holland with money for the exiled brethren. The person burned was not Weir, "but another wicked person bribed by wicked prelates and curates to personate him." Out of China such personation were surely impossible. The wits had, as was to be expected, many a scornful jibe at the expense of the true blues, and then the noise died away. But popular 184 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS imagination set to work and touched the legend to strange issues. The building was used as a brazier's shop, and later as a magazine for lint, but none would stay in it for the night. At midnight the house flashed with .light, sounds of ghostly revolt echoed within the deserted walls ; the noise of dancing and spinning incongruously mixed with howling fell on your affrighted ears. Anon the Major would issue from the door, mount a black horse without a head, and ride off in a flame. Again a magic coach and six, in grim parody of fashion, would call for him and his sister. The magic Staff loomed ever larger, improving on its early record. It ran messages, answered the door, acted as Hnkboy for the Major o' dark nights as he went about his unholy errands. Such are the fragments collected in Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, first written in 1823. Long before this, somewhere about 1771 in fact, Robert Fergusson had referred to the wizard in The Ghaists : a Kirkyard Eclogue, whereof the scene is the Old Gf ey- friars Churchyard. Watson's Hospital, in the course of their talk, says to Heriot's : " Sure Major Weir, or some sic warlock wight. Has flung beguilin' glances owre your sight." You could not expect the masters of Scots romance to leave the Major alone. In Scott's Letters on Demon- ology and Witchcraft the hum of the necromantic wheel and the enchanted Staff parading through the gloomy ruins are commemorated as traditions of his own youth, and he notes the house in 1830 as just being pulled down, though James Grant affirms, in his Old and New 185 EDINBURGH Al^D THE LOTHIANS Edinburgh, that the last relics were only removed as late as 1878. Indeed I have heard it suggested that part of a wall actually remains as the western boundary of a house in Riddle's Court, which you may remember is at the east of the Bow Head, at the upper end of the Lawnmarket. In "Wandering Willie's Tale" vci Red- gauntlet,the brief story that is the supreme flower of Scott's genius, the jackanapes that mocked the dying agonies of its master. Sir Robert Redgauntlet, is called " Major, Weir, after the warlock that was burned." There is also the horseshoe mark on Redgauntlet's forehead. R. L. S. describes how his own father had often heard the story, only half sceptical as to its falsehood, in the nursery. It held such a place in the son's memory that some rather fancifully believe it influenced the name of the unfinished Weir of Hermiston. The legend of Major Weir is real essential tragedy, more impressive when the " properties " of staff and spinning-wheel and black art are brushed away, and the matter nakedly regarded as the record of a human soul whelmed in storm and tempest. I have said that Major Weir's house abutted on Riddle's Court, Going eastward along that same south side of the Lawnmarket a step or two brings you to Fisher's Close, another step or two to Brodie's Close, so called after Deacon Brodie, the subject of my second criminal portrait, he who repeated a century after Weir the strange drama of the double life. His story is quaint and piquant. It is tragedy, for it ended in his death on the scaffold, a disgrace to a highly respectable burgher family ; but it is altogether in a lighter vein. 186 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS There are strong dashes of comedy. The Deacon himself had a pretty wit and a very sustained courage, and even if some was bravado the very bravado required infinite pluck. The story in outline is briefly this. Brodie was of a good Edinburgh family. His father was Deacon, or head, of the Incorporation of Wrights or Cabinet-makers. The old man died in 1782, when the son was forty-one years old. He succeeded to his father's business. He was believed to have inherited ;^ 10,000 in cash and considerable house property. He, like his father, was Deacon of the Wrights. He was a marvellously good workman — an artist as we should say. As Deacon of the Wrights, he was on the Town Council and had the best Corporation work. Thus Brodie was to all appearance a reputable and prosperous man ; in fact he was given over to all the vices of Old Edinburgh. Drinking and cock-fighting were not perhaps thought of as vices, but he was a desperate and inveterate gambler in a low den in the Fishmarket Close kept by one Clarke* He was not above the* use of loaded dice, and he kept two mistresses, each with a family. Jean Watt in Libberton's Wynd with her two children, and Ann Grant in Cant's Close with her three. His fortune was gone, and he was ever in want of fresh supplies. He got in tow with a certain George Smith, an English- man of ill repute, and two others, Ainslie and Moore, completed the gang. A series of burglaries of the most astonishing character was set on foot. The skill of the Deacon as a craftsman, a certain simplicity about Old Edinburgh arrangements, made every house in the city 187 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS patent to those remarkable rogues. The stories are numerous. A man has the Deacon to supper, shows him out and retires to bed. He wakens in the middle of the night, a burglar is in the room — his guest the Deacon ! An old lady is at home o' kirk time reading her Bible. A figure enters, robs her cabinet, and then discovers he is not alone. Equal to the occasion he bows and retires with his booty. Of course it is the Deacon, but neither lady nor gentleman can believe their senses ; at any rate they say nothing. There came an end to such pranks. The gang at last robbed the Excise Office in Chessel's Court. They got a mere trifle, for they were frightened from their booty by a curious alarm. It was a Government office, the commotion was extreme. And then Moore peached, and Smith and Ainslie, laid by the heels, made a clean breast of it. And though the Deacon fled to London, and from thence to Holland, he was unearthed and brought back. It is the most exciting story imaginable. You will find it told at length by Mr William Roughead in his Trial of Deacon Brodie (1906). And to the same source I must refer for an account of the trial itself. It is only that of Brodie and Smith ; the Crown had accepted Ainslie and Moore as King's evidence. To let Ainslie go was really superfluous caution. The evidence was carefully got up, and the thing as com- petently stage-managed then as it could be to-day. Some of the technicalities strike you as ridiculous, but it was the " tune o' the time," or the time's law, and at any rate made in favour of the prisoners. The proof was 188 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS crushing. Smith had elaborately confessed during the examination, an interrogatory to which prisoners are subjected in Scots and French procedure. That did away with him, and did far to do away with Brodie. Then there was the testimony of Moore and Ainslie. There were certain intercepted letters of Brodie which clearly amounted to a confession, and all the minor details exactly fitted in. An alibi, supported by the evidence of Matthew Sheriff, prisoner's brother-in-law, and Jean Watt, already mentioned, was attempted, but in vain. Henry Erskine, Dean of Faculty, perhaps the most brilliant advocate that ever pleaded at the Scots Bar, did all he could for Brodie. But what could he do with such materials ? John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin, tried what was practically his 'prentice hand on the defence of Smith. There were no less than five judges on the bench, of whom Braxfield and Hailes are still remembered. Glerk had violent quarrels with Braxfield. Mr Roughead thinks his conduct of the case a mistake. I venture to hold otherwise. It was perhaps just possible that by creating a scene he might have forced Braxfield to put the case at once to the jury and snatched a preposterous verdict through detestation of the judge, who even then was unpopular. Braxfield, however, was too much for him. He finally allowed him to finish. The court had sat from nine o'clock on Wednesday morning till six o'clock on Thursday morning, and Braxfield then adjourned it for the verdict till one o'clock. And this deliberation ruined any chance the prisoners might have had. They were condemned to death, which they 189 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS suffered in due course after a reasonable interval of thirty-four days. Brodie showed courage if not bravado to the lalst. The day before the end he sung a stave from the Beggar's Opera, made some jesting remark to his companion in suffering the next morning. "It is fortune de la guerre" quoth he, a scrap that reminds one of like Gallic efforts of Robert Burns. He had, as wright to the Corporation, done something to improve the apparatus by which he suffered, yet the bolt did not work at the first or the second trial. Between the acts, so to speak, Brodie came down and conversed coolly with his friends. The third time the thing went and all was over. A desperate attempt was presently made to resuscitate Brodie by bleeding and so forth, but it failed. It is believed that an expectation of those attempts buoyed up the Deacon in his last minutes. Popular tradition, that had kept alive James after Flodden, and Major Weir after the fire on the Gallowlee, would not let Brodie perish at the west end of- the Tolbooth on the afternoon of 2nd October 1788. It was rumoured that no body was found in the grave to which he had been in appearance consigned, and that he himself in the flesh was afterwards encountered in Paris, that paradise of unholy joys to every generation of Scotsmen. Brodie when he ended was forty-seven years of age. A slender, small man, a cast in his eye that made him look like a Jew, high, smooth forehead, ever carefully and precisely dressed — such is the picture of him that remains. The peculiar piquancy of Brodie's position fascinates you to-day. It had an unholy attraction for himself. 190 TWO EDINBURGH CRIMINALS The profits were small though useful, but the very idea of outwitting all those grave and reverend people was inexpressibly alluring. One has to recognize the criminal instinct as a fact of life. The plot and the mystery of wrongdoing have their own independent attraction for certain minds. How far, you wonder, was the Deacon suspected ? The gossip that went on in those Old Edinburgh taverns, hour after hour, all the night long, what did it say? One has a horrible suspicion that the double life in some form or other was no uncommon thing in Old Edinburgh, and that there was a general convention of toleration and silence until some criminal or other committed the unpardonable offence of being flagrantly found out. There are many references in contemporary and later ephemera, and there is one piece of literature with this for subject — the play oi Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life by Henley and Stevenson. Very considerable liberties are taken with the facts. Jean Watt is a graphic portrait of a lower-class Edinburgh woman of the period, and R. L. S. never drew with a stronger and a surer hand. She lives with the vitality given by Shakespeare or Scott. R. L. S. knew his High Street closes and old world types not yet extinct, and the quite mythical Bow Street Runner of W. E. H. is also superb. The problem of the double life had always an attraction for Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is only another version of the remarkable affair of Deacon Brodie. 191 CHAPTER XVII THREE EDINBURGH MASTERS AND A VISITOR The Great Men of Edinburgh — Three Edinburgh Authors and Their Monuments — The Fergusson Localities — His Life and Character — His Chief Poems — His Pictures of Edinburgh — The Scott Localities — His Pictures of Edinburgh Folk and Edinburgh Places — The Stevenson Localities — His Early Years — The Attrac- tion of the North — His Literary Use of Edinburgh — His Remarks on, and Interest in, Fergusson — His Suggestions for a Monument — Scott and Stevenson Contrasted — A Personal Reminiscence of Stevenson — The Burns Localities — His Life in Edinburgh — Clarinda. CERTAIN of the great men of Edinburgh, as David Hume and Adam Smith, have no tang of the place in their work, others reflect it but slightly. Thus Burns never has his Edinburgh as he has his Ayrshire, but three writers of genius, all poets, though the- prose of two of them is before their verse were born here, lived here the best years of their lives, and were Edinburgh to the very marrow of their bones. These were Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Steven- son. Edinburgh is writ large in what they did, and the city has not been unmindful. Scott has his monument in ^ Princes Street, R. L. S. is honoured in St Giles, and if as yet it is only the simple stone in the Canon- gate Churchyard that^>commemorates Fergusson, the man who raised it marks it as memorable. Fergusson was born on 5th September 1750 in Cap 192 EDINBURGH MASTERS and Feather Close, which climbed from the valley to the High Street, whereabouts the southern approach to the North Bridge now stands. He was at school in Niddry's Wynd, a certain Phelp giving him there his first instruc- tion. Afterwards he went to the High School, and so was familiar with High School Wynd and High School Yards, and the old building to the south of Edinburgh, where Scott also did, and Stevenson did not, to his openly-expressed regret, study, though it could only have been in its successor on the Calton Hill, since before Stevenson's time the old place had become an Infirmary, and in one form or other it has so remained. He was afterwards at school in Dundee and at college at St Andrews, but still a lad he returned to Edinburgh and lived in Warriston's Close with his mother. That close to-day is but a dreary back entrance to warehouses, and yet its memories brighten for us its dull ways. Fergusson was mainly employed in the Commissary Clerks' office in Parliament Close ; his pay was small. He died, 1 6th October 1774, in the madhouse hard by the Bristo Port, and you remember he was buried in the Canongate Churchyard. He was a member of the Cape Club that met in Craig's Close. These are the places that you would seek if you tracked his footsteps, but ail Edinburgh was his province. At which of its endless taverns had he not drunk, in which of its numerous closes had he not sought shelter or friendship? His work is not large in bulk, and much of it is English and entirely futile, but when he wrote Scots the matter was far other. The Daft Days, The King's Birthday in 13 193 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Edinburgh, Hallow Fair, The Sitting of the Session, The Rising of the Session, Leith Races, To the Tron Kirk Bell, Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey are the chief of the poems in which he pictured the life of the place ; but it is the life of the tavern and the street, lewd, dirty, drunken, witty. What higher things there were in philosophy or divinity, or clean life or deep thought, were not for this poor lad of genius, for genius true and unmistakable was there. " I smell you in the dark," said Johnson to Boswell in those same streets ; you smell Edinburgh in Fergusson. He dwells with a positive relish on that muck heap, he is warm and cosy in it, and though he professes to object you see his easy tolerance. Poor infirm lad ! he is only comfortable by some warm tavern fire. He died young, but it seems he had done his life's work. What more could he have said of Edinburgh, and of what else could he have written to any purpose ? You have the wit and merriment and all the varied life of eighteenth century Edinburgh brought before you ; you know how the stones felt under the feet, and the ladies ogled, and that " black banditti," the City Guard, browbeat and bullied, Scott is a greater name, and his localities are briefly these. The College Wynd, formerly the Wynd of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Field, as noted, still exists in fragment. Scott was born at the west side of the Wynd head on the 15th August 1771. A tablet in Chambers Street indicates the whereabouts, Scott's father removed to No. 75 George Square in 1776, and here was his Edinburgh residence till 104 EDINBURGH MASTERS 1797, when he went to 39 Castle Street. That is the east side of the northern half of the street, and here he was for twenty-six years, and what temporary residences he had elsewhere it is not worth while to inquire. He studied at the Old High School and the University ; and it was in Old Greyfriars Church that the beginning of his first romantic love-story took place. As an advocate he trod the floor of the Parliament House, and he sat there for long years as Clerk of Session. He it was, as I have told, who restored Mons Meg to the Castle, and rediscovered the Scots Regalia. Also there is the Assembly Rooms in George Street, where on the 23rd February 1827, at the Theatrical Fund Dinner, the open secret of the Waverley Novels was laid finally bare to all. But this is only part of his contact with his native town. He above all other men took pleasure in her stones, her very dust was dear to him. " No funeral hearse crept more leisurely than his landau up the Canongate, and not a quaint falling gable but what recalled to him some long-vanished memory of splendour or bloodshed, which by a few words he set before the hearer in the reality of life." Scott made the most of great advantages, his powers of mind were not diverted to far-off themes. The romantic history, life, scenery of Scotland were ere his coming practically untouched as stuff" for letters, and he used them so as to leave but the fragjment to those who came after. The English wars, the Reformation, Mary Stuart, the Killing Time, the Porteous Mob, the '45 — but why recall them? Carlyle spent his energies in "the 195 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Valley of the Shadow of Frederick," as his wife called it ; and John Knox was calling, as he still calls, for an inter- preter of genius. Scott took what was at his hand and found in the common incidents of his country's history themes of undying romance. What pictures we have ! There is Jeanie Deans and Davie Deans, and Saddletree and his cronies in the Heart of Midlothian ; the border hills and town taverns in Guy Mannering ; the incidents of legal life in Redgauntlet ; the delightful opening of the Antiquary in the High Street; the Ball at Holyrood and the White Horse Inn in Waverley ; Holyrood again and Lord Seton's lodgings in The Abbot; the meetings of the Privy Council in Old Mortality. Then there is the delightful Mr Chrystal Croftangry in his Chronicles of the Canongate, with his accounts of the Sanctuary ; and My Aunt Margarets Mirror tells the legend of Lady Stair with admirable local setting. I need not turn the pages of Marmion to quote the famous view of the city as seen from Blackford Hill, nor shall I repeat the stirring numbers of Bonnie Dundee ; his love and devotion are summed up in one line — " My own romantic town." Fergusson tells you but one phase of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, but Scott gives it in many ages, in many aspects, And in many ranks. I pass to the third. The Robert Louis Stevenson localities are 8 Howard Place, where he was born on 13th November 1850; 17 Heriot Row, where he went in 1857 ; Mr Henderson's School, which he attended in India Street ; the Edinburgh Academy ; the College, which he neglected with a regularity upon which 196 EDINBURGH MASTERS he rather plumed himself. Like Scott he was a member of the famous Speculative Society, whose pro- ceedings, by the way, are reflected on with considerable scorn by Lockhart in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. You note the Parliament House, where he made some little effort to practise as an advocate ; the Lothian Road, over whose unlovely stones he tramped so often that he became a part of it. He hints they should call the great edition of his works not the Edinburgh but the Lothian Road edition. But like his predecessors he knew every hole and corner of Edinburgh, and not the place alone but round about it. Colinton, on the slope of the Pentlands, where. his grandfather was minister ; Swanston Cottage, near Golinton, which his father had for fourteen years, from May 1867, Portobello, Lass- wade, North Berwick were the objects of visits more or less prolonged. Fairmilehead, on the southern main road from Edinburgh, is memorable for the parable of the gauger with his flute. Halkerside and Allermuir and Caerketton were Pentland summits that he loved. And in another direction there is Cramond and Queensferry. Stevenson's attitude to Edinburgh is peculiar. Weak-chested and sensitive, there was some- thing terrible to him in the winter, in the spring, and often part of the summer, and he was in wild revolt also against the first rigid limitations of his life and of his family. He wanted to go his own way. The world has -since said it was a very good way, but the world looks back, and the world is wise after the event. Looking forward we needs must confess all the proba- 197 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS bilities were against the course he was taking. It was 99, or perhaps 999 to i that he was ijiaking a mess of things. How to see that he was a genius, and a successful genius, even as money spinner? As to Edinburgh weather, the New Town schemers quite forgot it was a thing to be reckoned with; they laid themselves open to squall, shower and blast in every way. These long, straight streets, these wide, patent squares, the elevation, the want of screen were a pressing invitation to Boreas and Pluvius. The old-time citizen could get up a close or dive into a tavern. " Whan big as burns the gutters rin. Gin ye hae catcht a droukit skin, To Lucky Middlemist's loup in, And sit fu' snug Owre oysters and a dram o' gin. Or haddock lug." It was not only on account of the Auld Enemy of England but the Auld Enemy of Weather that the houses were crowded together in that queer shape in that queer place. When Stevenson went away, especially during his last exile in the South Seas, he more and more turned with what finally became a passion of devotion to the town of his birth. " There are no stars so bright," he writes, " as Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning ! " He moralizes to Mr Barrie : " How strange it is that that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come should have such an attraction." He found Edinburgh excellent for material. His style, he vowed, was inspired by the old Covenanting writers. He could imitate them as to the 198 EDINBURGH MASTERS manner born, witness Thrawn Janet and the tale of Tod Lapraik in Catriona. His Picturesque Notes is the classic picture of the place. You begin your study of Edinburgh with it as a matter of course. Deacon Brodie is pure Edin- burgh. The stage, it seems, won't have it or any of its fellows at any price, though distinguished actors have not always thought so, but they are good reading for all that. St Ives, with the French prisoner and his escape and adventures in the neighbourhood, is much concerned with Edinburgh and the places about it, and so are Kidnapped and Catriona. The dedication of that last book to Mr Charles Baxter is a masterpiece of graceful and pathetic allusion to Old Edinburgh days. Again, John Nicholson is entirely concerned with Auld Reekie. The Wrecker has a graphic scene in Greyfriars Church- yard, and in the unfinished Weir of Hermiston you have George Square, and the Justiciary Court, and the place of execution, to name but these. Touches of Edinburgh stray into most things, Stevenson wrote ; even in the New Arabian Nights there is the opening episode of Francis Scrymgeour's adventures. In an essay like Old Mortality reflections centre round the burial-ground on the Calton. Edinburgh was beautiful to Stevenson in the pale light of memory as it had never been in actual fact. He knew he would never return, even when he wrote : — " The voice of generations dead Summons me, sitting distant, to arise, My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace. And all mutation over, stretch me down In that denoted city of the dead." 199 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS One figure of the town's past had for him a strange fascination. That was Robert Fergusson, "the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse." He tells Mr H. B. Baildon that he meant to write on him, "him that went down — my brother, Robert Fergusson." And again, " my unhappy predecessor on the causey of Old Edinburgh." "I believe Fergusson lives in me," he said, and " so like myself." He told Mr Baxter he was inclined to dedicate the Edinburgh edition to one whom he calls elsewhere "the old Robin who was before Burns and the flood," and (not all in jest) " it really looks like the transmigration of souls," He set Mr Baxter to find out if the monument in the Canon- gate churchyard was in good condition ; if not, he pro- posed to restore it, with an additional inscription. R. L. S. must have forgotten the Burns' Club and the Burns' cult ; the memorial is, in fact, continuously spick and span. Again, he is eager that a monument should be erected to Fergusson, " the true place (in my view) were the churchyard of Haddington." An odd state- ment ! There is a tradition that the Rev. John Brown of Haddington, the old seceding divine, met Fergusson two years before his death in the churchyard, and so preached to him repentance and the life to come that Fergusson trembled and was horror-struck, if not re- pentant. The story is a mere myth ; there is another of like character about David Hume and this same John Brown. In fact Sommers, his contemporary, friend and biographer, expressly contradicts the tale. He saw 200 EDINBURGH MASTERS Fergusson immediately after the Haddington visit, and the poet said nothing about it. Fergusson, though at the end afflicted with religious melancholia, was altogether of the Cavalier party, like the other wits of the day. " Bluidy Mackenzie " was to him a perfect paragon. "Whase laws rebellious bigotry reclaim'd; Freed the hale land o' Covenanting fools, Wha aft hae fash'd us wi' unnumber'd dools." It is too soon to say where, exactly, time will put the ingenious R. L. S. If picture postcards and tourists' haunts are a test, his fame grows apace. Few writers have greater charm, a more delicate, sensitive style, a stronger feeling for romance. We all know the famous phrase of the "sedulous ape." However attained, the results were wonderful, yet he is often precious, and sometimes smells of the lamp. And this fine work produces a practical difficulty at its best, and even because of its best. The interest of the story hurries you along, the finish of the style bids you linger and savour each phrase ; you feel as if too quick for digestion you had bolted a cunning banquet. You do not have that idea about Scott. Stevenson, and not he alone, has said the magician had no style. Save in one or two passages, as in Wandering Willies Tale, and that is " braid Lallan'," it is true enough ; but how pleasant and comfortable to read ! It is the easy coat and slippers as against the dress suit. You float on the current of the story, with no thought of the boat in which you sit. Hence Stevenson's short stories impress 201 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS one more than his long. Thrawn Janet and a Nights Lodging are before Kidnapped and Catriona, and even Treasure Island. Obviously, too, Scott had more know- ledge of his theme than Stevenson, He took a broader and healthier interest in life, he paints with a larger brush and more powerful strokes. He is contented with the surface, and Stevenson always tried to look below. He is something of the philosopher and the moralist ; he was terribly fond of preaching. All things considered, his Address to the Clergy and Laity of the Church of Scotland is an unblushing performance. The problem of the double life had in literature, at any rate, the greatest interest for him. He loved to preach a well-nigh evangelical sermon, and he loved to draw a well-nigh unadulterated villain. I conclude these words on Stevenson with a personal reminiscence, Virgilium vidi tantum. I was the contem- porary at college of R. L. S., but I only remember seeing him once, and under conditions rather ludicrous than re- markable. I belonged to a Society called the Edinburgh University Philosophical Society, which met once a week to discuss metaphysical questions. We were great on Hegd, whom none of us understood, which fact increased the interest of the discussion. Many of the members became great folk, a Cabinet Minister, a Law Peer, a shining light in the Kailyard School of Letters, professors, advocates and ministers too numerous to mention, and if others went down instead of up, they are now where Orpheus and where Homer are, and the rest is silence. In those distant days the most charming 203 EDINBURGH MASTERS and alluring figure was James Walter Ferrier, son of Professor Ferrier of St Andrews, the well-known meta- physician. His career is told in a brilliant passage in the essay called Old Mortality; his epitaph is in Henley's Hospital Rhymes : " Our Athos rests — the wise, the kind. The liberal and august, his fault atoned, Rests in the crowded yard. There at the west of Princes Street." Then he seemed at the beginning of a brilliant and successful career. We all admired him. It was his turn to read us a paper. He chose a whimsical subject : " Was the human race produced from one pair of originals ? " It meant sport and mischief, but we were too dull to see it. The hour came — and passed, and we sat in silence in one of the upper rooms of the College. At length in came Ferrier, urbane and rubicund, and more hilarious (we thought) than the occasion required. With him was a slim, pallid, unkempt, uncanny youth, also un- reasonably hilarious, who threw himself carelessly on a seat and proceeded to consider us and our goings-on with mocking elfin mirth. Ferrier walked to the desk, pulled out a paper and began to read at a rapid rate. Now and again he paused to laugh heartily. His friend was ready chorus. We failed to discover the cause of this unseasonable merriment. The evening's entertainment was soon over. Ferrier crumpled up his paper. He and his friend rushed together from the room, and with wild bursts of uncontrollable merriment clattered away down the echoing stone passages and stairs. I learned after- 203 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS wards that the name of Farrier's friend was Robert Louis Stevenson. In this strange guise we had enter- tained an Angel of Light. I never saw him again. And now a word as to the most famous visitor (unless, as some have thought, Shakespeare once strolled that way) Edinburgh ever had. Robert Burns enters the stage of Edinburgh on the 17th November 1786. He first lived in Baxter's Close, an extinct alley of the High Street, now a cleared space. His other Edinburgh residence was St James' Square, a little to the east of the Register House. Of the taverns he frequented, that of Dawnie Douglas in the Anchor Close, where the club called the Crochallan Fencibles had its meetings, and Dowie's tavern, in Libberton's Wynd, are the most noted. At Sciennes Hill House young Walter Scott had a look and a word from him for supplying the author of a quota- tion under a picture. In St John Street the Old Canon- gate Kilwinning Lodge of Freemasons crowned him as their poet-laureate. In General's Entry, at the junction of Bristo Street and Potterrow was the residence of Mrs Maclehose.the Clarinda of his most passionate love songs. How he saw what was highest and lowest in Edinburgh, gatherings of divines and philosophers, " drucken writers' feasts," ladies of rank and fashion, the Highland wenches of the Cowgate, is not here to be told, nor the story of his desperate flirtation with this same Clarinda. On 6th December 1791 he saw her for the last time. He was dead five years after, but she lingered fa:r on into the next century. Scott saw her at her relative's. Lord Craig's, old and devout, and, as he almost brutally says^ 204 EDINBURGH MASTERS with no touch of her former beauty. Yet she was to survive Scott, who died on the 6th December 1831. Forty years after her parting with Burns she wrote, " This day I never can forget, parted with Burns in the year 1 791, never more to meet in this world." How to forget, even after all those years, the eye that glowed like a live coal, the hand that even in health seemed to burn like fire? It was not till 22nd October 1841 that to her the end came. She was then eighty-three. Surely of all Edinburgh women the most pathetic, if not the most memorable. 205 CHAPTER XVIII LITERARY ANNALS OP EDINBURGH Edinburgh and Men of Letters — The New and the Old — Fugitive Figures — The Great Days of James IV. — William Dunbar Gawin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay — Their Lives and Works — The Reformation Epoch — John Knox and George Buchanan — Life and Times of Allan Ramsay — The Great Men that followed him — "A Hotbed of Genius" — The Last Days of Adam Smith — " Bozzy " and his Pranks — Lord Jeffrey and Henry Mackenzie — The Edinburgh Review — Its Founders and their Work — Blackwood's Magazine and its Work — The Chaldee Manuscript — The Chief Figures — The Scots Observer — Dr John Brown — The End of the story. MOVING to and fro in Edinburgh we have come on the tracks of many eminent people, some of them great writers. I have picked out for special mention three of them. I here gather into one whole the complete literary story of the capital. The connection of Edin- burgh with literature is very close. A long series 6f writers of the first rank lived and worked here. The story is finished. It is one of the piquant contrasts between the old and the New, and between spiritual splendour and material prosperity, that, spite its wealth and population and culture, New Edinburgh is as nothing to Old. " A hotbed of genius," so Smollett well named that small, quaint, unsavoury eighteenth-century city. No one says that of the caput mortuum of to-day. The mere fact that a man was a " residenter " does not make him one of the Edinburgh writers, Walter Kennedy, in 206 LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH the words of Dunbar, "brought the Carrick clay to Edinburgh corrse," yet we may safely pass him by. More than two hundred years after a more illustrious figure brought the Carrick, or rather Kyle, clay to Edin- burgh, moved like a comet among its fixed stars, but Robert Burns was professedly a visitor, and so was the first James. Thus we cannot credit the Kinges Quair, or Pebles to the Play, and (if he were, in fact, the gifted author) Christis Kirk on the Green, to an Edinburgh man. When we come to James IV. it is quite other. He was much in Edinburgh. Holyrood was his head- quarters so to speak, and attached to his Court were a body of poets, the old Makaris, men of genius and learn- ing, whose lines are to us " unsavoury and sour '' only because we do not take the trouble to understand them. Three eminent figures rise above their fellows. These were William Dunbar, Gawin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay. Ofthese Dunbar is easily first. He wrote much of the highest and most various excellence; he was the poet of love and satire. How often he paced the High Street and noted the busy scenes of city life ! He is not complimentary to Edinburgh ; he pictures it very much as Fergusson did long afterwards, but not with the sym- pathy of a native. He was born not far off in the Lothian fields ; perhaps he preferred the country to the town. At any rate, in one of his most famous verses he pictures what there ought to be at the Cross, and what in fact there was, and you learn that very early indeed Edinburgh had acquired its evil reputation for uncleanness. In what rapturous strains, on the other hand, did he sing of 207 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIAN S London in the Guildhall Recitation : " London, thou art the floure of cities all ! " In the Thistle and the Rose he carolled love strains on the marriage of Margaret Tudor to his master. But if such things are too much for the modern reader, let him at least try Kind Kittok, a daring Rabelaisian adventure in this world and the next, such as Burns might have written had he been born two centuries earlier. Of Gawin Douglas I will only here recall that he was Pro- vost of St Giles, and Lyndsay's official position fixed him to the court, and so for long periods to Edin- burgh. Lyndsay's genius is not as great as Dunbar's, and yet he was more popular. He appealed more to the man in the street, so to speak ; voiced the popular dis- content against the priests and the Church, and yet died without formally renouncing that Church. He is the link between the Makaris and the reformers. As we look back on the time of James IV. it shapes itself as golden age ; a brief spell of fine weather when what was always being sown was for once allowed to bring forth fruit. And then came the Reformation and the rule of the Kirk, and there was an end of the Mak- aris and poetry was banished to the muir and the hillside. Yet two great writers adorned Edinburgh under Mary and her son. These were John Knox and George Buchanan. Of Knox I speak elsewhere. Buchanan was a scholar, and therefore he wrote in Latin, and to the acquisition of Latin verse and Latin prose he gave the best years of his life. He had his reward ; he had Europe for his audience, and he acquired the reputation of T)eing the 208 LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH one great scholar his country had produced. It is hard to say how a cultured Roman would judge him or any modern Latin. Of course he is grammatical and all that, yet his History is no more like Livy than chalk' is like cheese. How could it be ? He wrote little in Scots, and that was his loss and ours ; he is a strange, elusive personality. Knox stands out clear and definite; you almost feel you had met him there by the Netherbow, but you never say the last word, even to yourself, about Buchanan. These great figures vanished, and in this chapter, at any rate, I will not dwell on Drummond of Hawthomden and other minors, who might fairly swell the literary annals of Edinburgh. It is said that the influence of the Kirk was unfavourable to literature ; it was stern and severe and repressed all human enjoy-^ ment. There is some truth in this, but only some. The Presbyterians were but a party in the nation, and in the seventeenth century they were not always at the top. Men had more elemental and more desperate things to think of than literary composition ; life is more than letters. In the seventeenth century your life was in danger if you were in great place or in small, from wounds or famine, or civil or religious commotion. Whenever things got a little easier letters revived, and when, after the last Jacobite rising, Edinburgh turned aside from the Stuart dream and the past and began to extend and grow rich, she had, at the very beginning, a period of splendid literary activity. Allan Ramsay stands at the head of thi? new era. What an interesting figure he makes, this barber and 14 209 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS bookseller and author of gentle blood and small stature, and quick movements and merry eye ! Perhaps you must be born in Edinburgh to have that peculiar depth of affection for her that Scott possessed, and Fergusson and Stevenson, but Allan Ramsay came into her so early, and stayed in her so long and knew her so well, that it were hard to consider him other than native. It is not many years since his shop in the High Street, opposite Niddry's Wynd, was swept away ; his still more famous place at the east end of the Luckenbooths, the shop that was after- wards occupied by Creech, went with that historic pile. I will not give a list of his works or tell at length how, in the Tea- Table Miscellany, he half revived and half destroyed many an old Scots song. He could be dignified and proper. " Dalhousie of an auld descent My stoup, my pride, my ornament." And his most famous piece, The Gentle Shepherd, is fit for maidens as well as men ; but he was most at home in that dim Edinburgh underworld which rises up before us with a certain unholy attraction, that gross underworld of the tavern, where drunkenness and scul- duddery was the order of the day. At what exact spot on Bruntsfield Links stood that long-vanished alehouse, where umquhile Maggy Johnstoun dispensed her treasures to all Edinburgh ? An ideal alehouse, though the ideal was purely Caledonian, "There we got fou wi' little cost And muckle speed." 210 LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH What a prudence, what an iron will Ramsay possessed ! Had he let himself go he had never been out of the tavern ; his fall had been swifter and surer than Fergusson's and a hundred others. But he knew when to stop, not a common knowledge in old Edinburgh. As he was human his prudence or his judgment failed now and again. The theatre in Carrubber's Close nearly ruined him, but he pulled through, and he kept still through the '45, sentimental Jacobite as he was. Arid so he prospered and gathered money, and died well ofif and respected, a very human and sympathetic, if not altogether admirable, figure. Then came the era of the mighty, for there were giants in Edinburgh in those days : David Hume and Adam Smith, and Principal William Robertson, and witty and learned judges, as Kames and Monboddo and Hailes, and lesser figures as "Bozzy," and "Ossian" Macpherson, and "Jupiter" Carlyle, and John Home of Boug/as notoriety, and delightful gifted women speaking Scots with elegance and propriety, and prouder of their race than that they had written immortal song ; such were Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie, and Mrs Cockburn and Lady Ann Barnard, and Caroline, Lady Nairne. Edinburgh was surely a " hotbed of genius." It held its own with London. Its men took permanent places in English literature. The best blood in England came north to sit at the feet of those Gamaliels ! What a delightful place to live in Edinburgh must have been! Great as writers, they were equally great as men. They were contented with small means and simple pleasures ; wealth they neither 211 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS despised nor envied. Without mean jealousies and without envy of each other, they took an honest and unaffected pride 1 in the fame of their friends. A certain gentle and benevolent irony coloured the life of the chief among them. They were brave in life and in death, whatever were their creeds, and the greatest were not merely of Edinburgh or of Scotland, but of the universe. I could tell a hundred stories of those giants, of their wisdom as of serpents and their harmlessness as of doves, but a few words as to one of them must here suffice for sample. In Panmure House, hard by the Canongate Churchyard, where is buried what is mortal of this immortal, Adam Smith lived from 1778 till his death in 1790. Here it was his habit to entertain his friends at supper each Sunday night. We have no record of the feast. You may believe it was the simplest fare in Edinburgh ; but you will also believe the claret was good, for to the Scot the " Auld Enemy " was not France and the punch compounded by the hand of a cunning artist. But at the last Smith was sick unto death. He^knew the end was at hand and he was pre- pared, but it was no reason why he should not entertain his friends ; he welcomed them as of old, and did the honours as he was wont to do, and then asked permis- sion to retire. "My friends, I fear I must leave this happy meeting, and that I may never see you again." This was Saturday, the loth June 1790, and before the week had run its course our host was dead. And the historic street missed the carefully-dressed little man with his shambling, " vermicular " walk and vacant stare. LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH To many an old friend it can never have looked the same again. There was many a scene of less decorum in Edin- burgh. Shakespeare, or all tradition lies, followed in practice the theory of his own Autolycus, that " a quart of ale is a dish for a king," a theory and practice that we know found favour in Old Edinburgh ; though the climate, it was urged, called for something better than ale. There is so ludicrous a tang about Bozzy's dissipation, as there was about his other pranks, that it makes us smile rather than sneer. Once he was much "disguised in liquor," quite helpless, indeed. "Drunk again, you dog," as the great Samuel might have remarked — as he, in fact, did remark on one occasion during the tour to the Western Isles ; it was an early reminiscence of young Frank Jeffrey, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, that he had assisted the greatest of biographers to bed. Next morning Boswell was duly informed of Jeffrey's share in the pious duty. He thanked him, patted him on the head as a promising lad, and with that engaging absurdity of which he, above all other men, had the trick, said, "If you go on as you've begun you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet." Jeffrey himself, as a young advocate pleading before the General Assembly on behalf of a bibulous divine, was guilty of an expression of great absurdity or of great impudence. , In either case it showed a very peculiar sense of humour. " Was there," he asked, " a single reverend gentleman in the house who could lay his hand on his heart and say he had never been 213 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS overtaken with the same infirmity?" The Assembly did not own the soft impeachment ; the members showed themselves highly indignant, though they were too easily placated by an apology that reads almost worse than the offence. The orator had his ill-timed Jest, if it was one, and Lord Cockburn, who tells the story, omits to record the result to the client. The name of Jeffrey reminds us that we are in a new era. From October 1822 to January 1829, that is during the brilliant youth and early manhood of the Edinburgh Review, he was editor, though we must make a partial exception as regards the first two or three numbers. I do not put him forward as a link between the two eras ; the link, if it existed, was Henry Mackenzie, known as the Man of Feeling, from his chief work. He was born in 1747 in Libberton's Wynd ; he died in 1831 in Heriot Row, and was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard. He was a W.S. and a shrewd man of business, but his fame in letters was great— even greater than the deserved respect with which he was regarded for his other excellent qualities. He knew all Edinburgh of two great generations, but in letters he belongs to a peculiar phase of the eighteenth century. Of his merits or demerits you cannot judge, for you cannot read him. He speaks an unknown tongue albeit you see it is excellent English. The letters begin to dance before your eyes, your head turns round, and you presently close the volume in despair. But I get away too far from Jeffrey and his Review. When the great men of the eighteenth century died off the end 214 LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH was not yet, even as against London Edinburgh was destined to another period of triumph. If she did not produce as before she held the critical rod ; if she could not crush the head she could always bruise the heel of every contemporary English man of letters. The new era was the era of two periodicals and the men who wrote for them ; these were the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood. The idea of the first was due to Sidney Smith. The story has often been told how the thing took birth at an evening supper in an upper flat in Buccleuch Place, and how Smith suggested as a motto the Virgilian line — slightly adapted — " Tenui musam meditamur avena" " We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal" was the original and felicitous translation. With Smith and Jeffrey were Horner and Brougham and other young men. The eldest was scarce over thirty, and Brougham was but twenty-three. They had little money but plenty brains, and the most absolute belief in their own powers, which their after careers abundantly justified. They came in at the tail-end of the "Dundas despotism." It seemed to them that the life of the country was ground down and repressed, that good and bad were stereotyped in one settled form. Some of the same spirit for good and ill animated them as animated, under different con- ditions and in different days, Burns and Heine. They were soldiers in the war of liberation, knights of the Holy Ghost, in that strange phrase of the German poet. They scented the battle from afar. As they laid their plans that wild Edinburgh wind, which is 2IS EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS a part, and a very impressive part, of the northern capital wailed in one of its fretful fits round the tall land in a nook whereof they sat. It reminded them of the spiritual storm that they were about to create, yet even they took some precautions. The contributors, corrected their proofs in Willison's office in Craig's Close, and thither the conspirators were wont to repair, singly and by different paths, probably at nightfall, possibly in disguise. The pay was royal, extravagant for that time; twenty-five guineas a sheet was not unusual. The views were novel and daring, the style firm and confident. Matters were not minced. Jeffrey " went " for the " Lake school " and many other schools and beliefs. The ex- citement was tremendous. Read English Bards and Scottish Reviewers and you get some idea, though from an enemy, of the strength of the Edinburgh in its youth ; better still, take up Macaulay's Essays (after all, the only piece of the early Review that remains current literature), and think of it as fresh and new, and then you know what that generation was. The publisher was Archibald Constable, surely a prince among publishers, though his end was unfortunate. He was by some named " the crafty," " and he had a notable horn in his forehead with which he ruled the nations." Thus the Chaldee Manuscript. And we are reminded that the Review was not allowed to have everything its own way. When the Whigs came into power at last a chosen band was found ready to assault them in turn, and in Blackwood' s Magazine, of which the first number 216 LITERARY ANNALS OF EDINBURGH appeared in October 1817, they found a new organ. The chief of these were Wilson and Lockhart and Hogg, In that same Manuscript they are very admir- ably hit off. Wilson is the beautiful leopard from the valley of the palm trees ; Lockhart was the scorpion which delighted to sting the faces of men ; Hogg was the great wild boar, from the forest of Lebanon whetting his dreadful tusks for the battle. The first number settled that Blackwood's was to be one of the forces of the day, and it did so through this same Chaldee Manuscript, which was simply a brilliant skit on con- temporary Edinburgh. You see that Edinburgh was still a world of its own, and a world to which the English-speaking race listened, with dissent and scorn and anger it may be, yet they listened. The Review was Whig and the Magazine Tory ; the Review had attacked the Tory poets, the Magazine stuck up for them. In splendid daring, or confident audacity and plain speaking and conceit of themselves, it were hard to say which bore the palm. Of course they were often wrong. Blackwood, in its attacks on the Cockney school, said things about Keats and Shelley that read now like blasphemies, but I cannot trace the various points in their history. London has annexed the Edin- burgh just as it did the other day the Encyclopcedia Britannica. Of old Encyclopaedias were such a feature of Edinburgh that they might be called the literary staple of the place, and Blackwood is more of the Enipire than the Town, The North British Review (1854-1871), notwithstanding its singular ability, I can but mention. 217 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS A brilliant attempt was made to revive the critical glories of Edinburgh in the Scots Observer, a weekly which by its daring, its learning and its wit deserved a success which modern Edinburgh could not give. The Review and the Magazine leapt into fame at once, but a periodical cannot do that nowadays, and the Edinburgh folk who started it had to go south for their editor. In the late W. E. Henley they found a heaven- born one, but were it fate or too hard conditions the Observer never took the place it so well deserved, and the band of Edinburgh writers, even the smaller fry, have completely disappeared. Dr John Brown not quite unworthily closed the list. Rab and his Friends is his masterpiece, and everybody knows that slight story with what Mr J. N. Millar has well called its "excruciating pathos." It is a gem but not flawless. The subject was difficult and the treatment is perilously near " Kailyard." It was saved by the touch of real genius in its amiable author. When Brown died he had no successor. It is now the night without a star, yet Edinburgh might be supposed to offer every attraction to a man of letters, but the wind bloweth where it listeth, and in that airt it does not to-day even whisper. 218 CHAPTER XIX A NOTE ON ART Old Scotland unfavourable to Art — Church and Church Splendours before the Reformation — The Altar-piece at Holy- rood — A Time of Destruction— The Statue of the Old Town — James Norrey, George Jameson, David Allan— The New Town and the Changes it Brought — Museums of the Capital — A Lesser South Kensington — The Corporation Museum — Its Value for the Student — The Antiquarian Museum and its Treasures — The National Portrait Gallery — The National Picture Gallery — Rae- bum and his Work— Art Treasures in the Lothians outside Edin- burgh — The Buildings of Edinburgh — Their Various Merits — The Scott Monument — Divergent Views — In the Classic Style — Hopes for the Future. YOU easily understand that art and art culture had little or no place in old Scots life. The people had more serious and elemental things wherewith to concern themselves. They were indifferent or even hostile ; more disposed to destroy what of artistic merit they possessed than cherish and increase it. The in- fluence of the pre-Reformation Church made in favour of culture, its gorgeous and complicated ritual, was only one of many elements. In the time of James V. (151 3- 1542), for instance, Edinburgh possessed buildings beautiful without, splendid within ; ornate caskets that held precious jewels! There was Holyrood Abbey, the Collegiate Church of St Giles', the Monasteries of Greyfriars and Blackfriars, Kirk o' Field and Trinity 219 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS College, to name but the chief. Their altar-pieces, their stained-glass windows, their statues of saints were treasures over which we sigh in vain. Perhaps it is as well that we can only guess at what they were. In the troubled years of civil and religious strife that accom- panied and succeeded the Reformation nearly everything perished. Greyfriars and Blackfriars and Kirk o' Field vanished altogether. Some defaced stones of Holyrood Abbey alone remain. A few panes in the Magdalen Chapel are the sole survivors of scores of beautiful windows. In the centre of the Gallery of Kings at Holyrood you gaze to-day on a work of rare merit. It is a votive piece from the altar of Trinity College, It bears the portrait of James III. and his queen, Margaret of Denmark, and is supposed to be the work of Van der Goes (d. 1482). It had strange wanderings, but was restored to Scotland in 1857. We have reason for inferring that other religious foundations in Edin- burgh held masterpieces of equal merit, but it was con- sidered a good work to destroy them, and they were destroyed so thoroughly that not even their memory remains. We still have St Giles'. I have spoken of the change and mutilation it suffered. In later times Old Edinburgh offered little employ- ment to the artist. It held only one statue, that of Charles II., the man on the tun-bellied charger tramp- ling on the grave of Knox in the Parliament Square of torday. That dates from 1685. Two centuries passed. It still remained solitary and supreme. Then in i888Boehm's statue to the Duke of Buccleuch was placed in the open 220 A NOTE ON ART space at the west end of St Giles', almost the only avail- able site for a statue in the ancient city. Three years later Lord Provost William Chambers was appropri- ately set up in stone in the centre of Chambers Street, but then Chambers Street is not the old town. There were minor efforts in various directions. James Norrey decorated the interior of many of the Edinburgh houses. George Jameson, "the Scottish Vandyke," settled in Edinburgh in 1623, and painted portraits of many of the chief men of his time. The James VI. in red stock- ings in Dalkeith Palace is a noteworthy instance. David Allan, "the Scottish Hogarth," worked here in the latter part of the eighteenth century. As early as 1729 there was founded in Edinburgh the Academy of St Luke for the encouragement of the fine arts, but it did little and had a short career. When the New Town arose this was changed. The citizens set themselves to decorate their beautiful city with a profusion of statues and fine buildings. Hostile critics have said that their zeal was not always according to knowledge ; that they had not that abounding wealth which commands the best work and gathers to itself the precious products of other lands. To the stranger the art treasures of Edinburgh are a negligible quantity. His, interest in the city will lead him elsewhere, yet the capital has museums and galleries well worth attention. You must visit them often and carefully if you desire to know your Edinburgh thoroughly. Much that you see belongs to Scotland, and not merely to its capital, but many things clearly appertain to Edinburgh alone. One 331 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS of these museums may be dismissed with a word. The Industrial Museum of Science and Art in Chambers Street is, in brief, a lesser South Kensington. Much of its interest is drawn from lands or places in which neither Edinburgh nor Scotland is specially interested. If you happen to be a student of geology you dare not neglect the specimens there collected in rich profusion from every part of Scotland. To the lover of Edinburgh the most interesting thing is the beautiful model of Arthur's Seat, recently added (1910), itself worth a special visjt. Different altogether is the comparatively small collection known as the Corporation Museum in the Municipal Buildings, or Royal Exchange, opposite St Giles. It is all in two or three fairly large rooms, but these are filled with objects that bear directly on the history of the city. There are plans, engravings, por- traits, tokens, letters, books, curios, all touching on Edinburgh. You want to know where exactly stood the Heart of Midlothian, or how the West Bow de- scended to the Grassmarket, or a hundred other things, there is the place to solve your difficulties. It is as a great bunch of keys to the secret places of the city's past. Anyone who makes Edinburgh more than a perfunctory show ought to deem it first and last the object of his attention. If there were a rearrangement of museum contents you might be inclined to further enrich it at the expense of its fellows. Deacon Brodie's keys and lanthron, and the pulpit in which it is quite possible John Knox preached, and the fauldstool, which at any rate must be similar to that hurled by Jenny 222 A NOTE ON ART Geddes at the head of Dean Hannay, were fitter here than in the Antiquarian Museum, and the same might be said of the memorials of the Old Tolbooth. Perhaps it is not desirable to have all the good things in one place, and you see them and much else very commodi- ously in their own house, which is the Antiquarian Museum in Queen Street. The contents, long in the charge of the Society of Antiquaries, were gifted by them to the nation in 1851 — that is, the bulk of them, for the collection has grown much since then. The Society still issues the catalogue, a considerable volume of 380 closely-printed pages copiously illustrated. You learn much by simply turning over the pages ; you learn a great deal more by looking at the objects themselves. Here is everything that Old Scotland used in recorded and much unrecorded time. You see what it ate and how it prepared its food ; how it was dressed ; with what weapons it fought ; how it adorned and amused itself; how it tortured its prisoners, buried its dead, worshipped its gods. Of a keener interest is that which has a direct touch with famous people. Surely it helps your grasp of the past to stand by the Maiden that shore off so many famous heads, to inspect the very thumbscrews that compressed the knuckles of a Cove- nanter, or to look at the faded and tattered flag that once waved at Bothwell Brig. And you have trinkets, letters and what not of Queen Mary, the young Chevalier and Robert Burns, and most of the oddly- mixed deities of the Scots Pantheon. The same building contains the National Portrait 223 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Gallery, dedicated by J. R. Findlay, in 1890, "to the illustration of Scottish history." Thus it is only beginning its career, but already it has much to interest and instruct. The portraits of the James's, Sir Henry Raeburn's "Professor Wilson" and "Neil Gow," Beechey's " Sir D. Wilkie," Flaxman's statue of Bums are some of the most obvious. To study the pictures of Edinburgh, however, you must get to the National Gallery on the Mound. In the eastern part is held the annual show of the Royal Scottish Academy, The Academy is rather national than local. Edinburgh at any rate is its head-quarters, and many of its members live and work there. In the western part is the permanent national collection ; it is not large but it contains some gems. You will not linger too long over Rembrandt's " Heridrikye Stoffels " or even over Gainsborough's " Honourable Mrs Graham," for these are not of the soil. You will seek the works which have both artistic merit and illustrate the past history of Scotland. Such are Sir G. Harvey's " Quitting the Manse," and " Covenanters' Communion " ; Sir D. Wilkie's " John Knox administering the Sacrament," J. Drummond's " The Porteous Mob," emd W. B. Johnson's " Murder of Rizzio " ; and in Allan Ramsay's " David Hume " you have the counterfeit presentment of one of Edinburgh's very greatest men. The main feature, however, of the gallery is the thirteen portraits by Raeburn. That great painter lived between 1756 and 1823, He was born in Edinburgh, he was educated at Heriot's Hospital, he spent two years in Rome, and for 224 A NOTE ON ART brief periods he was absent from his native place or native land. With these slight exceptions he lived in Edinbui^h and he died there. He is buried in the dormitory of St John's Church at the west end of Princes Street. He won early renown. He was, fortunately for his own time and ours, the rage, or rather the inevitable. The whole generation of that day lives for us on his canvas. There is one cruel exception. He did not paint Robert Bums, and thus he missed as a subject his greatest chance in life, and we also miss what would have been for us the illumination of a lightning flash. Again, what competent critics have considered his masterpiece, his "Portrait of Mrs James Campbell," is that of a woman who made no special mark on her time. Such 4S the common stuff of the Fates' web ! Of the generation he painted Edinburgh possesses many brilliant examples. In this same National Gallery my own preference would be " Dr Alexander Adam," and there is the magnificent " Lord Braxfield " on the walls of the Parliament House, that portrait over which R. L. S. grew so justly enthusiastic. There is the " Lord President Blair " in the W.S. library, hand- some, grave, dignified — surely the very ideal of a judge. "My man, God Almighty spared nae pains when he made your brains," muttered plain-spoken John Clerk on a famous occasion. As Lord Eldin he afterwards sat on the Bench, and his portrait was also painted by Raeburn. The Royal Company of Archers has his " Dr Nathaniel Spens," and the Leith Shipmasters his " Ad- miral Lord Duncan." Thus the distribution is fairly wide. IS 225 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS I ought to say in one word that many of the mansions in the Lothians possess notable art collections. Newbattle Abbey, the seat of the Marquis of Lothian, and Dalkeith Palace, that of the Duke of Buccleuch, are instances. The first has examples of Vandyke, Holbein, Sir Joshua Reynolds. The portrait of James I. in red stockings, by Jameson, already mentioned, is interesting on other grounds than its mere artistic merit. At Dalkeith there is the " Duke of Monmouth " by Kneller, "George IV." by Wilkie, and Lely is represented by the interesting portraits of "Lucy Walters," "Nell Gwynne " and " Mary Scott " the " Flower of Yarrow." And here again are specimens of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Vandyke and Holbein. I will not go so far afield as Dalmeny or Gosford but return to Edinburgh to say a word as to what must always be its most popular and important arts, those of the architect and the sculptor, whose material at any rate is the same. Those who built Old Edinburgh chanced on rather than sought striking architectural effects. The unbroken rampart of solid building on the cliff, the long, continuous line of the great closes, the projection of the wild landscape on the street and the place were in their own way unmatched, but that is past and done with. In Edin- burgh, as in other modern cities, effects are consciously sought after. The burgher, from his nature and his training, takes a peculiar interest in them, for he is justly proud that he is a citizen of no mean city. The streets obviously gain much from their position and surroundings, yet they owe something to them that 226 A NOTE ON ART planned. George Street, for instance, is beautiful in itself. Charlotte Square at its western end is noted by R. A. M. Stevenson as " the triumph of the Greek revival in domestic architecture." St Andrew Square, which concludes it on the east, is not less elegant. The chief monument in Edinburgh is that in Princes Street Gardens to Sir Walter Scott. It is large, original, suitable ; it occupies the best site, and it is to the most famous citizen Edinburgh ever possessed. Opinions on it almost comically diverse are extant. Ruskin roundly condemned it as "a small, vulgar, Gothic steeple on the ground," and Professor Masson lauds it as " the finest monument raised anywhere on earth to a man of letters." It remains a matter of opinion. When the oracles are not dumb but con- tradictory you must trust your impressions, or accept as Arbiter Elegantiarum the man in the street, whose view is distinctly favourable. Almost the last in time, assuredly not the least in merit, is the Highland Soldier resting on his rifle. It stands at the corner of the road leading up the Mound to Bank Street. It is of singular grace and power. The huge mass of University buildings, comprising the Old College, Industrial Museum, the University Union, the M'Ewan Hall, the Medical School and the New Infirmary, are impressive from their very size. Of the individual members of the group the Old College is still the best. These take lead as the chief schools of Edinburgh. It has been claimed for those at the other end of the scale, the more humble edifices raised by the 227 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS School Board, that they are harmonious, suitable, even dignified. More pleasing to the eye than any of them, or even Fettes College or the Academy, I should place George Heriot's Hospital and Donaldson's Hospital at Coltbridge. The simple elegance of the latter is more attractive than wealth of detail and profusion of orna- ment. Edinburgh is crowded with examples of the classic ; the Grecian temples on the Moutid, the National Monument on the Calton, and the High School are the most obvious. I have already said that I consider the last the first building in New Edinburgh. Of churches I will not further speak, though Edinburgh is of necessity a city of many churches, and I can only note that there are many graceful public offices and private houses. Edinburgh must, like other places, suffer from the uncultured zeal of the too early restorer and adorner. The givers of statues, even as the gods, cannot recall their gifts. You dare not put a rope round the neck of an offending image, haul it ignominiously down amid the jeers of the populace and end it as road metal. The Old Edinburgh mob did like things but not from love of art. To start a revolution with such aims were to burn a house to roast your own eggs. The citizens are, at any rate, honestly concerned to continue the em- bellishment and enrichment of their city. What can you do but wish them good taste and God speed ? 228 CHAPTER XX THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS The End of Old-World Scotland— Early Stage of the Rising— In the Lothians— Flight of the Dragoons— Fear of the Citizens— Lochiel Enters the Town— The Prince Reaches the City— Procla- mation at the Cross— The Night at Holyrood— The Advance of Cope— The Battle of Prestonpans — Victory of the Jacobites — Edinburgh Under the Prince— His March on the South— End of the Rising — Was Success Possible ? — Conduct of the Highlanders during the Occupation — Traditions, Grave and Gay — The Last Notes of the Pipes. THE great event that rung down the curtain on old- world Scotland was the '45. It has permanent interest. The adventure of Charles Edward Stuart will never cease to charm because it deals in a fascinating way with elemental human passions. The romantic note struck at first vibrates to the end. Only as it affects Edinburgh and the Lothians does it enter within our field. On 20th June 1745 Charles left France on the Doutelle, a frigate of sixteen guns. He landed on the 2Sth July at Moidart, a wild and lonely spot in the West Highlands, accompanied by seven companions, known as the seven men of Moidart. On the 19th August he hoisted his flag at Gl^nfinnan. On the isth September he crossed the Forth at the Fords of Frew. On the 1 6th he entered the Lothians, and that day he was at Linlithgow, where the Provost's wife and daughters, adorned with white cockades, met him at the Cross. 229 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS The ancient palace fountain flowed with wine in his honour. The dragoons fell back to Kirkliston and then on Edinburgh, and Charles pressed on to Corstorphine. The capital was in wild terror and confusion. It was the Old City, intact, unspoiled, uniniproved, hemmed in by walls, and no stone of the New Town yet laid. The Highlands were a terra incognita, the folk there were savages. The citizens had vapoured and bragged when these were at a distance, but now they trembled ; they had some excuse. The dragoons, who were regular troops, set them an example "of cowardice. They had fallen back to Coltbridge, where the Water of Leith cuts the road between Corstorphine and Edinburgh. There was an interchange of shots and the retreat quickly became a panic flight. The soldiers dashed along the Lang Dykes, full in view of the citizens of the Old Town. Although they did not stop at Bearford's Park, where is now St Andrew Square, at least they drew up, till a mischievous urchin shouted, " the Highlanders are coming ! " when they went off again by the sea coast to Musselburgh and Prestonpans. Here they halted, but one of their number fell down a disused coalpit. He clamoured so piteously for help that his comrades, in craven fear of the foe, bolted to North Berwick and Dunbar, not without other false alarms by the way. The commander. Colonel Gardiner, had slept in his house at Prestonpans during the night. By the morning his troop had vanished. He tracked them easily by the arms they had thrown away. At Dunbar he joined with Sir John Cope, commander of the Government 230 THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS forces, who after rather a goose-chase expedition in the Highlands had returned by sea to the Lowlands, de- termined to crush th6 insurrection in one battle. This flight of the dragoons is known as the Canter of Colt- bridge. It destroyed what little stomach for fight the citizens had. No doubt the substantial folk of Edin- burgh, good, honest Presbyterians, were in favour of the Established order, but there was a strong Jacobite feeling both among the very high and the very low. The Union was still a twitching sore, and the women were all Jacobites. When Provost Stewart led out such forces as he could muster from the West Bow towards the West Port, half the women-folk in the city, with tears and sighs, embraced the warriors and urged them not to risk their precious lives against wild savages ; the other half, from the windows of the street itself, jested and gibed with open scorn, and did not hesitate with pert assurance to predict the result of the conflict. A song of the time begins " The women are a' gane wud." It had foundation in fact. Thus everything depressed the courage of the hastily-collected town levies. The Provost, douce man, suspected, though probably ua- justly, of Jacobite leanings, headed his men from the West Bow to the West Port, but some drained away at every close, and at the end there were none worth the leading. The hours passed in fruitless interchange of messages and stern summons to surrender. The Blue Blanket fluttered from the steeple of St Giles,' but the old fighting spirit was clean gone. Charles crept ever nearer, though he had moved from the direct road to 231 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the south to avoid the Castle guns. On the 17th September a party of the Camerons under Lochiel crossed the Boroughmuir by moonlight at five in the morning, and came round to the Netherbow Gate. A coach was being let out ; they rushed in and the place was their own. The dawn was breaking as they marched up the High Street with yells of joy, whilst their bagpipes skirled "We'll awa to Sherramuir, to haud the Whigs in order." The citizens gazed, some glad, some sad, the most sleepily and stupidly, from their lofty windows, but they did nothing else save submit to their fate, which was at least not terrible. If the Highlanders piped and yelled they hurt nobody. They seized all the coigns of vantage as quietly as if merely changing guard, and the main body stood in the Parliament Close for hours in silent order, although what seemed to their simple souls incalculable treasures were within their grasp. The romance of the day was only beginning with these stirring early morning adventures. Charles, still keeping to the south of the city, passed along Grange Loan, entered the King's Park at Priestfield by a breach made in the wall, and led his forces through the Hunter's Bog, the valley in the midst, where they were for the time encamped. Under a guard of Highlanders he moved to the eastward, and so by the Duke's Walk to Holyrood. There were thronging and cheering crowds all round, and the Prince paused again and again at this great moment of his life. There was everything to catch the popular fancy: the handsome form, the young figure, 232 THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS the fair hair, the gallant bearing, the tartan dress, St Andrew's Cross on his breast, and more than all, the memories that thrilled through every heart. This was the heir of many and famous forefathers, and that was the house of many and famous memories. " He travels far from other skies, His mantle glitters on the rocks, A fairy Prince with joyful eyes. And lighter footed than the fox." Perhaps not " joyful eyes," however. They say that the Stuart sadness was dark on his brow at the very moment of triumph ; or perhaps men in after years, then knowing the sadness of the end, read their knowledge into the remembered impressions of the day. An ominous sign was not wanting. As he entered the porch of the palace of his ancestors a shot from the Castle struck James V.'s tower, and stones and rubbish riimbled at his feet. Inside the quadrangle, James Evan O'Keith, the very ideal of a Jacobite gentleman, stepped from the crowd, did homage to the Prince, and holding before him his naked sword upright marshalled him into what was now his home. Even yet the people were not satisfied with seeing. Charles needs must show himself at the window and smile and bow to an enthusiastic and cheering populace ; and still there was more, for the Heralds, in all their old-world finery, marched in solemn procession to the Cross, and there with every pomp of circumstance proclaimed father and son as King and King's Regent, and there round the Cross was a bevy of ladies, chief among them the beauti- 233 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS ful Mrs Murray of Broughton, who sat on horseback, a drawn sword in her hand, a white cockade on her bosom. Even Edinburgh in its long annals had seen no more romantic sight. That same evening there was a great ball in Holyrood. The murmur of a crowd, surely the bravest of the brave and the fairest of the fair, echoed through its long, silent, historic halls. The gleam of torch and taper, the noise of the old Scots music of fife and pipe, rolled far and late into the summer night. To some shepherd on the neighbouring hill, or some peasant watcher in the not distant fields, the vision must have seemed eerie and uncanny, like a magic story of some ruined castle tenanted by ghostly revellers with spectral light and music and feasting. In three days the Prince was off to Duddingston, which was his chief camp. Here it was determined to fight, and on the 20th September he moved on to Fisherrow, and over the Esk by the old bridge at Musselburgh, and then south-east to Tranent. Cope in the meantime had left Dunbar on the 19th Sep- tember and marched to Haddington. His army and baggage occupied several miles of road. The country folk flocked from far and wide to gaze on a spectacle so unwonted as war in the Lothians. Cope continued along the high-road till he came to Huntington, where he took the low road to the sea, a road that leads you through exquisite fields and unfrequented ways, by streams and woods, and gentle hills and dales, with a friendly inland sea to bound the near view. Not these things occupied poor Cope's solid wits. You fancy the 234 THE 45 IN THE LOTHIANS look of perplexity and bewilderment which men noted in him after the battle was already there. Anyhow, he sought rather safety than vantage. He got down by the sea among old-world villages and houses, and there with the Firth at his back, and his wings stretching from Tranent to Seton, and a marsh before him, he fondly believed himself secure. He had 2100 men as against his opponents' 2400, but of these latter only 1456 were engaged in the battle. The Highlanders had found a way over the morass. They had moved from the west to the east side of Tranent, and at 3 a.m. on the morning of 21st September they advanced in the darkness on the other army. They got across the morass and formed in line. A strange scene ! The sun rose, it was light on the Firth and the hills, but the mist lay heavy over the two armies. No sound save the rush of the Highland brogues on the stubble, and now and again a drum beat in Cope's camp. On the stone dykes that divided the fields were perched crowds of silent spectators, whom the rising of the mist made ever more clearly visible. The yards of a Government vessel on the Firth were also crowded with anxious lookers-on. This is what they saw. When the mist at length clean vanished the Highlanders presented their guns, A flash, a crash, and loud yells of battle, and from out the smoke, right in the enemy's lines, the Highlanders falling upon the foe swift and terrible as lightning, in the right hand the sword, in the left the buckler and dirk ! Then came the shock, and the armies seemed fused in one, but in five or six minutes 235 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the English soldiers were streaming in hot flight in every direction and the Highlanders already collecting prisoners and plunder. The victory was complete. The defeated lost baggage and renown alike. None now resisted. Those who were not dead or prisoners were hopeless fugitives. Cope could not believe himself safe till he was within the walls of Berwick ; everywhere he brought the news of his own defeat. A touch of the ridiculous lay in every action of the Government forces. A Highland boy disarmed a whole troop and drove them before him prisoners ; a Highland chieftain, single handed, hunted a band of horse into and through the streets of Edinburgh, and right up to the very guns of the Castle. Charles marched triumphant into the capital, and the Jacobites went mad with joy, and there were gallant parades and reviews, and meetings of the Council every morning, and balls in the old Picture Gallery ; and the old portraits of old Kings, that long line of shadowy monarchs of the house of Fergus, looked down on a Prince and his Court that to us seem not less shadowy than they. And yet, though the women were ready with everything, the men hung back, and the only new levies were from the Highlands. From the Forth to the Thames folk, unless they were in the Government employ, seemed to think, " well, this is no business of ours," they were mere spectators. Even professed Jacobites held their hands. What on earth was Allan Ramsay doing, I wonder? How is it we never even hear the name during all this stirring time of that reputable and prosperous citizen and senti- 236 THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS mental Jacobite? Life in Edinburgh went on very much as usual. Business was interrupted, it was true, paper money and bills useless and credit unprocurable, but it was a time indifferent, it would seem, to such dull matters, and no one was in a desperate hurry, and there were compensations in speculation and adventure. The citizens had one decided crook in their lot. The Castle held stoutly out for the Government. The commander had been General Preston of Valleyfield, an old ex- perienced soldier, but he was a Scot, and as such held suspect, and Guest, an Englishman, was appointed in his place. Guest had Jacobite sympathies, or perhaps he was only affected by the prevailing terror. At any rate he suggested surrender. His officers agreed, but Preston would not hear of it, and was allowed to resume the command. He was eighty-six years of age, and, too infirm to walk, was carried every two hours in his arm- chair from port to port to examine the positions. He mercilessly bombarded the town whenever the High- landers proved troublesome. Nay, when he believed himself pressed hard, his cannon raked the High Street so ferociously that many citizens, with their wives and children, fled towards Leith ; but they were met by the folk of Leith fleeing towards Edinburgh. Cannon from a Government warship in the Forth were raking their streets with equal ferocity. A plague on both their houses must have been in the hearts, if not in the mouths, of the burghers. A sort of informal truce was patched up : the Highlanders left the Castle unassailed ; the Castle ceased to fire on the town. 237 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Charles spent six weeks in Edinburgh. He held a re- view on Portobello sands before his departure. He left Edinburgh on Thursday, the 31st October, for Pinkie House. The next day he rode to Dalkeith. It is not needful to follow the various routes by which his army drained out of the Lothians. On Friday, 8th November, he crossed the Border near Longtown. Many of the Highlanders were afraid of the terra incognita of South Britain. They deserted him in large numbers, yet he took Carlisle without much difficulty, but now he is beyond our ken. On the i6th November the Officers of State returned to the capital and things were as they had been. The Castle was soon the prison of Jacobite captives, and after Culloden their numbers were much increased. The standards of the clans taken at that battle were burned at the Cross by the hangman and his assistant with every detail of ignominy. The wheel of fortune had indeed come full circle ! Could Charles have succeeded under any circum- stances? He wished to move straight on southward direct from Prestonpans, and that maybe was his only chance. Had he caught London napping a considerable part of England might have risen in his favour, and yet the hero of romance was neither a great general nor a great man. The '45 gets its pathetic interest from its very hopelessness. Such an event left a huge mass of legend and tradition behind it. Much was garnered by after historians, much has perished for ever. The High- landers behaved very well in Edinburgh. Their wildness lay mainly in their looks, and it was the necessary theory 238 THE '45 IN THE LOTHIANS of their leader that the city was full of his own, his very own, subjects. Many stories are told of the simplicity of the Highlanders. They plundered Cope's army and strutted about in incongruous habiliments. One sold a watch for a trifle ; it had stopped ticking and he judged that "ta crater was deid." Another changed a horse for a horse pistol. Some were seen cheerfully speeding towards their distant homes with a military saddle on each back. Chocolate taken from the General's carriage was sold as Johrniy Cope's salve. Even the rascals among them had an air of amusing simplicity. One, pistol in hand and threatening in demeanour, stopped a prosperous burgher in the High Street. The trembling citizen gasped, " What would he ? " "A bawbee" was the moderate demand. True, some in- genious rogues disguised themselves as Highlanders and did a fair amount of plundering, but these were presently seized and fusiladed. There are many instances of their kindness to captives, and there is no instance of hurt to a non-combatant — at least willing hurt one must add. During the occupation a Highlander shot off a loaded musket in his glee. The ball grazed the forehead of Miss Nairn, a Jacobite lady, as she waved her hand from a H^gh Street balcony. "Thank God it did not touch a Whig or it were judged done on purpose," quoth the courageous damsel. Tradition records (apparently erroneously), how Charles was at a banquet in Provost Stuart's house in the West Bow, and was well nigh seized by a surprise party from the Castle. The guests escaped through a secret passage, 239 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS the entrance to. which a cabinet concealed. The sturdy minister of St Cuthbert's, a certain Mac Vicar, continued to pray for King George during the occupation, and expressed a not altogether pious wish that the young man who was seeking an earthly crown might rather find a heavenly one. The whole episode of the Prince in Edinburgh is admirably told in Waverley, though the affair was too recent for Scott to allow himself to go as far as his sympathies had suggested in favour of the lost cause. And so the curtain falls on this exciting drama. As the pipe music died in the distance on that autumn day when the Highlanders left Edinburgh, the historic and romantic interest of the city died with it. How can she ever bulk large again on the stage of time ? 240 CHAPTER XXI ROSLIN AND HAWTHORNDEN On the Road to Roslin— The Pentlands —The North and South Esk — The Gentle Shepherd — Roslin Castle — Memories of the Erskines — A Quaint Legend — The Glory of Roslin Chapel — Roslin Glen — Its Varied Beauties — Hawthornden and the Drummonds — The Visit of Ben Jonson — Drummond's Epitaph — Some Words on his House — A Note on Lasswade and Dalkeith. ONE of the impressions the stranger takes away from Edinburgh is the line of cars in Princes Street ticketed for Roslin and Hawthornden. They are worth doing, and you pass many places of interest on your way. The Bore Stone, where the Scots army assembled for that fatal march to Flodden ; Fairmilehead with its legend of the flute-playing gauger, " haunted Woodhouse- lee," the locus oi a quite baseless legend regarding the Regent Moray, are some of them. You move along on the slopes of the Pentlands, the greatest of all the near Edinburgh ranges. . Another route, quite unconven- tional but I fear impossible, would be to descend on Roslin by the Esk. Now there are two Lothian Esks : the South Esk, which rises among the Moorfoot hills, and the North Esk, which begins in the Pentlands. These join at Dalkeith and reach the sea at Mussel- burgh, The North Esk is one of the storied rivers of Scotland. Allan Ramsay knew its beginnings well, and the scenery of its upper reaches is figured in his charming i6 - 241 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS pastoral of The Gentle Shepherd. Contending innkeepers or antiquaries will make this or that spot "Habbie's Howe," but you will more wisely allow it to remain dubi- ous. Roslin and Hawthornden are the gems of the Esk, The village will not detain you, though the old inn has memories of Dr Johnson and Boswell, who drank tea there in 1773 ; and Rdbert Burns later on was so well treated that he wrote some highly complimentary verses to the landlady. The castle is a charming ruin, though the vaults are the only very old part. When its stone mass piled on that rocky crag above the stream bums red in the evening sunset you will swear no castle of the Rhine ever looked so fair. Here for centuries ruled " the lordly line of High St Clair." Earls of Caithness they were, but their power and splendour were princely. My Lord was attended by I don't know how many noblemen, and his spouse by I don't know how many ladies of high degree. They were served on vessels of gold and silver. There are all sorts of legends relating to the family. Scott, in the ballad of Rosabelle, has prettily woven some of them together, and even added a new one. But the story that most takes our fancy is one rather grotesque and farcical. In 1447 St Clair of Dryden, which is close at hand, repaired to Roslin to go a-hunting with his chief. He met an enormous crowd of rats speeding along in their best style, among them one very old, very grey and very blind, assisted by its companions, in its mouth a straw, the true intent whereof is not revealed by the legend. There is a scornful phrase of Bacon's as to the " wisdom of rats, that will leave a house some time ere it 242 DEXTfKR-S/.V kOSI.IN CHAI'Kl., THE SOUTH DOORWAY ROSLIN AND HAWTHORNDEN fall." Four days later the mansion of St Clair's blazed in red ruin, the result of an accident. But as yet fire insurance was not in the land and My Lord had to put up with his loss. Only one thing disturbed him, however. The family muniments, and some precious manuscripts of a more private nature — perhaps poems, perhaps not — seemed gone for ever, but these he presently had safe and sound. The chaplain, a man of infinite resource, had secured the papers spite the raging flames. Both he and they were singed, but the bell-rope fixed to a convenient beam afforded the means of escape. You pass to Roslin Chapel, a gem of the very first water. It was founded in 1446 by William St Clair, the Lord just referred to. He meant it for a collegiate church, but only the chancel was built. The magnificent fragments are only part of a grander plan, the dream is always greater than the fact! It is strangely and beautifully decorated in pillars and arches, with sumptuous rare carvings, a very garden of stone flowers, the poetry of sacred architecture. The Lord of Roslin was himself a man of taste, and he brought artists from far and near, and lavishly entertained and rewarded them. And the incitement of his own zeal, and his own precept was, you believe, more to the artists than the gold he showered on them. There is no settled plan. Each Master within proper limits gives scope to his peculiar genius, and the result is this root out of a dry ground, this strange exotic "flower among those cold northern fields, fit shrine for the most gorgeous rites of the old faith ! You wonder it survived the fierce turmoil of ancient Scots life. 243 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS What a mere shell is the chapel at Holyrood ; what a mere shell is Sweetheart Abbey! In 1688 a raging mob from Edinburgh, memory of their wrongs strong upon them, spoiled and defaced it in every way, and so it remained until 1868, when it was decently restored for the service of the Scots Episcopal church. Its legends are manifold. The Apprentice Pillar, in which the scholar exceeded the master, is found not only here, but the chapel has traditions all its own. Here the St Clairs were buried for centuries, each in complete armour, and as portent the chapel glowed with magic fire as each baron lay a-dying. But you remember how well those things are touched off by Scott. And Scott must again be our guide : — " Who knows not Melville's beachy grove. And Roslin's rocky glen, Dalkeith, which all the virtues love. And classic Hawthomden." If the chapel is a gem of art the glen is a gem of nature. A brawling stream rushes over a rocky bed, between richly-wooded and often precipitous banks. All this is to say little. It is a compendium or epitome of Highland scenery. The path is so rough and winding as to give you almost the sensation of peril, and there are caves and gnarled tree trunks, and — but you will see it for yourself, or, at any rate, description is inadequate, It is a considerable walk, the better part of an hour, I think. At length, in the depth of it, you come upon Hawthomden, perched on a high rock like a very 244 ROSLIN AND HAWTHORNDEN eagle's nest, the waters swirling round it at such a rate that it is positively sublime. There are the remains of an old fortress, with a fairly modern seventeenth-century house and such additions as to-day's luxury demands. In far-off times it was held by the Abernethys, but the Drummonds, who trace some marriage connection with the Abernethys, have had it between three and four centuries. But if for so long there has Jilways been a Drummond of Hawthornden, there is one special Drummond (i 585-1649) whom we all know by name at any rate — the Cavalier Poet, the friend, and in 16 18 the host of rare Ben Jonson. Rare and strange indeed that massive figure must have seemed among those lean, meagre Scots ! You still get bits of Drummond in anthologies* First of Scots he wrote entirely in English verse : Tears on the Death of Meeliades, Forth Feasting, The Cypress Grove. You guess the nature of the Cavalier Poet from the very names of his works, as also from the epitaph he wrote for himself. He rests in Lasswade churchyard some two miles off. " Here Damon lies, whose song did sometimes grace The wandering Esk ; may roses shade the place." You still read him with pleasure. There is a courtly, tender grace about him, a subdued echo of the Eliza- bethans. You must not place him too high Shake- speare stands alone, but you would not venture to compare Drummond with the other great dramatists, say Ben Jonson or Marlowe. He ranks with the men who are 24s EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS soldiers and statesmen first and only in an idle or softer hour carved some delicate gem of poetry, with Sir Philip Sidney or Sir Walter Raleigh. You rise to the level of the house through delightful terraced gardens, and there are sights galore: the cavern in the rock which Drumraond used as a study — he had been more comfortable in the house — the sycamore tree or its descendant under which he was seated when rare old Ben hove in sight and they exchanged greetings in metre. And you may also view the mighty sword which Bruce never wielded, and the pulpit from which Knox never preached, and the deep cavern where the Drummond of the day did noi hide Queen Mary. So you are inclined to affirm, for you grow weary of the insistent presence of those stock figures — ^tiresome repeating decimals you might call them — in the traditions of every famous Scots mansion. The extensive assortment of caverns under the house, even though stripped of their quaint names and quaint legends, is sufficiently curious. There seems ground for believ- ing that Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie and his merry men here found a retreat and hiding-place in those far-off troubled days when Bruqe and BalHol strove for the crown. You will prefer to their musty depths the walk on the terrace by the sundial for you are out in the bright air, and you see the house and the river far below you, and the rocks and part of the glen. And a gentle envy possesses you of the particular Drummond then in possession. What more blessed lot than to sit down in that delightful house among those choice 246 h'Jp^ 'O'^^T?.'*^ HAW'I'HORNTlKN ROSLIN AND HAWTHORNDEN scenes, with the memory of that long line of your forebears ever present, with pious hope that your line will never fade, and there look round on portraits of the great Masters of your country's destiny and believe that your poet was worthy to be ranked with them ? Lasswade I have already mentioned. Here Scott brought his young bride and spent some of the happiest times of his life, and here De Quincey abode for some seventeen years ; and you may still see the houses, or at least the outside of them, for " not shown " is surely with suflGcient excuse written on what was once Sir Walter's. If you get further down to Dalkeith you will find a very good example of an old Scots town : fairly antique houses, and wynds and gardens behind ; and in its huge park there is a huge Palace containing things rare and beautiful, and here the Dukes of Buccleuch hold sway. Surely you are more than satisfied with the things you have seen, and for the day, you will admit, sufficient are the pleasures thereof ! 247 CHAPTER XXII QUEENSPBRRY AND ITS MEMORIES The Queensferry Road — Objects of Interest on the Way— Cramond Brig in Fact and Drama — The Story of the Ferry- Memories of St Margaret — The Hawes Inn — The Unearned Incre- ment — Mentioned by Scott and Stevenson —The Romantic Note— The Forth Bridge — Blackness and Bambougle Castles— Graham's Dyke. THE route to Queensferry is classic. There is the Forth Bridge, and no self-respecting visitor will neglect the inspection ! The coaches billed Forth Bridge are even more numerous than those marked Roslin. You go along Princes Street and Queensferry Street, over the Dean Bridge, past Inverleith Quarry, whence was hewn so much of New Reekie, under the shadow of Corstorphine Hill. You call to mind, with some aid, maybe, from the experienced conductor, the memories of this and that spot. Ravelston, where the Keiths, Marshals of Scotland, had their home ; Craigcrook Castle, where Lord Jeffrey held those delightful symposia that live for us yet in the pages of Lord Cockburn ; Clermiston, touched off in a line of that stirring ballad, already quoted, wherein Scott tells the story of Dundee's gallant exit from Edinburgh. Farther on you cross the River Almond by Cra- mond Bridge. Here is the dividing line between 248 QUEENSFERRY the counties of Edinburgh and Linlithgow. The old bridge is a little below. It bears inscriptions tell- ing of five repairs, the earliest 1619. It is the locus of a well-known adventure of James V. Gipsies set upon him. He was assisted by a sturdy peasant, one Jock Howieson, who soundly drubbed the marauders, and had for guerdon a good slice of the adjacent land, which his descendants still hold. Popular fancy has adorned the legend with various picturesque incidentSt The play of Cramond Brig is still a favourite on Scots provincial boards. The old bridge is situated deep down in a charming hollow, and rises but a little over the stream. You have to climb a steep brae to gain the main road. The new bridge is high up on the level. From it you can scarce see the other in summer, the trees are so thick. Poets impute a feeling of jealousy to two bridges so placed. The classic example is the brigs of Ayr, for ever vocal in the verse of Burns, but the quarrel, if there be one, of these has not yet found its bard ! You pass on, climb up a brae, and descending close to the shore, under one of the arches of the Forth Bridge.drawup before the Hawes Inn at Newhalls. Thence a short run and you are in the middle of the main street of Queensferry. You are not impressed. The town is stranded ; even its latest renown as a seaside resort is vanished. It has known strange revolutions within less than a century. The Forth suddenly contracts. A promontory on which North Queensferry stands runs out from the opposite Fife shore, so the way across is but two miles. Nature meant it for the ferry, and ferry it was for many a long 249 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS day. The Queen is, of course, St Margaret of Scotland, zxid passagium regince monkish chroniclers wrote the name of the place. The vision of the fair-haired gentle girl, fleeing north with her brother and sister to escape the Norman invader immediately after Hastings, has still its romantic charm. She was married to Malcolm Canmore in 1067, aind by this route she passed again and again from Edinburgh to Dunfermline, where she abode, not "drinking the blude red wine," like her shadowy, descendant, but in fasting and prayer and good works as was fit and becoming in a saint. Here at least you will not forget her or hers. Not merely is there the North and South Queensferry, but there is the anchorage of St Margaret's Hope off the Fife coast, where her small fleet rode safely through a storm ; and there is Port Edgar a little way to the west of where you stand, named after her brother, Edgar the Atheling, who landed here with his sisters. No doubt the ferry was used long before the Queen came that way, even though she were the most persistent and remarkable traveller, but its earlier name, if it had one, is gone beyond recall. It was the chief passage over the Firth for many a century, and as late as 1805 the right of running across was let at £"2000 per annum. And then Granton Pier was built some miles further down, aboitt the time of Queen Victoria's accession, and, the steamboat service between it and Burntisland did for the old route altogether. But the whirligig of time was to bring about its revenges. In another half century the great Forth Bridge followed the very lines of the old 250 QUEENSFERRY ferry, and for the same reason, that here was the shortest way. And the little island of Inchgarvie, right in the middle, was a natural pier. Perhaps the very early ferry boats used it for a half-way house. All this, if it did not destroy, seriously damaged that Burntisland passage so familiar to many of us in other years. Yet the Bridge takes the passenger not through Queensferry but in the air above it, and except that folk come, therefore, to view the Bridge it lies more than ever out of the way. The Hawes Inn strikes you as the most flourishing institution about the place. Romance does something more than build castles in the air ; it can make, or at any rate increase, the reputation and takings of a hostelry, though no means have as yet been devised whereby the heirs of Scott and Stevenson can levy toll for the un- earned increment that accrues to Boniface from labours in no sense his own. The first chapter of the Antiquary takes us straight to the Hawes Inn. That chapter is a charming prologue to the work. It reminds, with a differ- ence, of the delicious comedietta which opens the Taming of the Shrew. The scene in the High Street between Jonathan Oldbuck, Esq., of Monkbarns, and Mrs Mac- leuchar, arising out of the non-appearance of the Queens- ferry diligence or Hawes fly, however excellent, is sur- passed by the business at the inn, where that pearl of Scots landlords, Mackitchinson, sets before Oldbuck and Lovel their banquet offish, chops and cranberry tarts" whilst he discusses his " ganging plea," that " weel kind plea " which has perplexed the " fifteen," and then brings in "that immense doublequart bottle covered with sawdust 251 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and cobwebs, the warrant of its antiquity." He pooh'- poohs the idea of them drinking either punch or port; " it's claret that's fit for you lairds," he remarks as he proceeds to decant it. And then; in genuine admiration of his own wares, declares " it parfumes the very room." Scott, like Shakespeare and Dumas and all the great jovial Masters of literature, had the tavern sentiment strong within him, They loved, in reason be it said, to talk of eating and drinking. Stevenson strikes a gentler and a thinner note. His heroes do not sit down to mighty meals, but the charm of old wine has inspired him with many a happy touch. It is not the grosser aspects of the Hawes Inn that takes his fancy ; he finds a suggestion of romance. " The old Hawes Inn at Queensferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine ; in front the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor ; behind the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary, But you need not tell me that is not all ; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more freely." He tells us he has lived at the Hawes " in a perpetual flutter, on the heels of some adventure that should justify the place." Nothing happened. " The man or the hour had not yet come ; but some day I think a boat shall put off from Queensferry fraught with a dear cargo." So far Stevenson in A Gossip on Romance, and in a note to this, when republished in Memories and 252 QUEENSFERRY Portraits, he tells us that in Kidnapped he has launched the boat. David Balfour arrives from Shaws. " We came to the top of the hill and looked down on the Ferry and the Hope ; on the south shore they had built a pier for the service of the ferry, and at the end of the pier, on the other side of the road and backed against a pretty garden of holly trees and hawthorns, I could see the building which they call the Hawes Inn." He goes inside but the landlord is a mere shadow vox et praterea nihil. David is presently taken possession of by Captain Elias Hoseason, who by a trick gets him aboard the brig Cove- nant of Dysart. I need not trace his exciting adventures aboard that most ungodly craft. At the end he returns with Alan Breck to Queensferry, but it is only to seek out Mr Rankeillor, the writer, and get him with them to Shaws. I stood by the pier on a day when the Forth was bathed in brilliant sunshine. Coaches with their cargoes of Americans came and went, and it was, I found, as much for Stevenson as for Scott. In what whimsical way had the place attracted him? The inn looked stolid, respectable, but far from romantic. There was, I believe, a garden, but I forgot to search for the holly bushes and the hawthorns. Was it the idea of the thousand-years-old ferry with Margaret as its patron saint that drew him ? He loved the high road winding on through hill and dale, with its constant movement of travellers. This ancient ferry has all of the high road and something more — the mystery of the sea. The Forth Bridge is wondrous graceful despite its size and massy strength. You shall find many accounts 253 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS of the millions of rivets that hold it together and the countless tons of metals contained therein, and the expansive acreage that requires painting, and so forth. The marvel of its erection reads like a fairytale of science. If any reader has not seen the Bridge, or even a picture of it, let him imagine three eggs longwise and touching, and two pier-like structures at the ends, and there you have the Bridge, only you must call the eggs cantilevers! If Queensferry were more remote you might re- commend it as a centre, but Edinburgh is too near for that. Anyhow the round about is interesting. To the west the road runs through the grounds of Hopetoun House, a very charming place, and by the seashore is Blackness Castle, once a prison like the Bass but now a Government store. And to the east is Dalmeny Park, where, as all the world knows, a former Prime Minister ploughs his lonely furrow, or at anyrate holds on his in- dividual way with every aid that lettered culture and well- applied wealth can give. In the grounds stands Barn- bougie Castle, of late restored, so that perhaps the Black Man and his hound will no more come with winding of bugle to announce the demise of the reigning baron, Every part of this historic shore has its own interest. If you push your way as far westward as Bo'ness you will not call that somewhat decayed town wholly lacking if you remember that here begins Antoninus Wall, otherwise Graham's Dyke, in effect a very early attempt made by their southern neighbours to persuade the Picts and Scots to remain in their own country. History records the hopeless failure of the effort. 254 CHAPTER XXIII LINUTHGOW The Linlithgow Road — Impressions of the Pentland Hills — First Thoughts of Linlithgow — A Town of Wells— Historic Sites— In the Palace Grounds — The Old-time Castle and its Fortunes — The Assassination of Moray — What Followed After — The Vision of James IV. in St Michael's Kirk — Outside and Inside the Palace— A Memory of the '45— Burning of the Palace — The Stuarts and Linlithgow — Riding of the Marches — " Adew Lithgow." THE road from Edinburgh to Linlithgow is pleasant enough when you once get clear of the overgrown suburbs. It is up hill and down dale, with neat fields, comfortable country houses and farm steadings of the conventional Lothian type. Now and again are patches of coal mines, marked by huge hillocks of dross, ugly blots on the landscape. " Oh, had I all the wealth Hopetoun's high mountains fill," sings Allan Ramsay. The lines occur to one with a comic touch in connection with those same hillocks. It is the Hopetoun country, though the guess at the owner is as like as not wrong. The best thing on the way is again the view of the hills ! I know not where the Pentlands look better than from parts of this road. You are at the right distance, far enough to catch the general aspect and the relation of 25s EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS one top to another, near enough to note delicate sunlight and sunset effects, the shadow of rain-cloud, the com- forting presence of house and hamlet. About Corstor- phine is the best standpoint. That place nowadays is an Edinburgh suburb. It has an unusually interesting kirk. Linlithgow itself is not likely to impress you favourably. It is a plain, untended town, and from the frequency of business places to let, not, you guess, thriv- ing. A curious fountain arrests you in the High Street. A quaint little figure is perched thereon with the legend, " Saint Michael is kind to strangers." You judge the Archangel Michael is meant, and think this a very charming and appropriate device to set up over the town gate — the east port, to use the old Scots nomen- clature. It beckons you encouragingly onward, for spite of first impressions there are things in Linlithgow worth notice. " Glasgow for bells, Lithgow for wells." So begins an old Scots jingle. You find them all over. There is the Palace well, the Cross well, the Lion well, the Dog well, in addition to St Michael's well. To understand a place like this you have to think yourself back into other conditions of life, when folk had no thought of bringing in water from far-off hills and a supply of that commodity was of itself enough to deter- mine a site. Probably the fashion of adorning these wells derives from the famous fountain at the Palace. St Michael bulks large in Linlithgow. The parish 256 LINLITHGOW church is his, and he has one side of the town's arms, whereon, with extended wings, he treads down a serpent. A Latin inscription expresses the pious wish, " May the power of Michael gather us all together into the heavens." The obverse has a greyhound chained to an oak tree. " My fruit is fidelity to God and the King," runs the motto. All of note in Linlithgow is within a half mile from the east end of the High Street. By what is now the railway station there was once a square picturesque tower, but that is vanished. It was part of the lands of the Templars, and looks quaint enough in the cuts that adorn the old guide-books. The street is broad and spacious to the Cross Well. Here if you turn sharp to the right up the Crossgate you pass the west end of St Michael's Church, and are presently in the precincts of the Palace. The church is partly within those same precincts. If you follow the High Street you find it much contracted. It descends a little way and almost immediately yoji spy a tablet in the wall of the County Court Buildings to the left. From there the shot was fired which closed the life of the Regent Moray, and near about where you stand was the place where he fell. The street, having reached a level, presently ascendsj but you do not care to climb it. You rather get you to the Palace grounds, sit you down on a seat by the loch and consider your surroundings. Here is what history has to say. The stately ruin before you was not the first castle on the site ; there are confused legends of all sorts of other buildings. You get solid ground when you come to Edward I., about whose remarkable personality 17 257 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS there is always the definite and the actual. One of his various conquests of Scotland was 27th July 1298 at Falkirk. The night before the battle he slept in the fields here. His horse pressed on and wounded him, and a wild rumour of his hurt ran through the army. Though in sore pain he mounted his steed and rode among his troops. They saw the dim form by their watch-fires on the early dawn of a northern summer and their unrest was calmed as by magic. He conquered Scotland and he tried to hold it, and here in 1 301-2 he built a strong castle, well garrisoned and well furnished. It stood out till the very eve of Bannockburn ; but the Scots were getting back their own everywhere. A farmer called Binnock supplied the garrison with hay. In reply to his last order he promised a " fothyr " better than any before — a grim, bitter jest characteristic of those truculent old Scots. He had conceived a plot to re-take the castle and this was his chance. He placed an ambush in the hay-wain. Eight of the very pick of his merry men lay concealed in a thin covering of hay. He himself drove the cart, and by him stalked his comrade with an axe. All seemed right to the sleepy warder as he heaved up the portcullis, the axe promptly descended on the trace, and the waggon thus kept open the ingress to the castle. The watchword rang out, the men rushed forth, and Linlithgow was restored to the national cause. The gratified Bruce rewarded Binnock with lands, the just recompense of his skill and daring. I pass over 250 years to the chief historical event connected with Linlithgow and its palace, and that is thei 258 LINLITHGOW death of the Earl of Moray. In 1 567, when Mary resigned the throne, he, as Regent, had taken up the reins of govern- ment, and not even his enemies could deny that he was bringing order out of chaos, and giving Scotland a firm and settled Government. So much the better he did this so much the worse for his enemies, and the faction of the Hamiltons decreed his death. They found a ready tool in James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. He had been taken at Langside four years before, had been doomed to die, but pardoned at the intercession of Knox. He seems to have had some personal spite against Moray, though the legend that his wife had been driven in cruel circumstances from Woodhouselee, " the haunted Woodhouselee " of poetry and romance, seems quite mythical. At any rate Moray had nothing to do with it, but as a traitor Hamilton had lost his all and possibly that was sufficient. It was purely a political plot. The details were prepared in a perfectly diabolical man- ner. Moray had been enticed away from Edinburgh, and it was known he must return by Linlithgow. He slept here in the house of the Provost his last night on earth, and on the morning of the 23rd January 1 570 he set forth eastward. On the south side of the street was an empty house belonging to the Archbishop of St Andrews, a Hamilton who was shortly afterwards to pay with his life for his share in the plot. Another Hamilton furnished him with his own carbine (still preserved as a Hamilton relic) and a swift horse. The house had a wooden balcony in front and a garden at the back, as was the case with most of the old Scots town houses, where the 2S9 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS garden wall and the house wall served as two lines of defence against attack. The floor of the room was padded. A black cloth hung on the wall to darken the shadow of the occupant. The lane that led to the back of the house was choked with bushes to retard pursuit. The gun was carefully loaded with four pellets. Moray had scarce started when Hamilton took deliberate aim and fired. The Regent fell mortally wounded. He was carried to the guard-room of the Palace, where he died at eleven the same night. He was dignified and reticent to the last. He was of the Royal house of Stuart, and all the Stuarts knew how to die. The Palace was the home of his race. His father, James V., was born there, loth April 1 5 12. Mary, his half-sister, one-time friend and benefactor but now deadly foe, was also born there on 8th December 1 542. None of the three lived to be old. The lives of all the actors in those tragic scenes appear to us now wondrous short. The assassin got safely away. The story goes that he was hotly pursued, and only escaped by forcing his horse across a ditch so broad that his pursuers failed to follow ; "Whose bloody poniard's frantic stroke Drives to the leap his jaded steed." He went abroad, and in France and Spain was received like a hero and a Master in the art of assassina- tion. Admiral Coligny and William of Orange were pressed upon his attention as proper subjects for his skill. His would-be employers could scarce understand his decided refusal. Mary expressed the frankest 260 LINLITHGOW approval, and all her party were jubilant. Scott's somewhat savage ballad of Cadyow Castle truly expresses, you cannot doubt, the sentiments of his enemies. To his friends it seemed that chaos had come again. They were in a passion of rage, horror, grief and consternation. They burned down Hamilton's house, so that the building that was shown some fifty years ago as the original was at the best but a successor. Even that is now gone. Moray's body was taken to Holyrood, and on the 14th of February was interred in St Giles.' Knox preached to a vast audience of three thousand. They were dissolved in tears. Their emotion still touches you as you read the pathetic words of his prayer : " He is at rest, O Lord, and we are left in extreame miserie." Yet he blamed the dead man for the foolish mercy he had shown his half-sister Mary, and this is perhaps the best defence the Regent's memory could have against those who reviled his conduct. I have said that going by Crossgate to the Palace you pass St Michael's Church. Like every church of the kind it has suffered restoration, but not harmfully. It lives in human memory as the theatre of one great scene, half history, half romance. Here appeared the dread vision to King James IV. that warned him to so little purpose against the Flodden expedition. It was in June 15 13, as he prayed in the south transept, which is dedicated to St Katherine, that a man about fifty years old, in a blue gown, with his hair to his shoulders, but bald before, suddenly appeared 261 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and spake : " Sir King, thow sail not fare well in thy journey nor non that is with thee," and he solemnly adjured James to turn back. "This man evanished away and could be no more seene," though Sir David Lyndsay, the Lyon King-of-Arms, and John Ingles, the Marshal, tried to stop him. So Pitscottie tells the story. It has been said few ghost stories are so well authenticated. Lyndsay went over the whole thing to Buchanan, who reproduces it in his History. It is usually explained as a device of the peace party thrown into prominence by the tragic issue of Flodden. The account which Sir David Lyndsay is made to give in Marmion of this incident, and the words with which it opens, rise in your memory as you pass into what one of the old Scots acts calls the King's great Palace : " Of all the palaces so fair Built for the royal dwelling. In Scotland far beyond compare Linlithgow is excelling." The form of the place is a mansion round a court- yard. It stands on a knoll at the foot of which are the waters of fair Linlithgow Loch. There are towers at the corners, and as you pace round it the walls seem yet fit and strong, and the ornamentation which French artists put there still fascinates your eye. Even on the great east entrance you do not greatly miss the figures of pope and knight and labouring man, emblems of the three estates that once adorned it ; but within all is desolation. The fountain is little better than a defaced 262 LINLITHGOW mass. The great Parliament hall which runs for loo feet along the first floor of the east end, and the chapel to the south of the same first floor, are still fine rooms, but they are bare and gloomy. Hang tapestry on the walls, strew rushes on the floor, let fires roar up the huge empty chimneys, crowd them with the parti- coloured throng of mediaeval life, reconstitute the old world, and how delightful were the great Palace ! But this long succession of bare stone walls and stairs and passages fills you with infinite dreariness, with a sense of desolation. You stroll listlessly through the apartment where Mary Stuart was born, and identify without conviction or interest the window from which Queen Margaret looked in vain for the return of James from Flodden Field. There are royal memories about every stone, for this was the chosen abode of the Stuarts from Robert II. to James VI., that is, for some two centuries and a half, though as building it dates mainly from the time of the fourth and fifth James. And then it was left in desolation, though it seems Charles I. meant to, and James VII. and II. did visit it. Finally, in quite a dramatic way, it literally and appropriately flares in the '45. Prince Charlie came here to the huge delight of a certain dame, Mrs Glen Gordon, then housekeeper. She set the Palace well running with wine, and would have set the ancient fountain running too had it not been "off the fang." But the vision of the fair laddie passed away — the vision that was to be so abiding and hopeless a memory in so many Scots lives, and was lost for ever. And next 263 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS year Hawley's dragoons came clattering in from their defeat at Falkirk at as brisk a rate as Johnny Cope's dragoons had taken after their defeat at Prestonpans. And the old lady, much against the grain, you believe, had to serve them of her best, not content with which they must needs set the place on fire. The house- keeper's remonstrances had scant attention from the General. She was roughly advised to look after herself, " Oh, she could do that ; she could flee from fire as quick as any dragoon in the land." And so with a grin of satisfaction on her hard Scots features, and having plainly the best of the encounter, the Glen Gordon vanishes from authentic record. But the Palace was hopelessly ruined. Various schemes were from time to time suggested to restore and utilize it in some way, but fortunately none of them came off. Save for needful repairs the place has been left in impressive ruin ; so impressive that you may still re-echo the words of Mary of Guise and vow you have never seen a more princely palace. I remember an autumn day when I sat long in the grounds. The quiet loch in front, the mighty wall of the castle behind, and set round was a Circle of fair hills, chief among them Glowr'our'em, so called, it is fabled, from the prospect it commands. Here is one of those choice spots fair in themselves, fairer still in their memories. I thought kindly of the town as I passed again through its streets. Had the Stuarts themselves not called it their faithful town of Linlithgow, and the burghers had shown their devotion in a fashion grotesque as that of Bottom 264 LINLITHGOW the weaver and his fellows ? The Stuart King, you are sure, was always gravely polite. Yet he must have been hard put to it now and again. When James VI. revisited Scotland in 1617, who should greet him at Linlithgow but the local dominie, done up in plaster as a lion, addressing him in the maddest doggerel ? " Then, King of Men, The King of Beasts speaks to thee from his den. Who though he now enclosed be in plaster, When he was free was Lithgow's wise schoolmaster." Like greater folk the burghers changed with the times. After the Restoration they burned the Solemn League and Covenant, and after the Revolution, in mortal terror, tried to prove it was not a town affair at all. And still once a year the past lives again in Linlithgow. In solemn state they ride the marches of land they have long lost, and from the castle hill of Blackness summon vassals who, if they exist, at any rate never come. However there is much feasting and " There are, maybe, some suspicions Of an alcoholic presence." But it is only onee a year ! We entered the Palace with lines which Scott gives to Sir David Lyndsay. We leave it and the town with the words Lyndsay himself gives to the King's Papingo : " Adew, Lithgow, whose palyce of plesance Might be ane pattern in Portugall or France." 26s CHAPTER XXIV HADDINGTON Dead Men's Bones — Some Quaint Buildings — Nungate of Haddington — Its Interest — Lucerna Laudonim — Its Varied Fortunes — The Bridge — Trials of the Old Citizens — Legends of a Flood— The Siege— A Story About It- The Birthplace of Knox— Old Town Life — Literary History — The Writings of Knox — Self-Interpreting Bible — The Letters of Mrs Carlyle — Samuel Smiles — A Nook in the Garleton Hills— Sir David Lyndsay— The Village of Athelstaneford— Blair and Home. A MAN whose daily task was to mole among gas- pipes and the like under every part of the burgh of Haddington told me that wherever he dug he found human bones, and the most he judged to have come there by violence of fire, flood, plague or slaughter. To-day the town is trim and quiet, in its broad streets, with here and there grass between the stones. Some places have old-time names, as Poldrate, The Lang Causey, the Butts. It lies low down by the Tyne, which divides it from the suburb of Nungate. There are trees and abundant green in it, and about it, — as where not in Scotland ? — the all-saving presence of the hills — the Garleton ridge to the north, the Lammermuirs to the south. These last change even as living forms under change of weather. Now they gather round and bend over the town, and again they withdraw to far-off horizons, and they smile bright or frown dark, but always potent. 266 HADDINGTON I remember quiet Haddington quainter than it now is. In the admirable Castellated and Domestic Architec- ture of Scotland, by MacGibbon and Ross, are drawings of the Roundles at Bedlam Close, Farmer's House in the Nungate, and the so-called Bothwell Castle. Those competent judges thought them most important and interesting. The first two are clean vanished, and Bothwell Castle is a crumbling, deserted ruin. The whole of Nungate was once a jewel of rare excel- lence. Miry and malodorous, dirty and disreputable, it was yet the very image of the old Scots town of centuries ago. It was crammed with every feature of old Scots architecture. Roundles, pends, closes, wynds, outside stairs, everything ! Nobody built, nobqdy pulled down. It culminated in Farmer's House, some work of the wealthy, ancient Abbey to which Nungate belonged, and there was and still is the ruined old chapel of St Martin, of forgotten origin. When the moonlight scored and underlined the fantastic shadows of the old houses, and you looked across the Tyne at the river front of Bothwell Castle, with its dim yet authentic tradition of Mary Stuart and her wicked spouse, and you caught a snatch of old Scots rhyme, simple and romantic, sung by children at play, you had found the supreme moment for Nungate of Haddington. I shall never walk in it again. There is a new bridge over the Tyne, and a new flour-mill with a new name, and the house-breaker and the house-builder are busy, and Nungate is swept and garnished. If I lived in it I should be delighted, but I would that some millionaire 267 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS of antiquarian taste had bought all fifty years since, and carefully dusted and preserved it under glass as a unique specimen of what is now gone and cannot return. The parish church, or Auld Kirk, dedicated to St Mary, was known as Lucerna Laudonice, the Lartip of Lothian, because it was splendid, or some say because it carried a light iio guide the traveller over these dreary wastes and moorland that are now fertile fields. But most church towers of old carried a light ; and though the tower be square, and massive, and imposing, yet it lies so low down that I doubt the efficacy of the light. Moreover, just as the old church builder loved his gargoyle and his pinnacle, so the old church writer loved his picturesque phrase and his parable. Does not the light of the lamp admirably image forth spiritual and temporal splendour? The antiquary here puts his s^oke in the wheel. The real lamp, he will have it, was a bowshot off — a Franciscan monastery, in fact, whereof not a stone remains. I cannot tell. This at least is served heir to every species of church that ever was in Haddington, and with its- comely stone, its fair shape, and a certain restraint and dignity in all its lines, it is a beautiful relic of other days. An old woman who had lived all her life under its shadow told me that as she grew up everything in Haddington shrunk and became less to her save this old church. It has been fearfully mauled about. The " Auld Enemy " with his torch, and the too early Restorer with his compass, the passionate Reformer, the callous Philistine, all did their cruel worst. 268 HADDINGTON The choir is a ruin, what is left shored up with diflfi- culty, and every stone has marks of some evil touch, yet it is fair and impressive in spite of everything. The mediaeval world could do one thing, at any rate, supremely well : it could big a kirk. The best your modern can do is to imitate. He cannot always manage even that. If you look across towards the river you will think that same vanished world could do one other thing, and that was, build a brig ! The Nungate bridge, which connects with that suburb, is straight and narrow, and it is steep to climb, but it has the same beautiful stone as the kirk, the like graceful arch, the like formal symmetry. The last restorers, to give them their due, have been modest and discreet ; they have destroyed the destroyers, and looked back rather than forward. You see brig and kirk to-day under the best conditions. And what about those "fellows in the cellarage" — those silent witnesses under the soil ? Impossible to recover the history of any one, yet the history of the town explains how they came there. It was four times burned. Once by chance or malice, thrice in warfare with the "Auld Enemy," of course — the enemy that meets you at every turn in Scots annals to check and thwart. It was flooded again and again. The plague, a constantly-returning dread, tore at it year by year. Less than a century since there was a severe visitation of cholera. Careful cleaning, sanitation, whitewash* pure water supply are recent things. One or two scraps of doubtful authenticity have escaped the general oblivion. The flood of 1358 threatened to sweep away 269 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS kirk and town in common ruin, when a nun, seizing an image of the Virgin, vowed it should go too unless Our Lady condescended to help her own. And there is a comic interlude of a citizen of Nungate who perched on the detached roof of his hut, with dog, cat and cock for fellows. " Row we merely (merrily) Quo John Burley," japed he with sardonic mirth when he swept under the bridge, "a saying of Nungate in Haddington to this day," but the scribe himself has gone centuries ago. Lothian, the capital excepted, was never keenly moved by religious change ; its folk took things as they came, yet that did not save them from trouble. In Reforma- tion times religion and politics were strangely mingled, Haddington was held by the Englishj and in 1 548 was closely besieged for some eighteen months by the Scots and a body of French auxiliaries. The folk in the walls had a hard time of it ; there was plague within and assaults without. One of the foreign besiegers, a certain Monsieur Beague, has left an account in very lively French. Like others of his tribe he takes for granted the common incidents of daily life, and so leaves untold what had now been of rare interest. This incident he gives. A Highland kern among the Scots admired the dashing French style of attack, he would do something in emulation. On the next sally he rushed up to the foe, gripped an Englishman, threw him over his shoulder, and staggered across to his own side. The captive struggled frantically, but in vain, though 270 HADDINGTON he bit him in so brutal a fashion on the shoulder that his life was in danger. The French captain rewarded the exploit with a coat of mail and twenty crowns. The Celt was efifusive in his gratitude. No wonder ! He had never been so well armed or so well in pocket all his life. The thing had its usual ending. What was there to get in that savage country but hard fare and hard blows ? So the foreign friend and the foreign foe presently departed, and the place was left with " a mean number of the ancient inhabitants to re-build and venture as best they couTd." So Knox sums up the siege in a brief phrase. He does not think it worth while to record that he Was born there, though he once reminded Bothwell, in strangely, kindly and pathetic words, as you deem, reflecting on all that passed between them, that he and his had served the Hepburns for generations. Had he condescended on the place of his nativity he had solved a once keenly-contested point. The whole weight of evidence is in favour of the spot by the well in Nungate that you see from the bridge. One odd custom for long kept the folk of Haddington in memory of their former troubles. The Town officer paraded the streets at nightfall throughout the year, and with tuck of drum chanted a rough, rude rhyme warning against the danger of fire. It was known as '' coal and canle " from its leading words. This too is long disused. Those old citizens had a miserable time. Were they not tempted to flee the place altogether ? Far from it. So you gather from a series of entries in the burgh records. For all offences there was one penalty: the 271 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS offender was " banished ye towne." If he came back he was scourged or branded, or both, and again thrust forth. If the fatal attraction of Haddington lured him yet again, there was a gallows in frequent use at the West Port, just outside the wall, and there was presently no more of him. The local hangman, by the way, had perhaps from frequent practice a more than local reputation. His services were in request in other quarters. The unpleasing name of Gallows Green preserved the memory of the fatal spot till recent times. It was not found a choice term for a spick-and-span suburban villa, and the owner changed it to something more commonplace. Not criminals alone were summarily thrust forth. The same fate befel beggars, Egyptians and all afflicted with the plague. It was to the citizens a dim, menacing outer world inhabited by English invaders, impost collectors, marauders, savage contend- ing Scots barons as bad as any. They barred their gates against all manner of intruders and strangers, they kept themselves cosy in their quaint little houses, and so in some fashion or other the burgh life went its course through centuries till the stream of time floated down Haddington to the present day, always oddly enough with about the same number of inhabitants. The literary history of the place has its own interest; Three names occur in distinct epochs : John Knox, John Brown, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Each of these has a less or greater reputation, but not mainly that of letters. It is said of Bacon that he was great even as 272 HADDINGTON lawyer. Knox was great even as writer. He is vigorous, graphic, humorous, picturesque ; you wonder he is not more read. Because perhaps his manner is antiquated and his themes unfortunate. His First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women is not for times when women strenuously assert themselves the equals of men. His Historie of the Reformation in Scotland is too brutally frank and prejudiced to please any party. " These things we write merrily," he says after detailing with unmistakable relish the murder of Cardinal Beaton. However impressed, you cannot formally approve. So much for the sixteenth century. Then in the eighteenth century we have the interesting figure of John Brown, him of the Self- Interpreting Bible. It is a library in a volume, containing history, chronology, geography, exposition and reflections. Once a great work in pious seceding circles in the north, it is long antiquated. The author had a varied life, was herd laddie, pedlar, volunteer in the '45, divine, and finally professor in his little sect. He had the true scholar's love for learning and a touch of graphic force in the way he put his matter, but Biblical criticism advances on lines undreamed of by him. He died in 1787 and was buried in the churchyard here, where you can still see his modest tomb. " Here also now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London." So runs her epitaph in the ruined choir, in the same house as it were with John, Duke of Lauder- dale, the "bloody Lauderdale" of the "killing time." Mrs Carlyle is only known as the wife of her husband. 18 273 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Her letters are brilliant and remarkable. Perhaps he was the upas tree that destroyed, not the prop that supported her renown. Her picture of Haddington after years of absence, her walk in the early morning among its ways and its graves, her words with one or two of its oldest folk, are touched with rare merit. They are the best that exist concerning Haddington. This band of three is oddly made up. As writers its members were unfortunate, but there were more im- portant things to them in life than letters. Shall we make our trio a quartet and include Samuel Smiles, who was born here in 1812, eleven years after Mrs Carlyle, and only died the other day ? I fear not. He made more by the least of his books than his three townsfolk did by all of theirs, if they made anything at all, which is doubtful. But the rich count as little in the Republic of Letters as they do in the Kingdom of Heaven. Here you do not deem Self Help literature at all. Its style is pedestrian, its thought commonplace, its philosophy cheap and shallow, hence possibly its success at home and abroad. I am not yet done with literary memories. About a mile to the north of the town, in a nook of the Garleton Hills, a fair spot with fair prospects over hill and dale, and plain and sea, and set amidst soft rounded gentle hills and clumps of beeches, and stretches of green, are the scanty ruins of Garleton Castle. It nestles under the shoulder of the hill, shielded against the wild west or the bitter east wind, a rare birthplace for a rare po6t, old, yet his wit was too keen, his 274 HADDINGTON humour too merry, his note too tuneful for complete oblivion. " Still is thy name in high account, And still thy verse has charms, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, Lord Lyon King-at-arms ! " This is the first of another set of three. A mile or so to the east of Garleton lies Athelstaneford, and here from 1 74 1 to 1746 Robert Blair was minister. His poem, The Grave, was widely read. It had the fortune to be illustrated by William Blake. The pleasing melancholy of its verse still gives it a certain vogue. One poet parson succeeded another, for John Home got the living after Blair's death and held it for two years. He wrote Dottglas in that eighteenth-century English of which Doctor Samuel Johnson and Mr Samuel Pope and a few others had the trick, though the most is but dust and ashes to our taste. Would you put Douglas with the most? His own day thought not. In 1756 the piece was produced in Edinburgh and received with wild enthusiasm. "Whaur's yox Wullie Shakespeare noo ? " bellowed, with bathos truly sublime, a voice from the gallery. In London the play went just as well, but the Presbytery would have none of it, and in high dudgeon Home threw up his kirk and departed south, where all sorts of nice things happened. The Lothian fields impressed him. " Amazing Bass," the " fertile land," and all the rest of it adorn his page. He saw them from his study windows on the few occasions when he attended to his pastoral duties. A choice bit beginning, 275 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHJANS " My name is Norval," was a favourite passage for recitation in Scots schools before the Education Act. Burns was as bathetic on the subject as the gallery god. " Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan." The piece is not unlike the worst of his own work. The judgment of old Edinburgh and old London is not ours. We prefer Shakespeare as he is, and Robin takes our hearts not by his efforts in Georgian English but by certain pieces written in the Scots dialect, not merely for the eighteenth century but for all after generations of men and women. 276 CHAPTER XXV ON LAMMER LAW Spring by the Tyne— The " Stanners Heids "—The Tower of the Maitlands— An Alpine Touch— The Hamlet of Bolton— A Memory of Burns — The Countryside — A Pastoral Interlude — Soutra Hospital and Soutra Aisle— Pringle of Goodman's Acre— Soutra Hill— By the Cairn on Lammer Law— Mist and Gloom— A Hill- side Shepherd— The Downward Path— The Journey's End. TI^ ARLY one morning of last spring I pushed my -Lv bicycle along the Haugh at Haddington, plan- ning to cross right over the top of Lammer Law. No great effort, in sooth, for the Lammermuirs are gentle hills, and Lammer Law, reputed the highest, is scarce 1 800 feet, but the freshness of the time, the prospect of a day in the woods and fields and hills, gave that in- spiring touch of romance which attaches to the begin- ning of a journey, be it great or small. As I passed over the wooden footbridge across the Tyne I looked at the channel filled with gravel and the green islands in midstream ; the familiar note of the water is distinctly in my ears as I think of the easy, gliding river. " You hear her streams repine," says Scott, exactly hitting off the voice of the water nymph. I have long known the particular spot as the "Stanners Heids." The term puzzled me for years. Was it rightly placed there, or did it belong to another part of the river, and what did it mean ? And then one day I happened to look into Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, himself a county 277 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS man, and there, in one of the " Prologues " with which he adorns and beautifies his translation of the ^neid, was the word " Stanners." As the glossary explained, it was gravel in the bed of a stream. I saw what it meant, and why it fitted more than one place on the Tyne. This by the way. I moved on, and was soon skirting the park wall of Lethington, or Lennoxlove as it is now called. I could just see the old grey keep of the Maitlands through the trees. There abode the two Lord Chancellors Maitland and their more famous son and brother, Secretary Maitland, who, when his own cause and Queen Mary's cause went hopelessly to ruin, was thought to have ended himself, " as the auld Romans were wont to do," to avoid an ignominious death on the scaffold. But the Maitlands, and even their successors, are gone ; and if you stop to muse over those old-world stories you progress not at all. So I swung round by Grant's Braes and Eaglescairnie — delightful name for a quaint little mansion and estate. It was one of those bright spring days that carry with them the presage of rain. " The distant hills are looking nigh," the whole Lammer- muir range seemed close at hand. Lammer Law, Cairn and all was right above my head. I felt as if I could throw a stone on to one of the snow patches that dotted its shoulders and gave an Alpine touch to my little adventure. A few minutes and I was in the small hamlet of Bolton. If you are anything of a Burns enthusiast you will not pass without turning aside to the churchyard. Not that Burns was, as far as one can 278 ON LAMMER LAW learn, ever in the parish at all, but his mother, his elder brother Gilbert, one of his sisters, and many nephews and nieces lie there. The stone that records their names and dates records no more. There is a touch of the antique Scots reticence and simplicity about stone and words alike. You will not wonder there is no reference to the world-famous poet. In 1820 and 1827, the dates of the deaths of the mother and the brother (who was long factor at Lennoxlove), the fame of Burns was not what it is now ; the last dark days in Dumfries still cast their black shadow over his name, and a number of things were said about him that seem to us now curiously irrelevant. But whatever his reputation had been it would not have occurred to those pious and simple souls to record it there. A little beyond Bolton the way deserts the main road. You climb to the uplands through a delightful succession of woods and fields and pastures, and burns and dells and braes. It is rustic but not savage. The woods and fields are equally trim and exact, the strong, well-kept horses draw the plough under the skilful guiding hand in miraculously straight furrows, the sheep look as if their fleeces had been combed, the fences are in trim repair, and far up the hillside man wrestles with Nature to reclaim the soil, to wring a little oats or what not from the barren slope before he abandons it as mere mountain pasture. Ever on the rise, you pass farm after farm — " toun " in the old Scots phrase. The summits became more and more imminent. A little rain fell now and again, the hills loomed black and bare 279 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and desolate, the wind whistled keen and shrill, and one thought of the dark days and nights of winter, and you saw why the houses were built so strong, and every- thing had the mark of energy and endurance upon it, for the sharp weather stings to activity all that work and labouf there. But the spring reasserted itself, the sky cleared, the light and play of the shadows raced across the hills, the sun changed the sombre hues to bright colours. The road led me by Humbie House, and a little way from Humbie church and Humbie village I descended into the lovely dell where Humbie Mill uses the waters of the passing burn. Here was a pastoral interlude. A boy sat in a cart, stationary before the mill door, and discoursed on a flute with some skill a fantasia of Scotch airs, simple, popular things, that went excellently well with the lambs skipping on the hillside, and the light and play of shadows, and the plaintive note of the burn, and the order of the woods and the fields. I suppose you must always take the native song and tune of a country in the country itself. The tarantella of Sicily had sounded thin and fantastic on this sober countryside. At Upper Keith I noted again a house far up the hillside ; it OQCurred here and there with a certain odd persistency, but perhaps I read into it what I knew of its history. You would put it down at first for a shepherd's hut, or even powder magazine ; it is all that remains of the magnificent twelfth-century mediaeval foundation of the old Scots King Malcolm, called the Maiden, for travellers and poor folk. Here was in distant days dispensed that strange mediaeval charity 280 ON LAMMER LAW which fell like the rain and sunbeam of heaven on the just and unjust, and ministered to the wayfarer and the beggar according to their needs and not according to their deserts. When the old order changed for the nfew at the Reformation the place was left to go to wreck and ruin, and yet you fancy it as still a majestic ruin, for it was long a quarry for the neighbourhood. Some fifty or sixty years ago the folk rose by one common impulse and carried the remains away for use in every base and common purpose. As yet there was no ancient monument preservation spirit in the land. Pringle of Goodman's Acre had built a sort of vault as burying-place out of the ruins over two centuries ago. This is called Soutra Aisle, and is to-day the sole sign of Malcolm's foundation, except for the crop of nettles that marks the site of the old burying-place. And then again there is a legend about Goodman's Acre, of how the wife of an old-time Pringle, by the exercise of a little timely hospitality to a presum- ably unknown but suspected stranger, obtained a grant of the ground from that Scots HarounAl-Raschid, James V. You now pass Johnstonburn and Woodcote, and come on the main road, which crosses the Lam- mermuirs at the lowest point right over Soutra Hill. A beautifully-engineered road this is, made just before the railways ; but the posts at the roadside, placed to show the track in the time of snows, hint that there are still lingering elements of uncouthness. Till you are right across the hill there is but one dwelling, called, oddly, Lowry's Den. In the old time of the 281 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS footpad and the smuggler it had an evil repute, and even to-day in the sunlight it looks sinister, but its looks are the worst of it. And now you are on the edge of the Berwickshire slope and you have a swift rush down till you reach Carfrae Mill, where you leave the high road and address yourself to the serious effort of the day. You must now follow a mere bridle track through the centre of the hills. It is ten miles to GifTord and only three or four are rideable ; the rest is mere sheep-walk through heather. You begin fairly enough where the road is plain beside the mountain burn, but you soon take to stiff hill climbing, and when you leave the solitary shepherd's house, half-way up your first hill, you do not meet another human habita- tion for six miles or so. I had passed this way before on a golden autumn afternoon when the very air seemed to sleep, and the heather was fragrant, and the silence of the hills had something magic about it ; but now the sky was dark, and the rain gathered strength, and the wind whistled, and the whaups screamed in sad unison. The whole scene was inexpressibly dreary. The track was sometimes lost in snow (some land here is held in blench tenure on paying a "snowball in June" — no impossibility at any rate), and again it wound through the midst of bogs and morasses, and I was fain to turn back, only it seemed easier to go on. Yet this was after all the more ordinary aspect of the place, and I thought how scenes like this form the character of men who live among them. In such moors and solitudes Border shepherds and Highland clansmen, and Moss- 282 ON LAMMER LAW trooper and Covenanter, and many other typical Scots folk, had passed their days, and from them, perhaps, came the sharp touch of Calvinistic theology, and the cruelty of savage deeds and the reticence of speech and hardy endurance of hard conditions ; for I was wander- ing through a dreary wilderness with no outlook beyond the near heights. However, the Cairn on Lammer Law, which had a little before appeared over the shoulder of a hill, my one star of hope, was now growing larger in the desolation. The track passes close to the summit, and I left my bicycle and climbed thereto through a piece of vile, boggy ground. Alas ! what could I see through the rain and the driving mist? Not those pleasant, happy fields I had gazed on once before, that delightful landscape, that in its gentle rise and fall has something of the stately and alluring rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter. And the ground was historic. You looked towards battlefields like Pinkie and Preston- pans and Dunbar, and islets like the Bass, and there was the smoke of Edinburgh, and the fields of Fife, and the shadow of the Highland hills, for, in sooth, from there you survey the theatre of a good half of Scots history ; but the curtain was drawn over it that day, and I had nought to do but to get me down the hillside through the ever-increasing rain. I was tempted by a few yards of better road to try the bicycle. I was promptly thrown for my pains, though possibly ultimately to my advan- tage. The gloom increased, the mist shifted uneasily on the hilltops, and I thought how fitly godly Mr Alexander Peden had prayed in cruel times for a lap of the Lord's 283 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS cloak when the dragoons were at his heels, and the mist in their faces seemed a sufficient and immediate response. These places do not strike those who work in them quite as they strike you. One man I met on the hillside, and, of course, I stopped for a " crack." You stop to greet thp traveller in such a solitude as naturally as two caravans do that encounter one another in the desert. He was not a traveller, but a shepherd, and at that lambing season he spent his days, and often his nights, on the hillside. He stared when I asked him if it was not lonely or dreary. The idea had not occurred to him ; the scene of his daily labours had a touch of cheerful commonplace about it. Perhaps his dog was sufficient company. I am sure his plaid protected him well against the weather, and his staff, it may be, guided him as ably as ever that of the old-time warlock. Major Weir, guided kim. But the hillside is not the place to discuss such curious questions. The rain still pursued me as I hurried ever downwards, but now on comfortable, ordinary, macadam- ized roads, through Long Yester and by pleasant green Chesters, and then through trim, neat Giffijrd. That day I turned not aside to view Hobgoblin Hall, "wrought by words of charm" by that mysterious old warlock, Hugo de Gifford. And though I skirted the policies of Coalstoun I did not even think of the magic pear to which tradition has tied the fate of the family. The primitive cravings for food and rest and dryness and warmth were strong within me as I crept with a sigh of relief under the shadow of the old church tower at Haddington, and so to my night's lodging. 284 CHAPTER XXVI BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN Hardgate of Haddington— House Mottoes— The Banks of Tyne— Amisfield Park— The Tragedy of Newmills— The Abbey Hamlet— Relics of the Abbey — Its History — Mary Stuart — Stevenson House — Untrodden Ways — Barbed Wire — Hailes Castle— Memories of Mary and Both well— The Castle Precincts — Traprain— Its Legend— " Speed the Plough"— The Harvesters. ' I ""HERE are many pleasant walks about the old -*- town of Haddington, but the favourite one for me is down by Tyne to the Abbey hamlet and so on to Traprain Law, the solitary hill that holds the eye from every little ridge to the very edge, and over, of East Lothian. It was an autumn day, grey and quiet in the morning hours, as I trudged over the uneven stones of Hardgate. I passed the shapeless mass that was once the Master of Hailes's place, commonly and fantastically known as Bothwell Castle. I recall it a fair dwelling, though now a hopeless ruin. Here Mary Stuart was on the very eve of Carberry Hill — a disturb- ing and unquiet memory. However, a Latin tag on a ne^r house, with the date 1642, admonished, " To think always better things." What a delightful custom that was to mark the date and the motto on your house ! It made every street a chapter of history and letters. I now turned at the Spout Well, and so along the bank of Tyne by a narrow and little-trodden path that 285 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS hugged the water edge. The river was covered with sea-gulls screaming and feeding with equal zest. Trap- rain was already right in view, but the Lammermuir hills on the south had shrouded themselves for the time in a soft mantle of mist. Across the water were the great trees and green swellings of Amisfield Park, and a little further down was the house itself. Old red sandstone, square, adorned with pillars and statues, like a villa on the hills round Florence, it accorded little with its fields. In front the water was diverted into a cascade of a certain feeble prettiness, but a wood of sombre Scots firs gave mystery and dignity to the place, and at the end there was the beautiful old mediaeval Abbey bridge. Amisfield, over two hundred years ago, was the scene of a great criminal tragedy — the murder of Sir James Stanfield by his son Philip. It was then called Newmills, and in name and aspect was far other than it is to-day. Perhaps that is why the legend is not a story of the countryside, yet this affair of 1687 had enough renown in its own time. You may still read it, writ large in the great State Trials collection. It is crammed full of incident and horror, culminating in a post-mortem examination in old Morham Kirk on a drear November night. When Philip helped to put back the body in the coffin the wounds bled afresh on his hands. Had the dead father spoke audible words the guilty one had seemed less clearly declared accused. So, at least, the men of that day believed. "Bluidy Mackenzie" was chief prosecuting counsel. He dwelt on the gruesome incident in Mor- 286 BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN ham Kirk with that solemn and impressive eloquence of which he was such a master. "God Almighty Himself was pleased to bear a share in the testimony which we produce." Philip went to the scaffold, though Lord Fountainhall and Sir Walter Scott have doubted his guilt. World's End Close in the High Street of Edinburgh was once the town dwelling of Sir James, and so called Stanfield's Close, as I have mentioned. I passed under one of the arches of the bridge and thus got on to the high road, and there, a few steps back from it, were the three or four houses that form the hamlet of the Abbey. The most were good solid Scots houses, clearly some centuries old. They were, no doubt, put together out of the ruin of the nunnery that once stood there. Four hundred years it flourished, and for near the same time it more or less quickly vanished. It only has one point of interest, and that was in 1548, just a little before the beginning of its end. The Scots Parliament met there and agreed to the marriage of Mary Stuart with the Dauphin. " Thus," says Knox, " was she sold to go to France, to the end that she should drink of that liquor that should remain with her all her lifetime for a plague to the realm and for her final destruction." Powerful, bitter words, but written after the event, and not very just or exact ! There is no record of what this nunnery was like. At one of the house doors a woman was standing. When asked if there were any vestiges she pointed to a shapeless heap of earth or rubble, one scarce knew what, and said that was supposed the 287 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS sole remnant of this one-time rich and prosperous religious house. Her own abode was probably a more authentic monument. However, she went on to tell the legend of the Abbey, a squalid murder-story about a hundred years old, not here to be repeated. Of the Stanfield affair across the river she had never heard. A direct question brought her back to the Abbey, and she pointed out a few trees in a field as the remains of its graveyard. I walked over. It was enclosed by a barbed- wire fence, but I squeezed over it or under it, and there, among the trees and under a thick undergrowth of nettles, lay some very old tombstones. " Nothing is sacred to a sapper," says a French proverb. What is sacred to the Lothian plough? The little space was cut sharp at its edges ; the field of the dead must have been diminished year by year till stones and trees and fence had altogether stopped the remorseless iron. I was glad to be out again on the open road, with the cheerful clatter of the Abbey Mill in my ears. I now went by the river, past Stevenson and so on down stream. All too-obtrusive notices threatened the trespasser with legal terrors, but having neither gun nor rod I assumed they could not concern me. This theory did excellent well. I met no one, and it was not put to the test. After Stevenson House, a pleasant old Scots mansion on a low knoll above the stream, the path failed, or at any rate became intermittent. Possibly it is continuous on the other or northern side ; if so, I noted no one on it. There was an occasional crazy boat, which no doubt served 288 BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN as ferry. Once or twice sets of stepping-stones supplied a more primitive crossing. The river and its banks were full of their own life ; fishes leapt in the stream, water-rats darted from the edge, at every step a crow rose from the fields, or a partridge started with indignant whirr, the protest of an aristocratic and law-protected creature against vulgar intrusion. The trees were full of birds, the air of insects, and every few steps a great heron rose up and sailed majestically away. The cattle in the fields gazed with mild bovine wonder at the passer- by. It was not a long walk, in miles some five or six perhaps, and only that because the river coiled in and out in gentle windings, always with a constant plaintive murmur. Now it swept round a succession of green haughs, and then between banks steep and narrow and dense with tree and bush. But the channel did not narrow or its waters quicken. I went slow and with little ease. The keen, eager plough disputed its narrowest banks with the river, if so be it might tame another yard of earth. It had hugged the steep so close that the line ran straight along the top. Another inch, and sure plough and man and cattle had toppled right over and crashed into mid Tyne. Sometimes I crawled along the bank, or I drove my way through a potato field, or I hung on to the fenpes. I had some trouble with the burns that fell into the Tyne ; they were innocent of so much as a plank, but piost had a couple of stones to aid the workers from the farms I saw here and there on the near sky-line. The crossing involved a scramble up and down steep banks by the aid of trees, 19 389 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and the top was invariably fenced. The day was grey no longer ; it was bright sun and warm, and the bits of level haugh, after the scramble, were very Edens. Finally, from the edge of a cornfield I caught sight of Hailes rising sheer from the water and seen above and through the trees. One final climb and I was inside the enclosure. It is very hard to describe Hailes. It is but a mass of masonry ; one or two rooms, hall or dungeon or cellar, have their roofs, most have not, and the wind stirs the grass and nettles that grow long and rank in hall and courtyard. The river front still looks strong ; from the other bank it must seem complete. Hidden away, broken and bowed, yet stout even in ruin, the castle will hang together in some sort for untold years if left alone. It will still touch with a vague interest the wayfarer on the slope of Pencraik, and save for one memory that were all to be said. Once again it is Mary Stuart that passes by, and the grey walls are touched with keen tragic interest. Hailes was Bothwell's castle in the midst of his own fields, and here he took his Queen in April 1 567, after he had carried her off, no unwilling captive. And she was there again in May, the month of her fatal marriage. She knew her danger, for her wit was keen ; she dared all, for her spirit was high. It was quieter here than at Dunbar or Edinburgh ; save for her own folk not less quiet than to-day. The castle grounds by the Tyne are of rare beauty. There is a miniature glen through which a tiny burn trickles to the river. Once it makes a little pool and you may choose a seat on one or other 290 BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN of some immense rocks. Maybe it served once as well. Trees, grass, burn are left untouched, and so they fit well the ruined castle. An easy road led to the foot of Traprain. Surely not a hard hill to climb, though there is no regular path. I remembered the legend of Thenew, Princess, Saint and Mother of Saint Kentigern, who was hurled, by the order of her heathen old father, Ludonius, King of Lothian, from the summit, on account of her piety, or the lack of it, for the story may be read various ways. It required a miracle to save her. True, this was a good deal more than a thousand years ago, when Traprain was known as Dunpender (a name still much in favour with the poets). But the age of miracles is past, and yet hills alter little in a thousand years. " So the Law ought to be dangerous at some parts ? " I asked the " guidwife " at a roadside cottage. She pointed out the sheep that were moving at their ease up the hill and told me to follow them ! Also she assured me that the girls of the countryside often raced down it on summer evenings ! Perhaps the "gilpeys" (as she called them) invoked the help of St Thenew. I was about to ask her when she began on the "craps" — that eternal East Lothian subject. I have no skill in such talk, and I " took the hill " forthwith. It was easy enough. Most was springy turf mined with rabbit-holes. Here the stone of the hill showed like the bare ribs of Mother Earth. Again I passed through nettles, for I found no beaten track. On the top the wind blew fresh and strong, and the sky was clear and blue. All was happy and useful labour 291 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS in the fields that stretched round. The ships on the Firth, the smoke of a distant train, the "reek" of Linton and Haddington, set off and edged the great picture of the harvest-field. By the sea the fields stood bare; on the hills crops were falling under the gatherer's knife. Just below men and women were piling the "stocks" in carts, or leading them away. There was complete method and order. The stocks stretched along the fields at regular intervals in un- broken lines ; the uncut corn was clean, and filled the field from end to end, and on the bared land there was no wrack left behind. This is the ideal of an earlier day, the newer world asks something more startling, but " Speed the Plough ! " The hours by the waterside had been full of tragic memories and ruined splendours. The unhappy dead had risen from their graves to chill, with their old-world sorrows, but in this cheerful scene the shadows vanished. You praise the strong arms and brave hearts that win so happy a victory. This is the real work of the world. These men live at the heart and core of things ; they give us our daily bread, they do that which makes everything else possible. And so did their fathers before them in long years of steady and incessant toil that changed the waste to this garden. They talked little but they ploughed much. Content that they had made their field more fertile they went to their rest in those little yards you see by the country kirks ; their dust is one with the dust of the field they ploughed, and si qucBris monumentum circumspice ! I passed on my way to the town in the 292 BY HAILES AND TRAPRAIN pure pale light of a northern evening. The road was dotted with farm places, and with woods and streams among the fields. The heavy-laden carts went by with- out end, for the workers toiled to the last minute of daylight. A laugh, a snatch of song floated now and again over the hedge. As I passed round the dykes by the south of Amisfield I turned and saw how Traprain seemed to have moved with me and stood blocking the end of the road. It had been the com- panion of my day, but now it vanished as I passed over the old bridge across the Tyne into the lamp-lit streets of Haddington. 293 CHAPTER XXVII DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD The Berwick Road — Gladsmuir — Principal Robertson— The Crawstane — St Lawrence House — The Leper and the Tramp — The Croakers' Hedges — Pencraik — The Stannin' Stane — The Tyne at East Linton — Belhaven Sands — Dunbar Tolbooth — The Presence of the Sea — The Story of Dunbar — The Castle — Its Ruin — The Prophecy of Thomas of Ercildoune — The Exploits of Black Agnes — Queen Mary in the Castle — Dunbar Drive — The Genius of Cromwell. THE highroad that leads from Edinburgh to Berwick through Dunbar and over the end of the Lammer- muirs is spoilt by houses and coal-pits until you crest the rise at Gladsmuir. That is a parish, but the houses in the centre are scarce big enough to form a village. You have just passed over the battlefield of Prestonpans. The Jacobites, who for many reasons went much by tradi- tion, called the affair after the name of this place, from an old saying " on Gladsmuir shall the battle be." Principal Robertson was once minister here, and the folk of these fields (you suspect) found his elegant diction and sonorous periods " a cauld harangue " and promptly fell happily asleep. The schoolmaster of the parish took me many years ago to the churchyard and showed me a curious stone with a hollow in the centre. He said it was the "Crawstane," and that devout Alexander Peden had foretold that in the evil time coming " the Crawstane of 294 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD Gladsmuir should be filled with blood." In the dark days of trouble the old Scots found a morbid pleasure in those wild, gloomy sayings, and Peden the prophet dispensed them with a liberal tongue. The battle of Gladsmuir might be taken as fulfilment, but in Peden's time, as well as before and after, you were safe in prophesying blood about any event in poor distracted Scotland. I have since sought for the Crawstane but it is clean vanished. Perhaps some vandal has ground it to powder for road metal, as the heritors once thought of doing with the ruins of Sweetheart Abbey ; perhaps some collector has conveyed it. There is a time of danger to all such things. For centuries they are accepted as part of the universe, like "the seas and the stars, and then a questioning spirit possesses the land. The thing is defaced as of bravado, or it is cunningly seized on before the public conscience is roused to protect, add injudicious improvement, and you explain the ruin of most of the historic buildings and monuments in the kingdom. As the name implies, there was a great waste here once, where now you see fertile field or game-stocked wood. Much was owned by the town of Haddington, but the council let it go in the dark days for an old song, though they still appoint a Baron Bailie of Gladsmuir, who does nothing, for the excellent reason he has nothing to do. You touch St Lawrence House, a western suburb of Haddington. Here was of old a huge bare structure used sonxetimes for barn, but latterly ruinous. Tradition would have it the one-time Lazar House. Bad food, neglect of every sanitary 295 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS precaution played sad havoc in the old Scots towns. The leper was a constant menace. The pest spread like wildfire, and you cannot wonder that the wretch was thrust forth on the instant. And then in those days St Lawrence House was a good way beyond the walls, and there he spent the few and evil remnant of his days. But the Lazar House, if such it were, is down, and who now recalls the dread and terror of that distant time ? Beyond Haddington the road runs at the most picturesque of elevations ; raised somewhat above the plain through which here flows the Tyne, yet well below the summit of the hills. Such are the pilgrim ways that converge on Canterbury, though it is said they are older and that the very first roads were so made, not for scenic effect but for safety. The King's Highroad is supremely interesting to the right-minded traveller. There are always noteworthy people on it. This stretch is infested with tramps, valiant and sturdy beggars as the Elizabethan statutes called them. If you are fairly young, and blessed, or cursed, with the true wandering spirit, the life is well enough in summer-time. The farmer scarce dare refuse you the shelter of his bam at night. A match is quite unobtrusive, a neat hayrick a very common object hereabouts. You beg or steal a meal, or the wherewithal to get one, There are all the diverting incidents of travel and no grinding toil to weary or worry you. I had no stake, save one purely sentimental, in those fair fields and was free to persist- ently ignore the persistent request. I gave nothing but some tobacco which one cunning rascal, producing an 296 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD empty pipe, begged with an air no smoker could resist. Burns has thought out the rough as well as the happy part of vagabondage : " To lie in barns and kilns at e'en, When banes are crazed and bluid is thin, Were surely great distress." And he moralizes even there content would make for blessedness. Yes, but who would be contented ? Not the passionate Robin of all men. Now you have climbed out of the green depths of the Croakers' Hedges, a dark corner set round with woods. Here highwaymen were wont, it is averred, to spoil all and sundry who passed by. It was the very spot to suggest highway robbery to the timid wayfarer. Next was Pencraik. The wind was up. It played on the telegraph wires as if these were an iEolian harp built for its private use. It made a grander and more sonorous wailing in the fir wood on the slope. That is the real song of travel. Who can hear it and not wish to wander over the hills and far away ? As you crest the ridge you catch a glimpse of Hailes Castle in the hollow with Traprain just above it. A little way along, but on the other side, is an older and simpler memorial. It is a " Stannin' Stane," to give it the country name — a strange, weather-beaten, almost shapeless yet upright block in the midst of a field. Tradition puts it down as marking the grave of a Saxon prince. Rather some aboriginal chief slept here long ere a Saxon foot touched our 397 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS shores. Though well down from the summit you can view from it a great stretch of hill and plain, and see all the beautiful and familiar figures of the East Lothian landscape. That grave on the wild hillside features those graves on the hill slope between Maidstone and Rochester. The surroundings have many points of likeness. The same race digged them, or at least the same thoughts filled the minds of their makers. Here the chief could look far and wide over the fields where he hunted, or ruled, or fought. It is the select site in East Lothian where one would choose to build a house, and alas ! that would be one other spot made common and vulgar. There is nothing to detain in East Linton unless the view from the bridge. Up the stream is a very charac- teristic and charming piece of Tyne scenery and below is the Linn that gives the town its name. You see a mass of rock and a great deep pool, and if water happens to be plentiful — not a too frequent occurrence — there is a reasonable din, foam-churning and commotion generally. Most of the six miles between this and Dunbar is clear level road, and as good for cycling purposes as the ways about Ripley or the slope of Hindhead, but now the motor has mauled it sadly. You enter Dunbar by Belhaven, the sands of which you see some way to your left. White, fine, beautiful, they must catch your eye. A famous place this for the mustering of yeomanry horse. It has a more sinister renown. By some play of currents, if you should unfortunately lose your life at the mouth of the Firth, you will come to land here though, it may be after many days. A corner in Dunbar 298 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD churchyard is the last haven of those who have thus perished. You find Dunbar perched on its moderate height. There is one fairly broad High Street, and closes run down from it to the beach. Lauderdale House shuts up one end of the street ; beyond this is the Castle. The High Street twists away round in the south-Ccist direction, and presently again becomes the high road to Berwick. By the way, that town is still something more than an artificial division. Your tramp, in real or affected ignorance, will ask the way to Berwick but not further. Beyond it is the beginning of another world. The quaintest thing about Dunbar is its odd little Tolbooth, some three hundred years old. Take a good look at the outside, then go into its narrow rooms and reflect that here was prison and council chamber, and indeed the centre of all the town's life. So the old Scots existed in those little burghs. The keeper showed a gigantic key which fitted an equally gigantic lock. He explained with a smile that a Chubb as long as your finger were a harder matter to pick. No doubt ! but the moral effect on the malefactor of that mass of iron must have been tremendous. The sea is the great thing at Dunbar. You may escape the sight but not the hoarse murmur, for it is never quite still on that iron-bound coast. The rocks are worn by its fury. Each winter has its tale of disaster. Down the closes, and so a little hidden away, the fishermen dwell in their ancient houses, always in sight and hearing of the tyrant who takes their toil and often their very life. Perched on 299 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS that headland you have as much of the ocean wave as if you were afloat, and "when the hoarse sea swings bodeful," as Carlyle says of it, and your dwelling rings under the buffet of its stroke, you fancy you are. He needs must be strong who would brave the winter months at Dunbar. The salt sea spray bites like fire, the bitter east wind stings like an adder. Dunbar is no place for soft dalliance. Yet it finds favour as sea-side resort. You can golf, and bathe, and take a strong man's holiday if there be a spell of decent summer weather. I did not find it so on my last visit. It was a September day, chill, and dark, and dreary, and I mourned for a summer that had passed without having arrived ; but if to-day is dreary and commonplace the story of Dunbar is tinged with romance and colour. Thomas the Rhymer, Black Agnes, Mary Stuart, Cromwell all played leading parts on the stage of this little theatre, and for the minoractors, Johnny Cope and therest, their name is legion. Ah, that castle, more tragically bound up with Mary Stuart's history, as Mrs Maccunn truly says, than even Holyrood or Fotheringay, how worn and shrunken it is to-day ! Have human needs or winter waves been the more cruel ? You see a fragment kept erect by props on one rock, and on another a shapeless mass of masonry. It is a castle reduced to its last elements before disappearance — nay, a Philistine Provost urged its destruction by powder as unsafe, wherat the folk murmured, hoarse and angry as their own sea, and things were left so that some stones still remain for history and tradition and romance to garland with evergreen. 300 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD What were these ruins like ? Captain Grose, whom you picture stout and rubicund — has not Burns touched him ofT so for all time? He lives more by the half- comic yet altogether kindly mention of him in one or two delightful lyrics than because of his own proper antiquarian renown — has a drawing of the remains, ex- tensive and imposing, and the local historian writing in 1840 tells of them even then as considerable. You could not now trace Queen Mary's room or hall or dungeon, for new harbour works destroj^ed much, and neglect and the North Sea did the rest. Dunbar, the learned say, means the Fort on the Rock, so that the castle was in essentials the town. Even greater than the ruin of the castle has been that of them that held it. The Earls of Dunbar were mighty nobles in their day, but before the middle of the fifteenth century their power had vanished. Two of the best-known episodes in Scots history are connected with them and their castle. On the nth March 1286, True Thomas of Ercildoune — famed through all time for his wondrous sayings was at the castle. The then Earl rallied him on his gloomy looks and inquired the cause, where- upon he foretold for the next day the sorest wind and tempest that ever afflicted Scotland. Perhaps his hearers thought that on the balance of probabilities a March day at Dunbar was like to be boisterous enough. However, it was exceptionally calm and mild. As noon passed without change the reputation of True Thomas was on the wane, when the terrible news arrived of the death of King Alexander HI. by the fall from his 301 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS horse at Kinghorn. This was the predicted tempest. Historical criticism was not yet, or it might have been objected that it was not difficult to make a guess at the weather, and if you were wrong lug in the first startling thing that happened to justify your forecast. About a century afterwards, namely in 1339, occurred the famous siege by the Earl of Salisbury and the not less famous defence by the then Countess. The lady lives in history, a very real and substantial person. Dark (hence her name of Black Agnes), masterful, jovial, are not several specimens of her thick mediaeval wit still extant, and held in much esteem by the Scots schoolboy? She bulks large among a very mask of shadows, for all who aided or opposed are mere names. The legends are notorious ; when some huge rock was hurled against the castle she caused one of her damsels, "arrayed jollily and well," carefully dust the spot with a cambric handerchief, or its old-world equivalent. When the soldiers -advanced, protected by the penthouse, called a sow, towards the wall, a well-directed rock " delivered," in Agnes' choice phrase, the sow of its litter, and as the men ran everywhere for shelter, the Countess, with splitting sides, yelled herself hoarse at the little pigs. There is much more to the same effect handed down in Wintoun's antique rhyme. Even her foes sung her praise : " She kept a stir in tower and trench. That brawling, boisterous, Scottish wdpch ; Came I early, came I late, I found Annot at the gate." 302 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD Annot became in after years exceeding rich and pros- perous, though apparently she reserved her witticisms for the family circle, as we hear nothing further. More than two centuries pass on, and Mary Stuart begins that close and intimate connection with Dunbar Castle which runs through the years 1 566 and 1 567. She escaped there from Holyrood immediately after Rizzio's murder, and though, in that same month of March, Bothwell took her back to Edinburgh, yet, giving as one among other reasons that he and his friends " dwell next adjacent to her highness's Castle of Dunbar — Hailes Castle, his chief seat, is about eight miles to the west — she made him hereditary keeper of the castle. She was with him here after her abduction, and, finally disguised as a page, she fled to Dunbar in June, that fatal month of Carberry Hill, and the beginning of her life-long captivity. Less than a century goes by and Dunbar again appears decisively, and perhaps finally, in history. On the 3rd September 1650 Cromwell fought and won a great victory, derisively called Dunbar Drive. Carlyle has told the story, graphic, picturesque, as he knew how. Its outlines are present to every educated man. You recall that Cromwell came from Edinburgh along the sea-coast ; that wary old David Leslie was on the hills above him, and the other could not draw him down to fight. Then the English moved along, and Leslie moved with them until at Dunbar the invader found himself in a peculiarly tight place. He was hemmed in by the sea and the Scots ; he could only move south- ward through a pass, and that pass Leslie held. If you 303 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS will walk along eastward from the High Street on the main road you will see exactly how things were. Cromwell's camp is stretching eastward from the railway station ; it is comj^letely overshadowed and commanded by Doune Hill, which you observe swelling up just behind. To-day it is partly covered with wood. Obvi- ously any move of Cromwell's must have been difficult ; he could not stay where he was and starve. If he had by some miracle been able to fall back on Edinburgh, or force his way through to England, his prestige were ruined, and both kingdoms were after all mainly Royalist, or at any rate non-Cromwellian, so that the difficulties were as much political as military. To attack Leslie secure on the hill were madness, and escape by sea probably as bad as defeat. And then Leslie descended from the hill, and all his advantage was gone. Well might Cromwell exclaim, "The Lord hath delivered them into our hand." A complete victory followed ; "the crowning mercy" of Worcester was not more thorough. The common story is that the Presbyterian ministers with the army got tired of Leslie's inaction and insisted on descending to snatch, what they believed to be, a predestined triumph. There was enough truth in this to make it pass muster, but it is worth pointing out that the Scots lost this battle, as they lost more than half of their conflicts, by rash and almost fatuous tactics. Your old-time Scot altogether belied the traditional character of his nation ; he was rash and self-confident beyond belief. Nothing but the result convinced him of his error. He assumed the battle won before it was 304 DUNBAR AND THE BERWICK ROAD started, and when all of a sudden he discovered the mistake the reaction was overwhelming ; he assumed all lost in as great a hurry, and fled headlong. On this very spot, on 28th April 1296, there was another Battle of Dunbar. The Scots were posted as afterwards. They descended in like manner, and were routed by Warenne just as they were by Cromwell. You may be sure that Dunbar Drive was not altogether the preacher's fault. In one respect this English victory was different from all others. Nothing more revealed the genius of Cromwell than the fact that he held what he won. Nay, he ruled so wisely that even the Scots were half reconciled to his sway. The equitable decisions of his judges in special were long afterwards spoken of with admiration and respect. But we are getting far away from our windy town on the northern sea, so here let us cease turning over the annals of Dunbar. 30 305 CHAPTER XXVIII TANTALLON AND THE BASS East Lothian Cottages — A Woodland Scene — Whitekirk — Legend of St Baldred — Our Lady of Whitekirk — A Gouty Pope— Tantallon— The Ducat— The Douglas Family— Their Stronghold — Gawin Douglas and Scott— A Ghost Story — The Bass— Its Various Aspects — The Martyrs of the Bass — Legends of Peden the Prophet — Old-Time Beer and Tobacco — Jacobites on the Bass- Solan Geese — Myths about Them — A Caledonian Tit-Bit. A PLEASANT tour from Haddington is by East Linton and Whitekirk, then round by the coast, Tantallon and the Bass, to North Berwick. After East Linton you keep on the left bank of the Tyne. At Tyninghame you note the charming cottages almost buried in flowers. East Lothian is far before most of Scotland in the neatness of its peasant homes. Else- where you come on choice bits that prove the Cottagers of Glenburnie no false picture, but not in this pleasant countryside. After Tyninghame the highway runs through a fine stretch of woodland. Of old this was bare moor, but the sixth Earl of Haddington, at the beginning of last century, set to work to plant on a great scale. As one master schemed and directed everything was done with method. Great avenues of trees led to a glade, and thick holly hedges rose in double walks or avenues, now alone and again interspersed with other trees. The late Queen was here in 1878 306 TANTALLON AND THE BASS and confessed it reminded her of Windsor and Windsor Forest. Her Majesty was happy in her visit. Three years afterwards, on the 14th October 1881, a storm of almost inexplicable violence burst on the forest, destroying some 30,000 trees and marring the symmetry of the whole. It is still pleasant, but if the best of it be seen from the highway, it is not to be compared with many an English sylvan scene. You are no sooner out of the wood than you climb a little hill into Whitekirk, the church whereof, with its square tower and antique porch, has come down from distant days less injured than is usual in the north. It has a notable record. Its first legend is that of St Baldred of the Bass. In the eighth century he flourished — one might irreverently say vegetated — on the Bass, where he stuck close as limpet to rock — was hermit there, in fact, for ever so long. Finally he died in the odour of sanctity, whereupon the three parishes we have just traversed — Prestonkirk, Tyninghame and Whitekirk •^contended for his remains. Things looked serious, for relics were then held valuable assets, but the spiritual guides urging their flock to take rather to their devotions than their fists, surprising results ensued. Three St Baldreds were found next morning instead of one, so like that there was literally not a hair to choose between them. The parishes had one a-piece. The church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and Our Lady of Whitekirk was a person of great repute in mediaeval Scotland. When Edward III. invaded in 1356 some sailors from the fleet wandered up here, 307 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and one of them impiously plucked a ring from Our Lady's finger. Down crashed a crucifix on his skull and stretched him lifeless on the floor. The tars stripped the church, nevertheless, but the ship that bore away the spoils was presently lost on the sands of Tyne- mouth. Some eighty years afterwards iEneas Silvius made his famous visit to Scotland. In a pilgrimage to Whitekirk in the depth of winter, with more piety than prudence, he trod barefoot ten miles of frozen ground. Long afterwards, when as Pope Pius II. he ruled the Church, many a gouty twinge in his poor feet hindered him from forgetting that far-off shrine by the Northern Sea. This Pope was a Piccolomini. The family which gave two Popes to the Church had, and still has, its seat in Siena. Our pilgrim enriched the cathedral of his native town in one way and another. You see in the library a fresco by Pintoricchio, representing James I., the King of Scots, receiving the future Pope on his aforesaid visit, and the background is a landscape. If it be East Lothian it is highly idealized, for the vine and the myrtle are not plants indigenous to that soil. There is an imposing-looking barn just behind the church — some sort of monkish grange, no doubt. There it is ridiculously averred Queen Mary spent two nights. Queen Mary was a good deal about those parts. She probably hunted or hawked over every mile of them, but why she should have put up at a bam, when she had a choice of Hailes and Dunbar within easy reach, it were hard to say. .In the churchyard there is this odd epitaph on a youth of nineteen who died 308 TANTALLON AND THE BASS in 1805 : "We can say this without fear or dread that he was one that feared God and an ornament to society." In epitaphs most of all a little learning is a dangerous thing. The sign-post here is misleading. It indicates a way to North Berwick which is hilly and comparatively uninteresting, though the shorter as far as space goes. Better to go right opposite for that will take you pleasantly round the coast, which you join just where the old castle of Tantallon stands on its cliff facing the Bass Rock. Tantallon to-day is a show place. They charge for admission and it is carefully kept up. I have no doubt the money is used for needful repair and watching, but Tantallon, like a hundred other places, was more enjoy- able when you went about it as you liked and there were few visitors and no hindrances. But then North Berwick and the places about it had not "arrived" in so tremendous a fashion. Tantallon is the limit of the ordinary tourist stream. There is a continual coming and going of traps of all sorts, not only between it and North Berwick but right on to Edinburgh. Tantallon has all the interest a ruin can have. Its situation is delightful, its history ex- citing. Genius has touched it with magic wand. It stands on a great cliff over the Firth, there opening into the North Sea, and right opposite is the great Rock, a couple of miles out, you learn, though it appears quite close. The outer walls of Tantallon are so entire that you would hardly call it a ruin. " Three sides of wall like rock and one side of rock like wall " is Hugh Miller's admirable description. It is a mere shell, but even were it other- 309 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS wise ruins look best from the outside. There is a dovecot near at hand. The " ducat " is a marked feature of the Lothian landscape. They do not build them now. I think all I ever saw look considerably over a century old. Perhaps wood pigeons are so plentiful that tame do not repay the trouble. Tantallon is bound up with the fate of one family though it be no longer theirs. In history and romance it must always be the property of the Douglas. With good eyes and good will you can still trace the bloody heart above the gateway. You remember how the good Sir James set off to carry the heart of the Bruce" to the Holy Sepulchre, how he died on "a blood-red field of Spain," and how his master's heart and his own body were brought back to Scotland for burial. Hence the sign in the shield. This poor shell was once deemed of fabulous strength. " Ding doun Tantallon, — Mak' a brig to the Bass," was old Scots for impossible. Its origin is unknown, but probably the great siege it sustained in autumn of 1528, against James V., aided by a park of the most powerful artillery of the day, including "Thrawn- mouth'd Meg and her Marrow," gave it reputation. Here grim old " Bell the Cat " had his lair, so that it was "deemed invulnerable in war." Two names in literature are connected with this old fortress. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, " who in a barren age gave rude Scotland Virgil's page," was born here in 1474. He prefixes his translation of each book with a wonderful 310 o H Z TANTALLON AND THE BASS prologue, quite Chaucerian, marked by delightful appre- ciation of natural scenery. He drew those pictures with the Lothian fields before his eyes or his mind. One graphic line of his, "Gousty schaddois of eild and grisly deed," would, as Hugh Miller says, have marked him poet though he had never written another word. And not less is Tantallon bound up with the name of Scott. You know from Marmioti how Lady Clare paraded the garden and the battlements. That famous poem is in the mind, or the mouth, or the pocket at least of all who pass by, and there is no need for quotation. The modern author does not always magnify his office. Scott thought literature scarce part of the real business of life. The ingenious R. L. S. has expressed the same opinion. Both have placed the writer far below the warrior and the builder. It would have been interesting to know what old-time Gawin thought about it. Old " Bell the Cat " at least had no doubts : "Thanks to St Bothan, son of mine Save Gawin ne'er could pen a line ! " Is Tantallon haunted ? A place with such memories ought to be, but the only story is one a century old and altogether comic. A rascally shipwrecked sailor, a Scots David Pew, in fact, took up his abode with some comrades and robbed right and left, but always during the night time. Noises heard at dark in the old ruins were naturally set down to the devil. Only when the 311 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS old salt's scarred and grim visage, surmounted by a Kil- marnock night-cap, was seen, the very embodiment of the actual, was the truth divined. The castle was stormed for the last time and the band routed and dispersed. And now, brig or no brig, we must get us over to the Bass. It stands 420 feet above the water, one huge mass of homogeneous trap, as Hugh Miller tells us. You are taken over from Canty Bay, a small hollow in the cliiif which is, and always has been, the port for the Bass. You will choose a reasonably calm day for your pleasure excursion. There is but one landing-place. The Bass is all precipice except one side, and this slopes down from the top. Near the bottom it narrows. A fortification is built across, and below this is the small platform on which you land. You peer into the prisons of the martyrs and climb up to the little ruined chapel which goes by the name of St Baldred's cell, and so on to the top. You note the heavy red-coloured flowers, the tree-mallow, and there are the sheep and the thousands and thousands of sea-birds with their hoarse call. One little change recent time has brought. A lighthouse has been built, and after many years the Bass has again a resident population. Some effects of wind and weather on Tantallon and the Bass are very striking, as at sunset, when the shadow of the great rock stretches for leagues over the sea ; or, again in still moonlight, when Tantallon seems a fairy castle ; or yet again in a great storm, when the ocean rollers dash spray and foam far up those rocky sides and make the mass shake and echo till it reels on its base. 312 TANTALLON AND THE BASS Here is R. L. S. with an admirable impression. " It was an unco place by night, unco by day ; and there were unco sounds ; of the calling of the solans, and the plash of the sea, and the rock echoes that hung continu- ally in our ears. It was chiefly so in moderate weather. When the waves were anyway great they roared about the rock like thunder and the drums of armies, dreadful, but merry to hear, and it was in the calm days when a man could daunt himself with listening ; so many still, hollow noises haunted and reverberated in the porches of the rock." There is a bore or cavern right through the Bass, which at low tide it is possible to traverse. The opening is half blocked up by a rock. It is loo feet in height to start with, but it narrows down presently, and in the middle is a dark pool. As it twists you do not see right through. It is dark, damp and dismal. It goes right under the ruin of the old chapel, and through and back again is somewhat under a quarter of a mile. The Bass, like Tantallon, has a romantic history. First comes St Baldred, to whom the little chapel may be said to belong, though it is centuries after his time. The story we have told shows his reputa- tion for sanctity. He wrought miracles in his life as well as at his death. Thus a rock which inconveiniently stood between the Bass and the shore floated at his command to an out-of-the-way cliff and was henceforth known as St Baldred's Cockle Boat, and there is St Baldred's Well, and St Baldred's Cradle, and St Baldred's Statue and what not. Later, the place was 313 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS held by the ancient family of Lauder of the Bass. One of them fought in the Scots Wars of Independence, and they had touch with the Rock for about five centuries. Their arms were a solan goose with the legend, Sub umbra alarum, tuarum, which strikes you as exceeding irreverent, but meant no more perhaps than that they derived considerable profit from the birds. The island was a prison and fortress. A sure holdfast ! Even if you broke your cell, how to get away from the rock ? The first prisoner mentioned is Walter Stuart, son of the Duke of Albany, regent during the captivity of James I. He and his father and one of his brothers were beheaded, and their heads shown to their mother, then a prisoner at Tantallon. The old lady controlled her feeling. " They died worthily," she said, " if what was laid to their charge was true." But the prisoners of the Bass were those confined on it fifteen years or so before the Revolution for their adherence to the national faith— the covenanting divines, in other words. "Peden the Prophet " was sent here in June 1763 and remained for four years, "envying with reverence the birds their freedom." Most grievous the prison to him of all men, for he had roamed far and wide over the wild hill districts of the south, and though he complained that he had got no rest in his life it is not like it was such rest he desired. How admirably the stern, gaunt figure is touched off in Catriona : " There was never the wale of him sinsyne, and it's a questioii wi' mony if there ever was his like afore. He was wild's a peat-hag, fearsome to look at, fearsome to hear, his face like the 314 TANTALLON AND THE BASS day of judgment. The voice of him was like a solan's and dinnle'd in folks' lugs, and the words of him like coals of fire." And again : " Peden wi' his lang chafts (jaws) and lunten (glowing) een, and maud (plaid) happed about his kist, and the hand of him held out wi' the black nails upon the finger-nebs — for he had nae care of the body." Another of the prisoners was Thomas Hogg of Kilturn, He had incurred the special enmity of Archbishop Sharp, who ordered that if there was a place in the Bass worse than another it should be his. The cavern " arched overhead, dank and dripping, with an opening towards the sea, which dashes within a few feet below " was his gruesome lot. This was the donjon keep of the old fortress, and a very prison of prisons. James Fraser of Brea is another name. In his Memoirs he has left a somewhat minute account of the place and his life. He notes the cherry trees, " of the fruit of which I several times tasted." He tells that the sheep are fat and good, and asserts that a garrison of twenty or twenty-four soldiers could hold it against millions of men. Another martyr, John Blackadder, was most worthy of that name, since he died in confinement. His tomb and its inscription are still to be seen in North Berwick kirkyard. You do not wonder men died, rather that they could there exist. The rooms were full of smoke, they had sometimes to thrust their heads out of the window to get a breath of air. They were often short of victuals, for in wild weather no boat dare touch the place. All was damp and unwholesome. It was horribly cold during most of the year. Two 3iS EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS lighter touches relieve the picture: " they were obliged to drink the twopenny ale of the governor's brewing, scarcely worth the halfpenny the pint," and there is, or was, a huge mass of debris made up of "the decapitated stalks and bowls of tobacco pipes of antique forms and massive proportions." Every smoker will understand what a consolation tobacco was to the small garrison chained to the rock. With the Revolution of 1688 the history of the Bass draws near a close. It held out some time under Sir Charles Maitland, the depute governor, but surrendered in 1690. Then it was used to confine Jacobite prisoners- four young officers, in fact, taken at Borrodale. These ingeniously managed to turn the tables on their gaolers, whom they packed speedily ashore. By what their enemies called piracy, and themselves legitimate warfare on passing vessels they managed to support themselves very well and annoy the Government very greatly. They capitulated in April 1694, on favourable terms, for by repetition of well-known tricks they persuaded the enemy they were great in numbers and well supplied. Then the old fortress was dis- mantled, and in 1706 it was granted to Sir Hugh Dalrymple, President of the Court of Session, and it is still held by the descendants of that astute lawyer. One cannot leave the Bass without saying some words about its constant inhabitant, the Solan Goose. At one time it was thought that only here and at Ailsa Craig were these birds to be found. This is long exploded, but the Bass is one of their few strongholds. 316 TANTALLON AND THE BASS Old Hector Boece has many wonderful things to say of them. They bring so much timber to the island for their nests that they satisfy the keeper for fuel. He ungrate- fully robs them of their prey, for they have a nice taste in the way of fish, and appropriates their young. For themselves, their fat is made into "an oile verie profitable for the gout and manie other diseases in the haunches and groins of mankind." Hector avers that common people are much mistaken in believing that these geese grow upon trees, " hanging by their nebs, as apples and other fruits do by their stalks," the fact being that when trees fall into the sea they become gradually worm-eaten. Now if you look at the worms very closely you see they have hands and feet, and finally "plumes and wings." In the end they fly away — Solan Geese ! The witty author of Hudibras must have heard of these theories. " As barnacles turn solan geese In the islands of the Orcades." It is difficult to believe that Solan Goose was ever looked upon as a delicacy, but Ray, the botanist, was in these parts in August 1661, and he tells us that the young are esteemed a choice dish in Scotland and a very profitable source of income to the owner of the Bass. As he ate of them at Dunbar he ought to know. But there is still better authority, since an act of the Scots Privy Council in 1583, ratified by an Act of the Scots Parliament of 1592, declared them to be "apt for nutriment of the subjects of this realm." Also the 317 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS minister of North Berwick, who is officially vicar of the Bass, is entitled to twelve Solan Geese per annum, which gives him a month to digest each bird. It is averred a one-time innkeeper of Canty Bay used to' supply them when a beefsteak was ordered, and that the guests only found out when told. That innkeeper had a very pretty wit, but this cuisine pour tire was a dangerous experiment. You easily believe the story, for as you swallow your Solan Goose you hesitate as to whether you are eating fish, flesh or fowl, or a combina- tion of two, or all of them. I have never heard that the Solan Goose is served up at the various palatial hotels which abound on the near coast. The Bass has other marvels : " that herb very pleasant and delicious for salad " which is of no good anywhere else ; that stone which has the property of changing salt water into fresh ; that still delicious mutton, surely the \tQs\.gigot du presold which hath ever enjoyed the highest renown. Here was sure the happy hunting-ground of the old-time Caledonian gourmet, if such ever flourished among an all too serious race ! 3i8 CHAPTER XXIX NORTH BERWICK AND THE SHORE OP THE PIRTH On North Berwick Law— The Prospect— North Berwick Old and New — Antiquities— The Nunnery— The Witches— Gelli a Duncan — A Royal Witch-Finder— Golf and the Golfer— Dress and Habits — The Caddies — Islands in the Firth — Dirleton — Feuing and Feu-Duties — Two prosperous Lawyers — Gullane — Old Days on the Links — Bogle Hill — Longniddry and its Memories— Fenton Tower and the Red House — The Seton Country and the Setons— The Thistle and the Rose. NATURE has given you an admirable coign of vantage from which to view North Berwick, for just behind it is the Law, "with cone of green," in Delta's hackneyed phrase. It is only 612 feet up, but then it rises straight from the sea. The strip of level ground on which the old town stands is scanty indeed. There it is as in Edinburgh and Heidelberg and Salzburg. If you saw them as left by Nature you would think each- site exquisitely inappropriate, but stick down your houses and how admirable the effect ! A road rises steeply from the High Street to the still steeper Law, and the climb though brief is fatiguing. It is just sufficiently off the perpendicular to remove the idea of danger. At the top are some ruins. Be not deceived by their weather-beaten aspect, they only date from the great French wars. Here dwelt the men who kept watch and ward night and day, so that if Napoleon 319 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS had in fact landed at Aberlady Bay — he had marked it as a possible spot — the Beacon Fire had on the instant flared through the Lothians and thence over all Britain. Here too lie the jaws of a whale, making a gate- way where there is no road, and not letting you in or out of anywhere ! You ask the why and the wherefore of those superfluous bones. In earlier days whales were not rare on that coast. They still strand thereon at irregular intervals, and it was the fashion to use their jaws for gate-posts. You look right down on North Berwick. There is the old kernel of the town. In it the High Street running east and west, and at right angles on the east Quality Street, with plane trees which give a pleasant shade in the few torrid days of the northern summer, and the old harbour. Then all about along the main road east and west, down by the shore, and up the hillside, are piles of villas, all built after the fashion of suburban Edinburgh, so that the place is fitly named Edinburgh-super-Mare. Every now and again is a huge hotel. Not often can you so clearly distinguish the old from the new and grasp so clearly how the old was featured. Till 1848 North Berwick had no railway. A stage-coach ran to Edinburgh once a day. The parish-minister in the well-known New Statis- tical Account lauds it as conducted with great propriety. He goes on to lament the thirteen public-houses, one to every fifty of the population. The average consumption ofwhisky he computes at five gallons per head. Possibly tippling was the only recreation of the populace, hard put to it to fleet the time through the unrelieved dreari- 320 THE SHORE OF THE FIRTH ness of the winter months. To-day it is an exclusive watering-place. Let the cheap tripper take note ; it is no place for him. There are no bands, no promenade jetty, no trains on Sundays, nay, the very butcher and the baker, if they do not " repulse him from their door," will receive him without enthusiasm and without popular prices. The extant antiquities of North Berwick are scanty. They afe, in fact, little more than two heaps of stone, one on a field by the station, the other by the harbour. The first was a Cistercian nunnery. The inmates had at any rate a fair view of the world they had renounced, and they took an annual outing, or pious picnic, to the near island of Fidra, for devotional purposes, doubtless, but looked forward to as the one excitement in their humdrum year. The stones by the harbour represent the former church, where were enacted the unholy pranks of the North Berwick witches, temp. 1 590. Duly captured and duly tortured they made the usual astounding confes- . sions. " On All Hallow even, to the number of two hundred, they went to sea, each one on a riddle or cive, and went into the same, very substantially, with flagons of wine, making merrie and drinking by the way in the same riddles or cives." They disembarked opposite "the kirk of North Berwick in Lowthian." Their leader was a servant lass, one Gellie Duncan, who under the pilliewinks (screw for fingers) developed strange narrative powers. She told how she led the band, playing on a jews' harp with infernal skill, and chanting a mad rigmarole. The ceremonies in the desecrated kirk were 21 321 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS grotesque beyond description. AU Scotland shuddefei in delicious horror. None more than sapient James VI,, for who so expert a witch-finder? He applied himself diligently to the matter, and his profound observations thereon were much admired in Court circles. As for Gellie Duncan and her companions, they were hustled out of the world with all possible speed, But where were the rest of the two hundred ? Every old woman in the Lothians was half dead with fright lest she also should be worrit at the stake and burnt like other innocents. Yes. Satan was at work in the land but all on the side of the accusers. Those old Scots were perfect fiends upon occasion. The one word that is the key of North Berwick's present-day prosperity is golf. The links here are as famous as those at St Andrews. The holes and bunkers therein are classic, and each has its individual name, known throughout the universal world of sport. Every bther man or woman you meet carries a club. Listen to scraps of talk at hotel or restaurant, or on the beach, and you catch endless chatter about astound- ing strokes made or marred, and the merits of this or that bit of green, and this or that man's play, and so forth. Golf is not a poor man's game ; it is the sport, of statesmen and was that of Kings. The old Stuarts dearly loved a turn on the green. It is the Royal game, the votary whereof is clad in purple or some such raiment that shines quite as gorgeous. Also it lets fall crumbs for the needy. All the poor boys, or what would elsewhere be poor boys, are caddies. It is the game 322 THE SHORE OF THE FIRTH first and last, everywhere and always, so that unless you are interested therein, what do you in North Berwick ? That is the question the player would like to ask, especially if you rashly take to strolling on the links. Here you are between the golfer and the deep sea. You may have a legal right but not (it is held) a moral one. The balls fly about as in a battle, and no genuine sportsman will divert his stroke because ^o«^ shins or head happen to be in the way. Stick to your perch on the Law, there only is safety, and the prospect is superb. The islands solicit your particular attention. First and foremost is the Bass, the most noted, yet but one of many. A fair way out in the North Sea is the May, but quite at hand are mighty rocks, quaint in shape, quaint in name : Craigleith, the Lamb, or " Lambie's isle," as Scott has it, Fidra and Eyebroughty, and some of these have antiquities and traditions of note and interest. You descend the hill, pick your way westward through the maze of villas, and are on the highroad once more. Presently you come plump into Dirle- ton, built round a large green. Quite a model village, an English place lifted bodily into Scotland, as it were. It has been spoken of in this fashion. It was offered as a bribe to Logan Si Restalrig by the Gowrie con- spirators, anxious for his support. The classic phrase about the place is his laud of it as the pleasantest dwell- ing in Scotland. There are the crumbling ruins of a castle which has its own record of sieges by the " Auld Enemy," and again in the Cromwell ian period, and 323 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS round about the ruin is an exquisitely fair garden. Yet I should not put it before Gifford or Tyninghame, to name but these. It is set on a frequented highway and thus draws attention. A famous Scots lawyer of the Restoration, Sir John Nisbet to wit, was possibly of Logan's opinions. He got it at any rate. His descend- ants still hold it, and have embellished their property, now an old possession. As yet it is evident they are not " feuing " their estate. It is worth noting that when proprietors of land in Scotland deliver it to the builder, speculative or otherwise, they do not follow English methods. The land is chopped up into small parcels in both cases, and an annual payment is exacted, but in England the landowner is still the landlord, and when the lease of ninety-nine years or what not runs out he, or rather his representatives, have house and land entirely as their own. In Scotland the landowner becomes the superior and the tenant his vassal, but the yearly payment is perpetual, and as long as the actual holder pays he cannot be disturbed. The words superior and the like are curious terms of the old Scots system of conveyancing ; it was a relic on paper of the Scots feudal system, and was practically intact within the memory of living lawyers. It was cumbersome, but historically very interesting. The legislation of the last fifty years has made sad havoc of its ponderosities, I maybe excused this disquisition since we are passing over ground the practice of the law gave to two lawyers, Dalrymple of North Berwick and Nisbet of Dirletof The latter took his title as Lord of Session from the 324 THE SHORE OF THE FIRTH place. You remember his town house yet standing in the Canongate. His Magnum opus, Dirletoris Doubts ("better than other men's certainties," said Lord Mansfield) lies dusty and neglected on the upper shelf of many an old law library. According to a saying of Lord Bacon's, the River of Time lets weighty matters sink and brings down trifles. Near seventy years ago this couplet was current in Dirleton parish : "For a' that fell at Flodden Field Rowny Hood o' the Hul cam hame." Who Rowny was no tradition tells, nor whether this was said of him in praise or blame. The parish minister preserves it in the New Statistical Account published in 1845. When a thing of this sort gets into print — and what now does not get into print ? — it has a new and changed life. In tradition there comes a time when the oldest inhabitant fails to repeat and the legend vanishes. Once printed it is known at least to the reader, though the common folk of the countryside never heard the words for which they are the authority. You presently come on the old toll-house. Such places are scattered over the country, and like thp " ducat " we saw at Tantallon are emblems of an extinct state of things, for of course all the ways are free. The road to the left leads up to the county town. I should have noted that the road up to North Berwick Law also takes you in the same direction ; and again at Aberlady, at which we shall presently arrive, there is another. The ground rises from the sea up to the range 325 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS of the Garleton hills and then sinks into the valley of the Tyne, wherein Haddington itself is situate. All those roads lead through the quiet, rural part of the county. The best is the way from North Berwick, It is the least encumbered with traffic; it passes through delicious woods and fields with a continual rise and fall, and it is dignified, at a little place called Kingston, by the'picturesque ruin of Fenton Tower, as to which history and tradition are silent, and not even romance has whispered a legend ! At Gullane we are still in Dirleton. Gullane gave its name to the parish till near three hundred years ago, when the kirk was transferred to Dirleton and the name followed. The last incumbent is said to have been expelled by James VI. because he was an inveterate smoker. We all know the British Solomon hated tobacco. We can all hope that the pipe remained a sufficient consolation to the banished parson. The church was restored the other day. If there is a saint who takes golf in hand he ought to be patron here. Golf has made Gullane even more than it has made North Berwick. Many years ago I played my last game on beautiful Luffness Links. Then there was a famous training-stable for race-horses, and the place was most known from that. It was scarce a village at all, merely a few houses scattered on the hillside. There was one little inn called the Golf Tavern. The host was some- thing, of an antiquarian and, what is called in the north, " a character," and amused us by his talk. The Gullane of those days had charms that have not survived. The 326 THE SHORE OF THE FIRTH place has grown like an American city, so that villas, hotels, shops stretch over the fields in boundless profu- sion. The highway leads right through the links. They are perfection. They are of wide extent, by the sea and yet not too close, provided by Nature with bunkers and so forth in reasonable plenty, right in front of the houses and in view of the fields. Then comes Luffness proper, the village of Aberlady, and Gosford. At Ferney Point, the western limit of Gosford Bay, there is again a fine extent of turf, springy under foot and fragrant with aromatic herbs. Beyond is quaintly named Bogle Hill, with its ruined cottages, the abode, as I remember, not of bogles but cows ! Some tradition, you fancy, ought to linger round a place called Bogle Hill, but the very ghosts are extinct. Legends of the spirit world do not flourish in modern Lothian. The folk are edu- cated, intelligent and commonplace. They regard tales of bogles and such like with cynical disfavour, A good mile inland a few houses on the roadside make up the uninteresting village of Longniddry, yet it has memories of Wishart and Knox. Some stones in a field near are called Knox's pulpit. Here it is averred the reformer preached his first sermon. A little way to the east is a ruined tower like unto Fenton Tower, known locally as the Red House, once the residence of some old-time laird. It is a conspicu- ous object from the railway, and touched with a sunlit effect it glows a burning crimson and is singularly im- pressive. Westward you come into the Seton country. There is Seton Mains, and Seton Mill, and Port Seton, 327 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS and Seton Castle, and Seton Chapel, but the famous Earls of Winton that flourished there for centuries are all gone, and Seton Castle is a puny heir to the glories of splendid Seton Palace. Seton chapel has been restored by the Earl of Wemyss as a burial-place for his own family, and the glittering marble of its modern tombs glares into nothingness those faded tablets on the wall, with their quaint Latin phrases setting forth the virtiies and achieve- ments of forgotten members of the old family. One of the Queen's Maries was a Seton, and the family were her devoted adherents and friends, as they were in after days of her son. It was proper, nay inevitable, they should take the Jacobite side in the rising of 1715, but for that they were driven forth, and they never returned. In 1745 Prince Charles, when on a visit at Grange, was presented with a rose by a lady of this ancient house. He gave in return the thistle from his cap, with a very pretty speech about the old kindness of the Stuarts and the Setons. The fated thistle is still preserved. Port Seton to-day is but a suburb of Cockenzie, or even of Edinburgh. The road rings under the tramway, coal-pits and factories smoke and screech on either side. The Setons come not again. You leave these shores of old romance behind and enter on the most commonplace and ugly league in all Lothian ! But it takes you towards Edinburgh ! 328 INDEX Abbey, hamle of, 287, 288 Advocate's Close, 69, 76 Albany, Dukes of, 26-29 Albert, Prince, 63 Alexander II,, 5 ,, III., 25, 301 Allan, David, 221 Antiquarian Museum, 223 Argyll, Earl of, 18, 34 ,, and Greenwich, Duke of, J7. 18 ,, Marquis of, 18, 34, 169 Arthur, King, 5 Arthur's Seat, 2, 5, 133-142, 222 B Barclay Church, the, 163 Bass, prisoners of the, 314-316 „ Rock, the, 309, 312-318 Baxter, Charles, 131, 199, 200 Bedesmen, the, 93 Blackfriars Monastery, 5, 219, 220 Black Rood of Scotland, 25, 49, 50 Blackwood's Magazine, 12, 153, 215-217 Blair, Dr Hugh, 104, 176 „ Rev. Robert, 275 Blue Blanket, the, 6, 161, 231 Boswell, James, 117, 211, 213, 242 Bothwell, 10, 56, 60, I2S Braid Hills, 2 Braxfield, Lord, 94, 189, 225 Bridges, 113 Brodie's Close, 73 Brodie, Deacon, 186-191, 222 Brown, Dr John, 1 13, 218 ,, Rev. John, 200, 272, 273 Buccleuch, Duke of, 220 Buchanan, George, 4, 57, 78, 208, 209 Burke and Hare, 108-110 Burns, Robert, 73, 76, 86, 90, 153, 174, 204, 20s, 207, 215, 223, 22s, 242, 276, 278, 279 Calton Jail, 144, 145 Calton Hillj 2, 142-146 Candlemaker Row, 113 Canongate, the, 50, 80-87 ,, Church, 165 „ Churchyard, 173-175, 212 „ Tolbooth, the, 69, 8i Carlyle of Inveresk, 104, 176, 211 „ Jane Welsh, 272-274 „ Thomas, 146 Carrubber's Close, 211 Castle, the, 15-47, 165, 237, 238 „ Wynd, the, 99-101 Cauvin's Hospital, 139 Charles I., 32, 263 „ II., 34, 220 „ Stuart, Prince, 1 1, 223, 229- 240, 328 Chambers, Robert, 185 ,, William, 115, 160, Z'Zl Chapel of St Margaret, 20 Chessel's Court, 188 City Guard, 102, 179, 194 Clarinda, 204, 205 Closes;' the, 67, 76 Cockburn, Lord, 214, 248 College Wynd, 116, 117, 148, 194 Cope, Sir John, 234-6 Corporation Museum, 77, 222 Corstorphine, 230 Covenant, the, 11 „ Close, 68, 78 Cowgate, 2, 111-121 Cramond Bridge, 249 Creech, William, 89-90 329 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS Croft-an-Righ, 46 Cross, the, 7, 70, 88 Cumberland, Duke of, 1 1 D Darien House, the, 114 ,, Scheme, the, 11 Darnley, 10, 56, 59, 60, 124, 126 David I., s, 48-50 De Quincey, Thos., 177, 247 Dirleton, 323 Disruption, 12 Donaldson's Hospital, 228 Douglas, Gawin, 120, 161, 2085 277, 278 Douglas tragedy, 27, 28 Drummond of Hawthomden, 209, 24s, 246 Drumsheugb Gardens, 152 Duddingston, 139, 234 Duke's Walk, the, 137 Dunbar, 230, 234, 298-305 „ Castle, 300-303 „ Drive, 303-305 ,, William, 207, 208 Dundee, Viscount, 34, 36, 177, 248 Edinburgh, 1-14, 103-4, 191, 217, 226, 328 Edinburgh Review, 12, 214-217 Edward I., 6 Edwin of Northumbria, 3 Eldin, Lord, 189, 225 Esk, the, 241, 242 Executions, 105-110, 183, 184 Fairmilehead, 241 Fergusson, Robert, 73, 114, 115, 174, 185, 192-194, 200, 210 Ferrier, James Walter, 203, 204 Fettes College, 148, 228 Fires, 117, 118 Firth of Forth, I / Fishmarket Close, 187 Flodden Wall, 7, 8, 12, 100, 112, 147 Forth Bridge, 250, 253-254 Francis, Earl of Bothwell, 61, 62 Free Kirk College, 9, 71, 72 G Gallery of Kings, the, 38, 39, 63, 220, 236 Galloway, Countess of, ^I6 Garleton Hills, 266, 274, 326 Geddes, Jenny, 161, 162, 223 George IV., 63, 150 ,, Square, 114 „ Street, 2, 150, 227 Gladsmuir, 294, 295 Glamis, Lady, 29, 30 Golfers' Land, 82 Gordon, Duke of, 34, 35, 177 ,, Mrs Glen, 263, 264 Graham's Dyke, 254 Grant, James, 185 Granton, 155, 250 Grassmarket, 99-110, 222 Greyfriars, the, loi, I70-I73. I95' 219-220 Gullane, 326, 327 Guthrie, Dr, 117 „ James, the covenanter, 107 H Haddington, 5, 200, 234, 266- 276, 293, 326 ,, Parish Church of, 268, 269 Hailes Castle, 290, 291, 297 „ Lord, 189, 211 Hamilton, Sir William, 128 Hawes Inn, the, 251-253 Hawthomden, 244-247 Henderson, T. F., "5 Henley, W. E., 131, 191. 218 Heriot, George, 132 Heriot's Hospital, 132, 224, 228 High Riggs, the, 100, loi 330 INDEX High School, 131, 143, 193, 195, 228 ,, Street, 64, 65, 204, 210 Holyrood, I, 2, 5, 15, 37-63, 219, ' 232, 233 „ Chapel, 43-46, 62, 63 Home, John, 176, 211, 275, 376 Honours of Scotland, 22, 23, 62, 195 Hopes, the, 119 Hume, David, 12, 153, 174, 176, 2CX}, 211, 224 Hunter's Bog, 137 Huntly House, 69 Inns, 113 Industrial Museum, 222 James I., 6, 10, 49, 207 II., 6, 27, 263 HI. , 6, 29, 220 IV., 29, S3, 207 v., 9, 29,219 VI., 10, 49, 60, 120, 126, 138, 221, 263, 265 „ VII., 263 James's Court, 73 Jameson, George, 221 Jeffirey, Lord, 213, 214, 248 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 117, 242 K King's Birthday, the, 98 King's Park, 232 Kirkaldy of Grange, 10, 31, 32 Kirk o' Field, S, 10, 123, 219, 220 Knights of the Thistle, the, 63 Knox, John, 31, 32, 57, 161, 162, 170, f08, 209, 220, 222, 224, 271, 272, 273 Knox's, John, House, 78 Krames, the, 90 Lady Stair's Close, 73-5 Lammermuirs, the, 266, 294 Lammer Law, 277-84 Lang, Andrew, 60, 115 Linlithgow, 255-65 ,, Loch, 262 „ Palace, 257, 258,261-63 Lee, Dr Robert, 164 Leith, 156 „ Wynd, 66, 103 Lethington, 10, 31, 278 Libberton's Wynd, 187, 214 Lockhart, John Gibson, 197, 217 Luckenbooths, 89, 210 Lyndsay, Sir David, 145, 208, 262, 265, 275 M Maccunn, Mrs, 57, 300 Mackenzie, Sir George, 11, 94, 95, 172, 286, 287 „ Henry, 214 Macmorran, Bailie, 73 Magdalen Chapel, 168, 169, 220 Me^dalene of France, 55 Maiden Castle, the, 4 Martyrs' Memorial, 172 Mary of Guise, 9, 55, 264 ,, Stuart, 9, 10, 30, 31,55.56. 79, 126, 145, 170. 223. 263, 278. 285, 300, 301, 303 Meteors, 27, 33 Miller.J. N.,2l8 Mint Close, 80 Mons Meg, 18-20, 195 Montrose, Marquis of, 161 Moray House, 69, 85 „ the Regent, 31, 160, 241, 259, 261 Morocco Land, 81, 82 Muschat's Cairn, 135 National Mondmbnt, 143, 144. 151 331 EDINBURGH AND THE LOTHIANS National Portrait Gallery, 224 Netherbow, 6, 66, 80, 103, 105, 232 Newhaven, 155, 156 New Town, the, 13, 14, 147-SS. 221 Nisbet, Sir John, of Dirleton, 182, 324. 325 Nor' Loch, 2, 6, 66, 147, 149 Norrey, James, 221 North Berwick, 230, 309, 319-23 „ Law, 319, 320, 32s North British Review, 217 Nungate of Haddington, 267, 268 O Old Assembly Close, 77 Greyfriars, I Kirk style, 90 Scots judges, 96 Town, the, 13, 14 Wall, the, 6, 112 Parliament Close or Square, 88, 220, 232 ,, Hall, 21 ,, House, I, 94, 19s Peden, Alexander, 283, 284, 294, 29s. 314. 31S Pentlands, the, 2 Pope Pius II., 308 Porteous Mob, 11, 107-108, 136, 19s Portobello, iS7 Preston of Gorton, 159 Princes Street, 2, 12, 148, 149, 151, 225 Purses, the, 93 QUBENSBBRRY HOUSE, 69, 84 Queensferry, 197, 248-254 Queen Elizabeth, 31 Queen Mary's Bath, 46 ,, Mary Controversy, the, 60 Queen's Maries 57, 328 R Radical Road, 137 Raebum, Sir Henry, 224, 2(25 Ramsay, Allan, 89, 209, 236, 255 Riddle's Court, 73 Rizzio, 10, 56, 58, S9. 60, 126 Robertson, Principal, 12, 117, 163, 176, 211 Roslin, 241, 242 ,, Castle, 242, 243 „ Chapel, 243, 244 ,, Glen, 244 Roxburgh Close, 69 Royal Exchange, 77 RuUion Green, 1 1 Salisbury Crags, 137 Sanctuary, 50-2 Scots Observer, 2 18 Scots student, the, 128-30 Scott Monument, 227 „ SirWalter,ii6, 117,153, 185, 194-96, 201, 202, 204, 210, 240, 247, 248, 251, 253, 265 Seton country, the, 327, 328 Smith, Adam, 12, 174, 211, 212 ,, Sidney, 215 Smollett, 86, 206 Solan geese, 316-18 Soutra Aisle, 280, 281 „ Hill, 281, 282 St Anthony, 142 St Baldred of the Bass, 307, 313 St Cuthbert's, 163 ,, Graveyard, 176, 177 St Giles'. I, 88, 158-63, 219, 220, 221, 231 St John's Street, 204 St Lawrence House, 295, 296 St Margaret, 24, 25, 250 St Margaret's Loch, 134, 142 Well, L34 St Michael's, Linlithgow, 256, 257, 261, 262 Statue of Charles II., 34 Stevenson, R. A. M., 227 332 INDEX Stevenson, R. L., 25, 131, 139, 140, 146,153.173.179.186, 191, 196-204,210,225, ^ 251, 253, 313 t>tewart, Provost, 231, 239 Strichen's Close, 79 Tam o' the Cowgate, 119 Tanner's Close, 108 Tantallon, 309-312, 325 Taverns, 73, 76, 83, 198, 204, 210, 211 Theatre, the, 82, 83, 85 Thomson of Duddingston, 138 Tolbooth, the, 65, 90-93, 105, 181, 222, 225 Tradition, 84 Tramps, 296, 297 Traprain Law, 285, 291-293, 297 Trinity College, 8, 165-168 Tron, the, 165 „ Church, the, 78 Trunk Close, 69 Tudor, Margaret, 54 Tweeddale Court, 80 Tyninghame, 306, 307 Tyne River, 277, 278, 285-290, 293. 298, 326 U University, the, 122-130, 195, 227 V Victoria, Queen, 63 W Wallace, Dr Robert, 164 Warriston's Close, 76, 77, 193 Weir, Jean or Grizel, 180, 183, 184 „ Major, 103, 178-186, 190, 284 Wellhouse Tower, the, 6 Wells o' Wearie, 135 West Bow, 66, 102, 103, 178, 179, 222, 231 „ Port, 100, 105, 108, 231 Whinny Hill, 135 Whitehorse Close, 82 Whitekijk, 307, 308 William the Lion, 5, 6 Wilson, John, 217 Woodhouselee, 241, 259 World's End Close, 80, 287 Writers' Court, 77 333 EDINBURGH COLSTONS LIMITED PRINTERS