Its Origin-Songs concerning it-Records--Market Cross-St. John's and the Girth Crosses-Early History-The Town of Herbergare--Canongate Paved-The Governing Body-Raising the Devil-Purchase of the Earl of Roxburgh's " Superiority'-The Foreign Settlement -George Heriot the Elder-Huntly's House-Sir Walter Scott's Story of a Fire-The Morocco Land Houses of Oliphant of Newland, Lord David Hay, and Earl of Angus-Jack's Land-Shoemakers' Lands-Marquis of Huntly's House-Nisbet of Dirleton's Mansion --Golfer's Land- John and Nicol Paterson-The Porch and Gatehouse of the Abbey- Lucky Spence.

THE Canongate-of old the Court-end of Edinburgh takes its name from the Augustine monks of Holyrood, who were permitted to build it by the charter of David I. in 1128, and to rule it as a burgh of regality. "The canons," says Chalmers, " were empowered to settle here a village, and from them the street of this settlement was called the Canongate, from the Saxon gaet or street, according to the practice of the twelfth and thir-teenth centuries in Scotland and England.

The immunities which the canons and their villagers en-joyed from David's grant, soon raised up a town, which extended from the Abbey to the Nether Port of Edinburgh and the townsmen performed their usual devotions in the church of the Abbey till the Reformation," after which it continued to retain its distinct dignity as a burgh of regality. In its arms it bears the white hart's head, with the cross-crosslet of the miraculous legend between the horns, and the significant motto " SIC ITUR AD ASTRA."

As the main avenue from the palace to the city, so a later writer tells us, it has borne upon its pavement the burden of all that was beautiful and gallant, and all that has become historically inter-esting in Scotland for the last seven hundred years and though many of its houses have been modernised, it still preserves its aspect of great quaintness and vast antiquity.

It sprang up independent of the capital, adhering naturally to the monastery, whose vassals and de-pendents were its earliest builders, and retaining to the last legible marks of a different parentage from the city. Its magistrates claimed a feudal lordship over the property of the regality as the successors of its spiritual superiors ; hence many of the title-deeds therein ran thus :-"To be holden of the Magistrates of the Canongate, as come in place of the Monastery of the Holy Cross."

The Canongate seems to have been a favourite with the muse of the olden tune, and is repeatedly alluded to in familiar lyrics and in the more polished episodes of the courtly poets of the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries.
A Jacobite song has it -.-
As I cam doun the Canongate,
The Canongate, the Canongate,
As I cam doun the Canongate,
I heard a lassie sing,
Merry may the keel rowe.
That my true love is in' " &c.
The Satire on Court Ladies " tells us,
The lasses o' the Canongate,
Oh they are wondrous nice
They winna gie a single kiss
But for a double price."
And an old song concerning a now-forgotten belle
says :-.
A ' doun alang the Canongate
Were beaux o' ilk degree ;
And mony ane turned round to look
At bonny Mally Lee.
And we're a' gaun east and west,
We're a' gaun agee,
We're a' gaun east and west
,Courtin' Mally Lee

The earliest of the register-books preserved in the archives of this little burgh commences in 1561, about a hundred years before Cromwell's invasion ; but the volume, which comes down to 1588, had been long in private hands, and was only restored at a recent date, though much of it is printed in the " Maitland Miscellany" for 1840.

Unlike Edinburgh the Canongate had no walls. for defence-its gates and enclosures being for- civic purposes only. If it relied on the sanctity of its monastic superiors as a protection, it did so in vain, when, in 1380, Richard II. of England gave it to the flames, and the Earl of Hertford in 1544 ; and in the civil wars during the time of Charles I., the Journal of Antiquities tells us that " the Canon-gate suffered severely from the barbarity of the English so much so that scarcely a house was left standing."

In 1459, when the first wall of the city was built, its eastern extremity was the Nether Bow Port. Open fields, in all probability, lay outside the latter, and though the increasing suburb was. then building, the city claimed jurisdiction within it as far as the Cross of St. John, and the houses crept gradually westward up the slope, till they formed the present unbroken street from the Nether Bow to the palace porch but it seems, strange that even in the disastrous year 1513, when the Cowgate was enclosed by a wall, no attempt was made to secure the Canongate, though it had gates which were shut at night, and it had boundary walls, but not of a defensive character.

Of old, three crosses stood in the main street that of St. John, near the head of the present St. John Street, at which Charles I. knighted the Provost on his entering the city in 1633 ; the ancient Market Cross, which formerly stood oppo-site the present Tolbooth, and is represented in Gordon's Map as mounted on a stone gallery, like that of the City Cross, and the shaft of which, a very elegant design, still exists, attached to the southeast corner of the just-named edifice. lts chief use in later times was a pillory, and the iron staple yet remains to which culprits were attached by the iron collar named the jougs.
The third, or Girth Cross, stood at the foot of the Canongate, 100 feet westward from the Abbey-strand. "It consisted," says Kincaid, " of three steps as a base and a pillar upon the top, and was called the Girth Cross from its being the western limit of the Sanctuary; but in paving the street it was removed, and its place is now known by a circle of stones upon the west side of the well within the Water Gate."

In the earlier ages of its history the canons to whom the burgh belonged had liberty to buy and sell in open market. it has been supposed by several Writers that a village of some kind had ex-isted on the site prior to the erection of the Abbey, as the king says in more than one version of the foundation charter of the latter, " I likewise grant to the said canons the town of Herbergare, lying betwixt the said church, and my town (of Edin-burgh), and that the burgesses thereof have the liberty of buying and selling goods and merchandise in open market as freely, and - without molestation and reproach, as any -of my own burgesses." Ac-cording to Sir Walter Scott, in his " Provincial Antiquities," the Canongate was formerly de-nominated the Herbergérie (or Hospitium) of the monastery.

But in time it came to be ,called Canongate, from its pro-prietors. Be this as it may, many privileges were conferred upon it by Robert, Abbot of Holyrood, and these were confirmed and extended by David II., Robert III., James II., and James III., who "granted to the bailies, council, -and community of the burgh of the Canongate the several annuities payable at the Exchequer by the said burgb, the common muir lying ;between the lands of Broughton on the -west, those of Pilrig on the east, and the way leading from Edinburgh to Leith on the south, with all the rights and customs thereunto belonging, together with the liberties, commodities, privileges, and immunities appertaining to a burgh of regality."

The Canongate would appear to have been paved about the same time as the High Street, and in 1535 James V. granted to the Abbot of Holyrood a duty of one penny upon -every loaded cart, and of a halfpenny upon every empty one, to repair and maintain the causeway.
According to the record books of the Canongate, it was governed in 1561 by four old bailies, three deacons, two treasurers, and four councillors-, "chosen and elected;" and, as enacted in 1567, the council met every eighth day, on fuirsdaye .'The Tolbooth was then, as till a late period, the ,council-room, court-house, and place of punishment
.
By 1561 the monastic superiority over the community had been swept away by the Reformation ; and by the king's grant a commendator succeeded the last abbot, enjoying the privileges of the latter, while the temporal superiority of the Canongate was conferred on the future Earl of Roxburgh.

Among the older legends of the Canongate is one mentioned by Sir John Scott of Scotstarvit, who tells us that Sir Lewis Fel-lenden, a Lord of Session, Council, and Exchequer, about the year 1591, " dealt with a warlock, called Richard Graham, to raise the devil," which he did in the back-yard of his own house in the Canongate, "and he was thereby so terrified that he took sickness, and thereof died. And having left his lady, sister to the Lord Livingstone, a great codjunct-fee, the Earl of Orkney married her, and after some years, having moved her to sell her conjunct-fee-lands, and having disposed of all the monies of the same, sent her back to the Canongate, where she lived divers years very miserably, and there died in extreme poverty."
In 1636 the superiority ac-quired by the Earl of Rox-burgh was purchased by the magistrates of Edinburgh This included the Canongate, North Leith, part of Broughton, and the village of the Pleasance - a purchase which was confirmed by, Charles I., and cost 42,100 merks Scots. By this the Canongate be-came subordinate to Edinburgh and was governed by a " baron and bailiff " appointed by the council of the latter ; but the real glory of the Canongate may be said to have departed with the court when James VI. succeeded to the throne of England in 16O3, though, as we shall show, it long continued to be a fashionable quarter of the metropolis even after the time of the Union.

In pursuing the general history of the suburbs, we find that in 1609, under favour of James VI, when a number of foreigners were introduced into the kingdom -to teach the making of cloths of various kinds, a colony of them settled in the Canongate, under John Sutherland, and a Fleming named Jacob Van Headen, where they daily exercised in their art of making, dressing, and litting of stuffs," giving great " light and knowledge of their calling to the country people."
Notwith-standing that these industrious and inoffensive men had royal letters vesting them with special privi-leges, they were-as too often happens in those cases where the enterprise of foreigners appears to clash with the interests of natives-much molested and harassed by the magistrates of the Canongate, with a view of forcing them to become burgesses and free men in the regular way; but an appeal to the Privy Council affirmed their exemption.
Among the inhabitants of the Canongate was a George Heriot, who died in the following year, 1610, aged seventy. He was the father of the founder of that famous and magnificent hospital, which is perhaps the greatest ornament of either Old or New Edinburgh.

In 1639, we learn from Spalding that George, second Marquis of Huntly, who in his youth had commanded the Scottish Guard of Louis XIII. was residing at his old family mansion in the Canongate, wherein, about the month of November, two of his daughters were married " with great solemnities "-the Lady Anne, who was " ane precise Puritan," to the Lord Drummond; and Lady Henrietta, who was a Roman Catholic, to Lord Seton, son of the Earl of Winton.
These ladies had each 40,O00 merks Scots as a fortune, their uncle. the Earl of Argyle, being cautioner for the payment, " for relief whereof he got the wadset of Lochaber and Badenoch." Lady Jean, a third daughter, was also married in the ensuing January, with a fortune of 30,000 merks, to Thomas, Earl of Haddington, who perished in the following year when the Castle of Dunglass was blown up by gunpowder.

An old house at the head of the Canongate, on the north side, somewhere in the vicinity of Coull's Close, but now removed, was always indicated as being the scene of that wild story which Scott relates in his notes to the fifth canto of " Rokeby," and in his language we prefer to give it here.
He tells us that "about the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the large castles of the Scottish nobles, and even the secluded hotels, like those of the French noblesse, which they possessed in Edinburgh were sometimes the scenes of strange and mysterious transactions, a divine of singular sanctity was called up at midnight to pray with a person at the point of death.

This was no unusual summons; but what followed was alarming. He was put into a sedan-chair, and after he had been transported to a remote part of the town the bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded. The request was enforced by a cocked pistol, and submitted to; but in the course of the discussion he conjectured, from the phrases employed by the chairmen, and from some parts of their dress not completely concealed by their cloaks, that they were greatly above the menial station they had assumed. After many turnings and windings the chair was carried up-stairs into a lodging, where his eyes were uncovered, and he was introduced into a bed-room, where he found a lady newly delivered of an infant, and he was commanded by his attendants to say such prayers by her bedside as were fitting for a person not expected to survive a mortal disorder.

" He ventured to remonstrate, and observed that her safe delivery warranted better hopes ; but he was sternly commanded to obey the orders first given, and with difficulty recollected himself sufficiently to acquit himself of the task imposed on him. He was then again hurried into the chair; but as they conducted him down-stairs he heard the report of a pistol! He was safely conducted home, and a purse of gold was forced upon him ; but he was warned at the same time that the least allusion to this dark transaction would cost him his life.

He betook himself to rest, and after long and broken musing, fell into a deep sleep. From this he was awakened with the dismal news that a fire of uncommon fury had broken out in the house of --------, near the head of the Canongate, and that it was totally consumed, with the shocking addition that the daughter of the proprietor, a young lady eminent for beauty and accomplishments, had perished in the flames. The clergyman had his suspicions; but to have made them public would have availed nothing. He was timid; the family was of the first distinction; above all, the deed was done, and could not be amended.

"Time wore away, and with it his terrors; but he became unhappy at being the solitary depository of this fearful mystery, and mentioned it to some of his brethren, through whom the anecdote acquired a sort of publicity.

The divine had long been dead when a fire broke out on the same spot where the house of -------- had formerly stood, and which was now occupied by buildings of an inferior description. When the flames were at their height, the tumult that usually attends such a scene was suddenly suspended by an unexpected apparition. A beautiful female in a nightdress, extremely rich, but at least half a century old, appeared in the very midst of the fire, and uttered these tremendous words in her vernacular idiom:-',Anes burned-. twice burned-the third time I'll scare you all !'

The belief in this story was so strong, that on a fire breaking out, and seeming to approach the fatal spot, there was a good deal of anxiety testified lest the apparition should make good her denun-ciation." ,
According to a statement in Notes and Queries, this story was current in Edinburgh before the childhood of Scott, and the murder part of it was generally credited. He mentions a person acquainted with the city in 1743 who used to tell the tale and point out the site of the house. It is remarkable that a great fire did happen there in the seventeenth century, and the lofty buildings on the spot date from that time.
Of the plague, which in 1645 nearly depopu-lated the Canongate as well as the rest of Edinburgh a singular memorial still remains, a little lower down the street, on the north side, in the form of a huge square tenement, called the Morocco Land, from the effigy of a turbaned Moor, which projects from a recess above the second floor, and having an alley passing under it, inscribed with the follow-ing legend:-

" MISERERE MEI, DOMINE: A PECCATO, PROBRO,
DEBITO, ET MORTE SUBITA. LIBERA M.E. 1.6.18."

Of the origin of this edifice various romantic stories are told : one by Chambers, to the effect that a young woman belonging to Edinburgh having been taken upon the sea by an African rover, was sold to the harem of the Emperor of Morocco, whose favourite wife she became, and enabled her brother to raise a fortune by merchandise, and that in building this stately edifice he erected the black nude figure, with turban and necklace of beads, as a memorial of his royal brother-in-law; but the most complete and consistent outline of its history is that given by Wilson in his " Memorials," from which it would appear that during one of the tumults which occurred in the city after the accession of Charles I, the house of the Provost, who had rendered himself obnoxious to the rioters, was assaulted and set on fire. Among those arrested as a ringleader was Andrew Gray, a younger son of the Master of Gray, whose descendants inherit the ancient honours of Kinfauns, and who, notwith-standing the influence of his family, was tried, and sentenced to be executed on the second day thereafter.

On the very night that the scaffold was being erected at the Cross he effected his escape from the City Tolbooth by means of a rope conveyed to him by a friend, who had previously given some drugged liquor to the sentinel at the Puir-folks--purses, and provided a boat for him, by which he crossed the North Loch and fled beyond pursuit.

Time passed on, and the days of the great civil war came. "Gloom and terror now pervaded the streets of the capital. It was the terrible year 1645-the last visitation of the pestilence to Edinburgh when, as tradition tells us," says Wilson, "grass grew thickly about the Cross, once as crowded a centre of thoroughfare as Europe could boast of.

"The Parliament was compelled to sit at Stirling, and the Town Council, on the 10th of April, agreed with Joannes Paulitius, M.D., that he should visit the infected at a salary of £80 Scots per month. A number of the ailing were hutted in the King's Park, a few were kept at home, and aid for all was invoked from the pulpits.

The Session of the Canongate ordained, on the 27th of June, that, " to avoid contention in this fearful time," all those who died in the park should be buried therein; for it would seem that those who perished by the plague were buried in places apart from churchyards, lest the infection might burst forth anew if ever the graves were reopened.

Maitland records that such was the terror pre-vailing at this period that the prisoners in the Tolbooth were all set at liberty, and all who were not free men were compelled, under severe penalties, to quit the city, until at length, " by the unparalleled ravages committed by the plague, it was spoiled of its inhabitants to such a degree that there were scarcely sixty men left capable of assisting in the de-fence of the town in case of an attack."

At this crisis a large armed vessel of peculiar rig and aspect entered the Firth of Forth, and came to anchor in Leith Roads-. By experienced seamen she was at once pronounced to be an Algerine rover, and dismay spread over all the city. This soon reached a culminating point when a strong band landed from her, and, entering the Canongate by the Water Gate, advanced to the Netherbow Port and required admittance. The magistrates parleyed with their leader, who demanded an exorbitant ransom, and scoffed at the risk to be run in a pIague-stricken city.

The Provost at this time was Sir John Smith, of Groat Hall, a small mansion-house near Craigleith, and he, together with his brother-in-law, Sir William Gray, Bart., of Pittendrum, a staunch Cavalier, and one of the wealthiest among the citizens, to whom we have referred in our account of Lady Stair's Close, agreed to ransom the city for large sum, while at the same time his eldest son was demanded by the pirates as a hostage. " It seems, however," says Wilson, " that the Provost' only child was a daughter, who then lay stricken of the plague, of which her cousin, Egidia Gray had recently died.

This information seemed to work an immediate change on the leader of the Moors. After some conference with his men he intimated his possession of an elixir of wondrous potency, and demanded that the Provost's daughter should be entrusted to his skill, engaging that if he did not cure her immediately to embark with his men, and free the city without ransom. After con-siderable parley the Provost proposed that the leader should enter the city and take up an abode in his house."

This was rejected, together with higher offers of ransom, till Sir John Smith yielded to the exhor-tations of his friends, and the proposal of the Moor was accepted, and the fair sufferer was borne to a house at the head of the Canongate, wherein the corsair had taken up his residence, and from thence she went forth quickly restored and in health.

The most singular part of this story is its denouement, from which it would appear that the corsair and physician proved to be no other than the condemned fugitive Andrew Gray, who had risen high in the favour and ser-vice of the Emperor of Morocco. " He had returned to Scotland," says Wilson, " bent on revenging his own early wrongs on the magis-trates of Edinburgh when, to his surprise, he found in the destined object of his special vengeance a relation of his own. He married the provost's daughter, and settled down a wealthy citizen in the burgh of Canongate.

'The house to which his fair patient was borne, and whither he afterwards brought her as his bride, is still adorned with an effigy of his royal patron, the Emperor of Morocco, and the tenement has ever since borne the name of the Morocco Land............... We have had the curiosity to obtain a sight of the title-deeds of the property, which prove to be of recent date.

The earliest, a disposition of 1731, so far confirms the tale that the proprietor at that date is John Gray, merchant, a descendant, it may be, of the Algerine rover and the Provost's daughter. The figure of the Moor has ever been a subject of popular admiration and wonder, and a variety of legends are told to account for its existence. Most of them, though differing in almost every other point, seem to agree in connecting it with the last visitation of the plague."
Near this tenement, a little to the eastward, was the mansion of John Oliphant of Newland, second son of Laurence, fourth Lord Oliphant, and father of the sixth lord who bore that title. His elder brother, the master,. was one of the Ruthven con-spirators in 1582, and perished at sea when fleeing from Scotland.
Beside it, a building of the same age was the residence of Lord David Hay, of Belton, son of John, second Earl of Tweeddale (who was among the first to join the royal standard at Nottingham in 1642), and who granted that barony to the former in 1687, at a time when he, the earl, was oppressed by debts which compelled him to sell his whole estate of Tweeddale to the Duke of Queensberry.

Northward of this edifice, and partly on the site now occupied by the Chapel of Ease in New Street, was the ancient residence of the Earl of Angus, only a portion of the walls of which were standing in 1847- It is supposed to have been the abode of Archibald, ninth Earl of Angus, who, as nephew and ward of the Regent Morton, was involved in his ruin, and fled the realm to England, where he became, as Godscroft tells us, the favourite " of that worthie Queen Elizabeth, partly in memorie of his uncle, but no lesse for his own Sake." More-over, he adds that he became the friend of Dudley, Walsingham, and Sir Philip Sidney, who was then writing his " Arcadia," which " he delighted much to impart to Angus, and Angus took as much pleasure to be partaker thereof.

"Returning to Scotland, he became involved in many troubles, and died in 1588-the victim, it was alleged, of sorcery, by the spells, says Godscroft, of Barbara Napier, in Edinburgh "wife to Archibald Douglas, of Carshogle, who was apprehended on suspition," but set at liberty. "Anna Simson, a famous witch, is reported to have confessed at her death that a picture of waxe was brought to her having A. D. written on it, which, as they said to her, did signifie Archibald Davidson, and she (not thinking of the Earl of Angus, whose name was Archibald Douglas, and might have been Davidson, because his father was David) did consecrate or execrate it after her forms, which, she said, she would not have done for all the world.............. His body was buried at Abenethy and his heart in Douglas, by his oune direction. He was the last Farle of the race of George, Master of Angus, who was slain at Flowden."

On the same side of the street, opposite to the archway leading into St. John Street, Jack's Land, a lofty stone tenement, formed, in her latter years, the residence of the beautiful Susannah, Countess of Eglinton, and there she was frequently visited by the famous Lady Jane Douglas during the vexed progress of "the Douglas cause;" and in another flat thereof resided David Hume, who came thither from Ridder's Land in 1753, while engaged on his History of England."
"The Shoemakers' Lands, which stand to the east of Jack's Land," says Wilson, writing in 1847, " are equally lofty and more picturesque buildings. One of them especially, opposite to Moray House, is a very singular and striking object in the stately range of substantial stone tenements that extend from New Street to the Canongate Tolbooth. A highly-adorned tablet surmounts the main entrance, enriched with angels' heads and a border of Elizabethan ornament enclosing the shoemakers' arms, with the date 1677.

An open book is inscribed with the first verse of the Scottish metre version of the one hundred and thirty-third Psalm-a motto which appears to have been of special repute towards the close of the seventeenth century among the suburban corporations, being also inscribed over the '-Tailors' Hall of Eastern Portsburgh and the Shoemakers' Land in the West Port. The turn-pike stair, the entrance to which is graced by this motto and the further inscription, in smaller letters,
'IT IS AN HONOUR FOR MAN TO CEASE FROM STRIFE,'

rises above the roof of the building, and is crowned by an ogee roof of singular character, flanked on either side by picturesque gables to the street. The first of the two tenements to the west of this, at the head of Shoemakers' Close, has an open panel on its front, from which the inscription appears to have been removed; but the other, which bears the date 1725, is still adorned with the same arms, and the following moral aphorism:-
BLESSED IS HE THAT WISELY DO
THE POOR MAN'S CASE CONSIDER.

We have referred to the mansion of the Marquis of Huntly, in the Canongate, and the marriage of his daughters therein. This singularly picturesque and antique edifice stands on the southern side of the street, opposite the old Tolbooth, and is erroneously said to have been at one time the Royal Mint.
Here George, sixth Earl and first Marquis of Huntly, is said to have resided-the same noble who was suspected of corresponding and conspiring with Spain, In his " History of the 'Troubles," Spalding tells us that this peer, in June, 1636, was borne from his lodging in the Canongate, in the desire of reaching his northern house in Badenoch, but got no farther than Dundee, where he died, in his seventy-fourth year.

Here, too, abode his son, the second marquis, who was forfeited in 1645 by the Covenanting Parliament for his steady adherence to the king, and after being deprived of his stately castles of Gicht and Strathbogie, lost his head on the block at the Market Cross in 1649, ten years after the marriage festivities referred to.

When Maitland wrote, in 1753, this house was the residence of the Dowager of Cosmo George, third Duke of Gordon, who had been Lady Catharine Gordon, of the Aberdeen family.
It still presents a picturesque row of timber fronted gables to the street, resting on a row of carved corbels and a cornice projecting from the basement, and a series of sculptured tablets adorn it, filled with certam pious phrases peculiar to the sixteenth century. One of these is-; Vt tu lingvae,, sic e, o mear; avrium -Dominus sum; " another is-
" Constanti pectori res mortalium umbra "

Lower down the street, on the same side, at the head of Reid's Close, a square projecting turret, corbelled well out over the pavement, with a huge gable, indicates the town mansion of the Nisbets of Dirleton, an old baronial family in East Lothian, erected in the year 1624- In accordance with the general style of all Scottish houses in those days, the basement storey is arched with stone; and the first of the family who resided there seems to have been Sir John Nisbet of Dirleton, who was raised to the bench in 1664, " a man of great learning, both in law and many other things, chiefly in Greek," according to Burnet, who adds that " he was a person of great integrity, and always stood firm to the law."

He was the son of Patrick Nisbet, Lord Eastbank in 1636, and was appointed King's Advocate, and was author of an old legal work, well known as " Dirleton's Doubts." He died in 1678. He was a tool of the Bishops, and rendered himself unpopular by his zeal in prosecut-ing the unfortunate Covenanters. Of this Wodrow relates an instance.

One named Robert Gray having been brought before the Privy Council, and examined as to his knowledge of their hiding-places without success, Sir John Nisbet artfully and cruelly took a ring from his finger, and sent it to Mrs. Gray, with a message that her husband had revealed all he knew of the Whigs. Deceived by this, she told all that she knew of their lurking places, and thus many were arrested, which so affected her husband that he sickened, and died a few days after.

Nearly opposite Queensberry House, and on the north side of the street, a narrow, old-fashioned edifice is known as John Paterson's House, or " The Golfers' Land," concerning which there is recorded a romantic episode connected with James VII., when, as Duke of Albany, he held his court at Holyrood. Conspicuously placed high upon the wall is a coat-armorial, and a slab above the entrance door contains the two following inscrip-tions :-
"CUM VICTOR LUDO, SCOTIS QUI PROPRIUS, ESSE'T,
TER TRES VICTORES POST REMEDITOS AVOS, PATERSONUS, HUMO TUNC EDUCEBAT IN ALTUM HANC, QUAE VICTORES TOT TULFT UNA, DOMUM."
" I HATE NO PERSON."

The latter is an anagram on the name of " John Paterson," while the quatrain was the production of Dr. Pitcairn, and is referred to in the first volume of Gilbert Stuart's Edinburgh Magazine and Review for 1774, and may be rendered thus: -"In the year when Paterson won the prize in golfing, a game peculiar to the Scots (in which his ancestors had nine times won the same honour), he then raised this mansion, a victory more honourable than all the rest."
According to tradition, two English nobles at Holyrood had a discussion with the royal duke as to the native country of golf, which he was frequently in the habit of playing on the Links of Leith with the Duke of Lauderdale and others, and which the two strangers insisted to be an English game as well.
No evidence of this being forthcoming, while many Scottish Parliamentary edicts, some as old as the days of James II., in I457, could be quoted concerning the said game, the Englishmen, who both vaunted their expertness, offered to test the legitimacy of their pretensions on the result of a match to be played by them against His Royal Highness and any other Scotsman he chose to select.

After careful inquiry he chose a man named John Paterson, a poor shoe-maker in the Canongate, but the worthy descendant of a long line of illustrious golfers, and the associa-tion will by no means surprise, even in the present age, those who practise the game in the true old Scottish spirit. The strangers were ignominiously beaten, and the heir to the throne had the best of this practical argument, While Paterson's merits were rewarded by the stake played for, and he built the house now standing in the Canongate.

On its summit he placed the Paterson arms-three pelicans vulned on a chief three mullets; crest, a dexter-hand grasping a golf club, with the well-known Motto-FAR AND SURE. Concerning this old and well-known tradition, Chambers says, "it must be admitted there is some uncertainty, The house, the arms, and the inscriptions only indicate that Paterson built the house after being victor at golf, and that Pitcaim had a hand in decorating it."

In this doubt Wilson goes further, and believes that the Golfers' Land was lost, not won, by the gambling propensities of its owner. It was acquired by Nicol Paterson in 1609, a maltman in Leith, and from him it passed, in 1632, to his son John (and Agnes Lyel his spouse), who died 23rd April, 1663, as appears by the epitaph upon his tomb in the churchyard of Holyrood, which was extant in Maitland's time, and the strange epitaph on which is given at length by Monteith. He would appear to have been many times Bailie of the Canongate Both Nicol and John, it may be inferred from the inscriptions on the ancient edifice, were able and successful golfers.

The style of the building, says Wilson, confirms the idea that it had been rebuilt by him "with the spoils, as we are bound to presume, which he won on Leith links, from 'our auld enemies of England.' The title-deeds, how-ever, render it probable that other stakes had been played for with less success. In 1691 he grants a bond over the property for £400 Scots. This is followed by letters of caption and horning, and other direful symptoms of legal assault, which pursue the poor golfer to his grave, and remain behind as his sole legacy to his heirs."
The whole tradition, however, is too serious to be entirely overlooked, but may be taken by the reader for what it seems worth.
Bailie Paterson's successor in the old mansion was John, second Lord Bellenden of Broughton and Auchnoule, Heritable Usher of the Exchequer, who married Mary, Countess Dowager of Dalhousie, and daughter of the Earl of Drogheda. Therein he died in 1704, and was buried in the Abbey Church; and as the Union speedily followed, like other tenements so long occupied by the old courtiers in this quarter, the Golfers' Land became, as we find it now, the abode of plebeians.

Immediately adjoining the Abbey Court-house was an old, dilapidated, and gable-ended mansion of no great height, but of considerable extent, which was long indicated by oral tradition as the abode of David Rizzio. It has now given place to buildings connected with the Free Church of Scotland. Opposite these still remain some of the older tenements of this once patrician burgh, distinguishable by their lofty windows filled in with small square panes of glass ; and on the south side of the street, at its very eastern end, a series of pointed arches along the walls of the Sanctuary Court-house, alone remain to indicate the venerable Gothic porch and gate-house of the once famous Abbey of Holyrood, beneath which all that was great and good, and much that was ignoble and bad have passed and repassed in the days that are no more.

This edifice, of which views from the east and west are still preserved, is supposed to have been the work of " the good Abbot Ballantyne," who rebuilt the north side of the church in 1490. and to whom we shall have occasion to refer elsewhere. His own mansion, or lodging, stood here on the north side of the street, and the remains of it, together with the porch, were recklessly destroyed and removed by the Hereditary Keeper of the Palace in 1753.
A little gable-ended house now occupies the site of the former, and was long known as the dwelling of a very different personage, a Lucky Spence, of unenviable notoriety, whose "Last Advice" figures somewhat coarsely in the poems of Allan Ramsay.
About 1833 a discovery was made, during some alterations in this house, which was deemed illus-trative of the desperate character of its seventeenth -century occupant. " In breaking out a new window on the ground floor, a cavity was found in the solid wall, containing the skeleton of a child, with some remains of fine linen cloth in which it had been wrapped. Our authority," says Wilson, "a worthy shoemaker, who had occupied the house for forty-eight years, was present when the dis-covery was made, and described very graphically the amazement and horror of the workman, who threw away his crowbar, and was with difficulty persuaded to resume his operations."

CHAPTER LI THE CANONGATE (continued).
Execution of the Marquis of Montrose-The First Dromedary in Scotland The Streets Cleansed-Roxburgh House-London Stages of 1712 and 1754-Religious Intolerance-Declension of the Burgh.OF all the wonderful and startling spectacles wit-nessed amid the lapse of ages from the windows of the Canongate, none was perhaps more startling and pitiful than the humiliating procession which conducted the great Marquis of Montrose to his terrible doom.
On the 18th of May 1650, he was brought across the Forth to Leith, after his defeat and capture by the Covenanters at the battle of Invercarron, where he had displayed the royal standard; and it is impossible now to convey an adequate idea of the sensation excited in the city, when the people be-came aware that the Griham, the victor in so many battles, and the slayer of so many thousands of the best troops of the Covenant, was almost at their gates.
Placed on a cart-horse, he was brought in by the eastern barrier of the city, as it was resolved, by the influence of his rival and enemy, Argyle, to protract the spectacle of his humiliation as long as possible, by compelling him to traverse the entire length of the excited and tumultuous metropolis, by the Canongate and High Street, " overlooked by the loftiest houses in Europe, with their forestairs, balconies, bartizans, and outshots, that afforded every facility for beholding the spectacle. On this day the whole length of that vast thoroughfare was one living mass of human beings; but for one who had come to pity, there were more than a hundred whose hearts were filled with a tiger-like ferocity, which the clergy had inspired to a dan-gerous degree, and for the most ungenerous purpose."

The women of the kail-market and the " saints of the Bowhead" were all there, their tongues trembling with abuse, and their hands full of stones or mud to launch at the head of the fallen Cavalier, who passed through the Water Gate at four in the afternoon, greeted by a storm of yells. Seated on a lofty hurdle, he was bound with cords so tightly that he was unable to raise his hands to save his face ; preceded by the magistrates in their robes, he was bareheaded, his hat having been torn from him.

Though in the prime of manhood and perfection of manly beauty, we are told that he " looked pale, worn, and hollow-eyed, for many of the wounds he had received at Inver-carron were yet green and smarting. A single horse drew the hurdle, and thereon sat the execu-tioner of the city, clad in his ghastly and sable livery, and wearing his bonnet as a mark of dis-respect." He was escorted by the city guard, under the notorious Major Weir-Weir the wizard, whose terrible fate has been recorded elsewhere.

In front marched a number of Cavalier pri-soners, bareheaded and bound with cords. Many of the people now shed tears on witnessing this spectacle ; but, says Kincaid, they were publicly rebuked by the clergy, " who declaimed against this movement of rebel nature, and reproached them with their profane tenderness ; " while the " Wigton Papers " state that how even the widows and the mothers of those who had fallen in his wars wept for Montrose, who looked around him with the profoundest serenity as he proceeded up the Canongate, even when he came to Moray House-
" Then, as the Graham looked upward, he met the ugly smile
Of him who sold his king for gold, the master-fiend Argyle ! "

On the broad stone balcony which there projects into the street was Argyle, with a gay bridal party in their brave dresses. His son, Lord Lorne, had just been wedded to the Earl of Moray's daughter, Lady Mary Stuart, and the young couple were there, with the Marchioness, the Countess of Had-dington, Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston, and others, to exult over the fallen Royalist. " Their malice was not confined to that," says Monteith of Salmonet ; " they caused the cart to be stopped for some time before the Earl of Moray's house, where, by an unparalleled baseness, Argyle, with the chief men of his cabal, who never durst look Montrose in the face while he had his sword in his hand, appeared in the balcony in order to feed merrily their sight with a spectacle which struck horror into all good men. But Montrose astonished them with his looks, and his resolution confounded them."

Then with broad vulgarity the marchioness spat full in his face! Argyle shrank back at this, and an English Cavalier who stood among the crowd below reviled him sharply, while Lorne and his bride continued to toy and smile in the face of the people. (" Wigton Papers.")

So protracted was this melancholy spectacle that seven o'clock had struck before the hurdle reached the gate of the Tolbooth, where Montrose, when unbound, gave the executioner a gold coin, saying " This is your reward, my man, for driving the cart."

On the following day, Sunday, the ministers in their pulpits, according to Wishart, rebuked the people for not having stoned him. One declared that " he was a faggot of hell, and that he al-ready saw him burning," while he was constantly taunted by Major Weir as " a dog, atheist, and murderer."
The story of Montrose's execution on the 21st of May, when be was hanged at the Cross on a gibbet thirty feet high, with the record of his battles suspended from his neck, how he died with glorious magnanimity and was barbarously quartered, belongs to the general annals of the nation ; but the City Treasurer's account contains some curious items connected with that great legal tragedy :-

1650. February. To making a scaffold at ye Cross for burning ye Earl of Montrose's papers. 2 8 0
May 13 For making a seat on a cart to carry him from ye Water Gate to ye Tolboooth 12 16 0
For making a high new gallows and double leather and setting up a galbert 12 8 4 Pd. 6 workmen for carrying ye trunk of his body and burying it in ye Burrow muir 2 0 0 Pd. the Lockman for making sd. grave deeper and covering it again 1 16 0
Pd. for sharping the axe for striking away the head, leg, and arms from the body 0 12 0
As a set-off -against these items, we have the following, in 1660-1 when Argyle's fate came:-
To Alexander Davidson for a new axe to ye Maiden, and is to maintainit all ye days of his life 70 12 0
To 4 Drummer: when Argyle and Swinton were brought from Leith 14 8 0
To 17 extra Drummers, 2 days, when Montrosewas buried and Aygyle executed 21 12 0
The marquis was interred amid great pomp in the Church of St. Giles at the Restoration but when a search was made for his remains in the Chapman aisle, in April, 1879, no trace of them whatever could be found there.

Amid the gloom and horror of scenes such as these executions, and the general events of the wars of the Covenant, all traces of gaiety, and especially of theatrical entertainments, disappeared in Edinburgh as forbidden displays; but in January, 1659, the citizens were regaled with the sight of a travel-ling dromedary, the first that had ever been in Scotland.

Nicoll describes it as "ane heigh great beast, callit ane dummodary, quhilk being keepit ,clos in the Canongite, none had a sight of it, with-out three pence the person. ........... It was very big, and of great height, cloven futted like unto a kow, and on the bak ane saitt, as it were a sadill to sit on. Thair was brocht in with it ane lytill baboun, faced lyke unto an aip."

In 1686 the public attendance at mass by some of the officers of state excited a tumult in the city, and many persons of rank were insulted on return-ing therefrom by the rioters. One of these, a journeyman baker, was, by order of the Privy Council, whipped through the Canongate, and ultimately the Foot Guards had to fire on the mob that assembled.

In that year an Act of Parliament empowered the magistrates to impose a tax of £500 sterling yearly, for three years, to cleanse the town and Canongate, and free both from beggars; and in 1687 the whole members of the College of Justice volun-tarily offered to bear their full share of this tax, and appointed two of their body to be present when it was levied.

In 1692 we find an instance in the Canongate of one of the many troubles which in those days arose from corporation privileges, by which the poor and industrious tradesman was made the victim of monopoly.

In the open ground which now surrounds Milton House, there stood in those days the mansion of the Earls of Roxburgh, surrounded by a beautiful garden. In October, 1692, William Somerville, a wright-burgess of the city, was engaged on some repairs in this house, when Thomas Kinloch, Deacon of the Wrights in the Canongate, came with others, and violently carried off all the tools of Somerville and his workmen, on the plea that they were not freemen of the burgh; and when the tools were demanded formally, two days after, they were withheld.

Robert, Earl of Roxburgh (who afterwards died on his travels abroad), was then a minor, but his curators resented the proceedings of Kinloch, and sued him for riot and oppression. Apparently, if the Roxburgh mansion had been subject to the jurisdiction of the Canongate, the Privy Council would have given no redress ; but when the earl's ancestor, in 1636, had given up the superiority of the Canongate, as he reserved his house to be holden of the Crown, it was found that the local corporation had no right to interfere with his workmen, and Somerville's tools were restored to him by order of the Council.
Earl Robert was succeeded-in this house by his brother John, fifth Earl and first Duke of Rox-burgh, K.G., who sold his Union vote for £500, became Secretary of State for Scotland in 1716, and died in 1741.

Long ere that time the effect of the Union had done its worst upon the old court burgh. Maitland, writing in 1753, says :-" This place has suffered more by the union of the kingdoms than all the other parts of Scotland : for having, before that period, been the residence of the chief of the Scottish nobility, it was then in a flourishing condition; but being deserted by them, many of their houses are fallen down, and others in a ruinous condition; it is ill a piteous case ! "
Five years after the Union we find a London coach announced as starting from the Canongate, the advertisement for which, with regard to expedi-tion, comfort, and economy, presents a curious con-trast to the announcements of today, and is worth giving at length, as we find it in the Newcastle Courant of October, 1712.

"Edinburgh Berwick, Newcastle, Durham, and London Stage-coach begins on Monday, 13th October, 1712. All that desire to pass from Edinburgh to London, or from London to Edinburgh or any place on that road, let them repair to Mr. John Bailies, at the Coach and Horses at the head of the Canongate, every Saturday, or the Black Swan in Holborn, every other Monday, at both of which places they may be received in a stage-coach which performs the whole journey in thirteen days, without any stoppage if God permit, having eighty able horses to perform the whole stage. Each passenger paying £4 10s. for the whole journey,. allowing each 20 lbs. weight, and all above to pay 6d. per lb. The coach sets off at six in the morn-ing. Performed by Henry Harrison, Nich.Speighl, Rob. Garbe, Rich.Croft."

When we consider the cost of food on a thirteen days' journey, the fees to successive guards and drivers, the small allowance of luggage, and the overcharge, the contrast of travelling in the days of Anne and Victoria seems great indeed.

In July, 1754, the Edinburgh Courant advertises the stage-coach, drawn by six horses, with a pos-tilhon on one of the leaders, as " a new, genteel, two-end glass machine, hung on steel springs; exceeding light and easy, to go in ten days in summer and tweIve in winter," setting out from Hosea Eastgate's, at the Coach and Horses, Dean Street, Soho, and from John Somerville's, in the Canongate, every other Tuesday. "In the winter to set out from London and Edinburgh every other Monday morning, and to go to Burrowbridge on Saturday night; and to set out from thence on Monday morning, and to get to London and Edinburgh on Saturday night. Passengers to pay as usual. Performed (if God permits) by your dutiful servant, HOSEA EASTGATE. Care is taken of small parcels, according to their value."

A few years before this move in the way of pro-gress, the Canongate had been the scene of a little religious persecution; thus we find that on a Sunday in the April of 1722 the Duchess Dowager of Gordon, Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, venturing to have mass cele-brated at her house in the Canongate for herself and some fifty other Roman Catholics, Bailie Hawthorn, magistrate of the burgh, broke open the doors at the head of an armed party, and seized the whole. The ladies he permitted to depart on bail, but John Wallace, the priest, he cast into prison; this he did all the more zealously that some thirty-five years before the latter had been-according to Wodrow -a Protestant clergyman. Thomas Kennedy, the Lord Advocate, refused bail for him, though five persons of rank offered it. It was at length taken to the extent of 5,000 merks, and failing to stand his trial under the statute of 1700, according to Arnot's " Criminal Trials," he was outlawed.

Notwithstanding the gloom, ruin, and desertion of which Maitland wrote in 1753, many persons of rank and note continued to linger in the Canon-gate, and a curious list of them is given by Robert Chambers, as taken down by " the late Mr. Chalmers Izett, whose memory extended back to 1769." It includes two dukes, sixteen earls, two dowager countesses, seven lords, and seven lords of session, thirteen baronets, four commanders of the forces in Scotland, and five eminent men- --Adam Smith, Drs, Young, Dugald Stewart, Gardner, and Gregory; and he adds that the last blow was given to the locality by the opening of the road along the Calton Hill in 1817, which rendered it no longer the avenue of approach to the city from the east.

Among the last of the old noblesse who resided in it was the Lady Janet Sinclair, daughter of William, Lord Strathnaver (who died in July, 1720). She was the relict of George Sinclair of Ulbster, and mother of Sir John Sinclair, the famous agriculturist. She died in her seventy-eighth year, in June, 1795.

CHAPTER LII THE CANONGATE-(continued).
Closes and Alleys on the North Side-Flesh-market and Coull's Closes-Canongate High School-Rae's Close-Kinloch's Lodging-New Street and its Residents-Hall of the Shoemakers-Sir Thos.Dalyell-The Canongate Washhouse-Panmure House-Hannah Robertson-The White Horse Hostel-The Water Gate.
AMONG the earliest breaches made in the Old Town by the City Improvement Trustees were those at the head of the Canongate, where several closes were swept away, especially on the north side, where we now find the entrances to Jeffrey and Cranston Streets.

The first of these was the old Fleshmarket Close (which adjoined Leith Wynd on the east), once a thickly-peopled locality, but a cul-de-sac, the bottom of which was blocked up by ancient buildings. On the west side of this squalid and filthy alley there stood a mansion, the interior of which pre-sented undoubted evidence of its magnificence in the sixteenth century, as it had among its many carved details a beautifully canopied, cusped, and ornate Gothic niche, with two shields, of which a drawing has been preserved, and which, in de-tails, is identical with those found in the palace of Mary of Guise. Traditionally it was named " the old Parliament House," wherein it is sup-posed the Regent Lennox, with Morton, Mar, Glencairn, and others, held their meeting in the troublesome time subsequent to the enforced abdi-cation of Queen Mary. At the foot of the close there was once an opening to the old Flesh-market of the Canongate-hence its name-an area shown in Edgar's map as entered by a gate, and measuring about 100 feet by 60.

Coull's Close lay next, with a very narrow entrance, and latterly it opened into Macdowal Street, and long exhibited-ere it absolutely tumbled into ruins-many a sculptured doorway, and many an inscription dictated by the piety or pride of its former inhabitants, of whom not even the name can now be traced.
The High School Close adjoined it, so named as leading to a large, and handsome edifice which stood in an open court at its foot, and was long occupied as the burgh High School. In the central pediment, which bore a sundial, was the date 1704, and Dutch-looking dormer windows studded its roof, but the school had a date far beyond the days of Queen Anne; it appears to have been founded by the monks of Holyrood, and is referred to in a charter granted by James V. in 1529; therein mention is made of Henryson, clerk and orator of the monastery, having taught with success in the grammar school of the Canon-gate, and many notices of this old educational establishment occur in the Register of the Burgh, printed in the " Maitland Club Miscellany."

Under date 5th of April, 1580, Gilbert Tailyour, schoolmaster, renounced his gift of the school, given him for his lifetime by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, in favour of the bailies and Council, who therefore restored it to him.

Of Midcommon Close, a narrow, blocked-up, and tortuous alley, little more is known than the name; but there once stood on its eastern side a stately old tenement, bearing the date 16I4, with this pious legend:
I. TAKE. THE. LORD. JESUS. AS MY. ONLY. ALL. SUFFICIENT. PORTION. TO. CONTENT. ME.
This was cut in massive Roman letters, and the house was adorned by handsome dormer windows and moulded stringcourses; but of the person who dwelt therein no memory remains. And the same must be said of the edifices in the closes called Morocco-and Logan's, and several others.

Between these two lies Rae's Close, very dark and narrow, leading only to a house with a back green, beyond which can be seen the Calton Hill. In the sixteenth century this alley was the only open thoroughfare to the north between Leith Wynd -and the Water Gate. In 1568 the foot of it was closed by a stone wall for security, and there was ordered to be "cast ane stank at the slope yatt comis fra the Justice Clark landis to the Abbaye, on tllc south side of this burghe." In 1574 a gate with a secure lock was placed upon it for the same purpose.

In 1647 only three open thoroughfares are shown to the north-one the Tolbooth Wynd-and all are closed by arched gates in a wall bounding the Canongate on the north, and lying parallel with a Iong watercourse flowing away towards Craigentinnie, and still extant.

Kinloch's Close, described in 1856 as "short, dark, and horrible," took its name from Henry Kinloch, a wealthy burgess of the Canongate in the days of Queen Mary,, who committed to his hospitality, in 1565, when she is said to have acceded to the League of Bayonne, the French ambassadors M. de Rambouillet and Clernau, who came on a mission from the Court of France. Their ostensible visit, however, was more probably to invest Darnley with the order of St. Michael. They had come through England with a train of thirty-six mounted gentlemen. After presenting themselves before the king and queen at Holy-rood, according to the "Diurnal of Occurrents," they '"there after depairtit to Heny Kynloches lugeing in the Cannogait besyid Edinburgh"
A few days after Darnley was solemnly invested with the collar of St. Michael in the abbey church ; and on the 11th of February the ambassadors were banqueted, and a masked ball was given, when " the Queenis Grace and all her Maries and ladies -were cled in men's apparell" and each of them pre-sented a sword, " brawlic and maist artificiallie made and embroiderit with gold, to the said am-bassatour and his gentlemen." Next day they were banqueted in the castle by the Earl of Mar, and on the next ensuing," they took their departure for France and England.

Kinloch's mansion and that which adjoined it- the abode of the Earls of Angus-were pulled down about 1760, when New Street was built, "a curious sample of fashionable modern improve-ment, prior to the bold scheme of the New Town" and first called Young Street, according to Kincaid. Though sorely faded and decayed, it still presents a series of semi-aristocratic, detached, and not in-digent mansions of the plain form peculiar to the time. Among its inhabitants were Lords Kames and Hailes, Sir Philip Ainslie, the Lady Betty Anstruther, Christian Ramsay daughter of the poet, Dr. Young the eminet physician, and others.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, "who was raised to the bench in 1752, occupied a self-contained house at the head of the street facing the Canon-gate on the east side, and then deemed one of the best in the city; thus strangers were taken by their friends to see it as one of the local sights, with its front of grooved ashlar-work. Born in 1695, he early exhibited great talent with profound legal knowledge, and the mere enumeration of his works on law and history would fill a large page. He was of a playful disposition, and fond of prac-tical jokes; but during the latter part of his life he entertained a nervous dread that he would outlive his noble faculties, and was pleased to find that by the rapid decay of his frame he would escape that dire calamity; and he died, after a brief illness, in 1782, in the eighty-seventh year of his age. The great Dr. Hunter, of the Tron church, afterwards lived and died in this house.

Lord Hailes, to whom we have referred elsewhere, resided during his latter years in New Street; but prior to his promotion to the bench he generally lived at New Hailes. His house, No. 23, was latterly possessed by Mr. Ruthven, the ingenious improver of the Ruthven printing-press.

Christian Ramsay, the daughter of "honest Allan," and so named from her mother, Christian Ross, lived for many years in New Street. She was an amiable and kind-hearted woman, and possessed something of her father's gift of verse, In her seventy-fourth year she was thrown down by a hackney-coach and had her leg broken - yet she recovered, and lived to be eighty-eight. Lead-ing a solitary life, she took a great fancy to cats, and besides supporting many in her house, cosily disposed of in bandboxes, she laid out food for others around her house. "Not a word of obloquy would she listen to against the species," says the author of "Traditions of Edinburgh,"

"alleging, when any wickedness of a cat was spoken of, that the animal must have acted under provocation, for by nature, she asserted, they were harmless. Often did her maid go with morning messages to her friends, inquiring, with her compliments, after their pet cats. Good Miss Ramsay was also a friend to horses, and indeed to all creatures. When she observed a carter ill-treating his horse she would march up to him, tax him with cruelty, and by the very earnestness of her remonstrances arrest the barbarian's hand. So, also, when she saw one labouring in the street with the appearance of defective diet, she would send rolls to its master, entreating him to feed the animal. These peculiarities, though a little eccentric, are not unpleasing; and I cannot be sorry to record those of the daughter of one whose head and heart were an honour to his country."

The hideous chapel of ease built in New Street in 1794 occupied the site of the houses of Henry Kinloch and the Earls of Angus, the latter of which formed during the eighteenth century the banking office of the unfortunate firm of Douglas, Heron, and Co., whose failure spread ruin and dismay far and wide in Scotland.

Little Jack's Close, a narrow alley leading by a bend into New Street, and Big Jack's Close, which led to an open court, adjoin the thoroughfare of 1760, and both are doubtless named from some forgotten citizen or speculative builder of other days.

In the former stood the hall of the once wealthy corporation of the Cordiners or Shoemakers of the Canongate, on the west side, adorned with all the insignia of the craft, and furnished for their convivalia with huge tables and chairs of oak, in addition to a carved throne, surmounted by a crowned paring-knife, and dated 1682, for the solemn inauguration of King Crispin on St. Crispin's Day, the 25th of October.

This corporation can be traced back to the 10th of June, 1574, when William Quhite was elected Deacon of the Cordiners in the Canongate, in place of the late Andrew Purvis.

lt was of old their yearly custom to elect a king, who held his court in this Corporation Hall, from whence, after coronation, he was borne in procession through the streets, attended by his subject souters clad in fantastic habiliments. Latterly he was conducted abroad on a finely caparisoned horse, and clad in ermined robes attended by mock officers of state and preceded by a champion in armour; and in fooleries such as these the funds of the corporation became, in time, utterly exhausted before the classic of the last century.

The Shoemakers' Close was, at the end of the last century, the abode of a curious dwarf, known as Geordie Cranstoun, who figures twice in Kay's remarkable portraits.

In Big Jack's Close there was extant, until within a few years ago, the town mansion of General Sir Thomas Dalyell of Binns, commander-chief of the Scottish forces, whose beard remained uncut after the death of Charles I., and who raised the Scots Greys on the 25th of November, 1681, and clad them first in grey uniform, and at their head served as a merciless persecutor of the out-lawed Covenanters, with a zest born of his service in Russia. The chief apartment in this house has been described as a large hall, with an arched or coach roof, adorned, says Wilson, with a painting of the sun in the centre, surrounded by gilded rays on an azure dome- Sky, clouds, and silver stars filled up the remaining space.

The large windows were partially closed with oak shutters in the old Scottish fashion. "'The kitchen also was worthy of notice, for a fireplace formed of a plain circular arch, of such unusual dimensions that popular credulity might have assigned it for the perpetra-tion of those rites it had ascribed to him of spitting and roasting his miserable captives !................. . A chapel formerly stood on the site of the open court, but all traces of it were removed in 1779. It is not at all inconsistent with the character of the fierce old Cavalier that he should have erected a private chapel for his own use."

It was to this house in Big Jack's Close that the Rev. John Blackadder was brought a prisoner in 1681, guarded by soldiers under Johnstone, the town major, and accompanied by his son Thomas, who died a merchant In New England, and where that interview took place which is related in Blackadder's Memories," by D. A. Crichton:-
"I have brought you a prisoner," said Major Johnstone.
"Take him to the guard," said Dalyell, who was about to walk forth.
On this, the poor divine, whose emotions must have been far from enviable in such a terrible pre-sence, said, timidly, " May I speak with you sir ? "
"You have already spoken too much, sir," replied Dalyell, whose blood always boiled at the sight of a Covenanter, " and I should hang you with my own hands over that outshot !

On this, Major Johnstone, dreading what might ensue, took hastily away his prisoner, who, by order of the Privy Council, was sent to the Bass Rock, escorted by a party of the Life Guards, and there he died, a captive, in his seventieth year.

In the Tolbooth Wynd, on the east side thereof and near the foot, was built the old Charity Workhouse of the burgh. It was established by subscrip-tion, and opened for the reception of the poor in 1761, the expense beeing defrayed by collections at the church doors and voluntary contributions, without any assessment whatever ; and in those days the managers were chosen annually from the public societies of the Canongate. The city plan of 1647 shows but seven houses within the gate, on the west side of the Wynd, and open gardens on the other, eastward nearly to the Water Gate.

Panmure Close, the third alley to the eastward- one with a good entrance, and generally more pleasant than most of those narrow old streets-is so named from its having been the access to Pan-mure House, an ancient mansion, which still remains at the foot of Monroe's Close, and bore, till within the last few years, the appearance of those partly quadrangular manor-houses so common in Scot-land during the seventeenth century.

It became greatly altered after being brought into juxtaposition with the prosaic details of the Panmure Iron Foundry, but it formed the town residence of the Earls of Panmure, the fourth of whom, James, who distinguished himself as a volunteer at the siege of Luxemburg, and was Privy Councillor to James VII., a bitter opponent of the Union, lost his title and estates after the battle of Sheriffmuir, and died, an exile, in Paris. His nephew, William Maule, who served in the Scots Guards at Dettingen and Fontenoy, obtained an Irish peerage in 1743 as Earl Panmure of Forth, and was the last who possessed this house, in which he was resident in the middle of the last century, and was succeeded in it by the Countess of Aberdeen.

From 1778 till his death, in 1790, it formed the residence of Adam Smith, author of " The Wealth of Nations," after he came to Edinburgh as Commissioner of the Customs, an appointment obtained by the friendship of the Duke of Buccleuch. A few days before his death, at Panmure House, he gave ,orders to destroy all his manuscripts except some detached essays, which were afterwards published by his executors, Drs. Joseph Black and James Hutton, and his library, a valuable one, he left to his nephew, Lord Reston. From that old mansion the philosopher was borne to his grave in an ob-scure nook of the Canongate churchyard. During the last years of his blameless life his bachelor household had been managed by a female cousin, Miss Jeanie Douglas, who acquired a great control over him.

At the end of Panmure Close was the mansion of John Hunter, a wealthy burgess, who was Treasurer of the Canongate in 1568, and who built it in 1565, when Mary was on the throne. Wilson refers to it as the earliest private edifice in the burgh, and says " it con-sists ', like other buildings of the period of a lower erection of stone with a forestair leading to the first floor, and an ornamental turnpike within, affording access to the upper chambers.

At the top of a very steep wooden stair, constucted alongside of the latter, a very rich specimen of carved oak panelling remains in good preservation, adorned with the Scottish lion, displayed within a broad wreath and surrounded by a variety of ornaments. The door-way of the inner turnpike bears on the sculptured lintel the initials I. H., a shield charged with a chevron, and a hunting horn in base, and the date 1565." It bore also a comb with six teeth. It was demolished in August, 1853.

A little lower down are Big and Little Lochend Closes, which join each other near the bottom and run into the north back of the Canongate. In the former are some good houses, but of no great antiquity. One of these was occupied by Mr. Gordon of Carlton in 1784 ; and in the other, during the close of the last and first years of the present cen-tury, there resided a remarkable old lady, named Mrs. Hannah Robertson, who was well known in her time as a reputed grand-daughter of Charles II.

From her published memoir-which, after its first appearance in 1792, reached a tenth edition in 1806, and was printed by James Tod in Forrester's Wynd-and from other sources, we learn that she was the widow of Robert Robertson, a merchant in Perth, and was the daughter of a burgess named George Swan, son of Charles II. and Dorothea Helena, daughter of John Kirkhoven, Dutch baron of Ruppa, the beautiful Countess of Derby, who had an intrigue with the king during the protracted absence of her husband in Holland, Charles, eighth earl, who died in 1672 without heirs.

According to her narrative, the child was given to nurse to the wife of Swan, a gunner at Windsor, a woman whose brother, Bartholomew Gibson, was the king's farrier at Edinburgh; and it would further appear that the latter obtained on trust for George Swan, from Charles II. or his brother the Duke of York, a grant of lands in New Jersey, where Gibson's son died about 1750, as would appear from a notice in the London Chronicle for 1771.

Be all this as it may, the old lady referred to was a great favourite with all those of Jacobite proclivities, and at the dinners of the Jacobite always sat on the right band of the president, till her death, which occurred in Little Lochend Close in 1808, when she had attained her eighty-fourth year, and a vast concourse attended her funeral, which took place in the Friends' burial place at the Pleasance. Unusually tall in stature, and beautiful even in old age, her figure, with black velvet capuchin and cane, was long familiar in the streets of Edinburgh.

From a passage in the " Edinburgh Historical Re-gister" for 1791-2, she would appear to have been a futile applicant for a pension to the Lords of the Treasury, though she had many powerful friends, including the Duchess of Gordon and the Countess of Northesk, to whom she dedicated a book named The Lady's School of Arts."

One of the most picturesque and interesting houses in the Canongate is one situated in what was called Davidson's Close, the old "White Horse Hostel," on a dormer window of which is the date 1603. It was known as the " White Horse" a century and more before the accession of the House of Hanover, and is traditionally said to have taken its name from a favourite white palfrey when the range of stables that form its basement had been occupied as the royal mews. The ad-jacent Water Gate took its name from a great horse-pond which was, no doubt, an appendage to this establishment. ln 1639, when Charles I. had made his first peace with the Covenanters, and came temporarily to Berwick, he sent messages to the chief nobles of the National Church party to have a conference with him.

In obedience to this, with their various retinues, they were all mounting their horses in the yard of this inn, to which a kind of arched porte-cochère gives access from the main street, when a mob, taught wisely by the clergy to distrust a monarch who was under English influences, compelled them to desist and abandon their intended journey. The Earl of Montrose alone broke through all restraint ; he went to the king, and from, thence-forward was lost to the cause of the Covenant for ever.

The invariable mode of a gentleman setting out for London in those days was to come to the White Horse with his saddle-bags, boots, and gambadoes, and there engage a suitable roadster to convey him the whole way. In more recent times it was associated with the Cavalier officers and Highland gentleman of Charles Edward's picturesque court, and the quarters of Scott's hero, Captain Waverley. According to a passage in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1786, there were then set apart, " in the inns at Edinburgh Glasgow, &c., English rooms, where English travellers could eat and converse together."
When the White Horse ceased to be an inn is unknown, but the vicinity is connected with the memory of more than one Episcopal dignitary. A tenement which serves to complete the courtyard is pointed out as the residence of John Paterson, Bishop of Edinburgh in 1679, a special object of hate to the Covenanters, as he had been chaplain to the cruel and brutal Duke of Lauderdale.

After his translation to Glasgow in 1687, he was succeeded by Bishop Alexander Rose, who was ejected in the following year by the Revolution party-the last survivor of established Episcopacy in Edinburgh. He has been described by Bishop Keith as a man of sweet disposition and most venerable aspect. He died on the 20th of March, 1720, in his sister's house in the Canongate.. "Tradition," says Chambers, "points to the floor, immediately above the porte-cochère (of the White Horse), by which the stable-yard is entered, as the humble mansion in which the Bishop breathed his last. I know at least one person who never goes past the place without an emotion of respect,, remembering the self-abandoning devotion of the Scottish prelates to their engagements at the Revolution."

A barrier called the Water Gate, existing now only in name, closed the lower end of the street on the north side. lt was by this avenue that the English entered Edinburgh in 1544, and advanced to their futile attack on the Castle. It was the principal entrance from the east, not only to the Canongate, but to the whole city prior to the North Bridge ; nearly all public entrances were made by it, and many state prisoners, on their way to execution, have passed through it ; but the Water Gate, and the " Post and yet passand in to the Abbaye Knok," have long been numbered with the past. A single rib, or arch of wood, sur-mounted by a ball, indicated the locality latterly, till it was blown down in 1822.

According to the " City Records," the Council' granted to the Baron Bailie, of the Canongate, as a gift of escheat, all the goods and chattels of witches found therein ; accordingly that official, in, 166i1 was not long in discovering a certain Barbara Mvlne, who Janet Allen, burnt for witch-craft, once saw enter by the Water Gate in the "likeness of a catt,' and did change her garment- under her owni staire, and went into her house."

Canongate dues were long levied at the site of the gate after it had ceased to exist ; but on the fall of' the ornamental structure referred to, the fishwomen of Musselburgh and Newhaven stoutly refused. payment of all burghal customs on the contents of their creels, till the magistrates again restored-but for a time only-the arch of wood across the street.

CHAPTER LIII.THE CANONGATE (continued).
Closes and Alleys on the South Side- Chesser's Court -The Canongate Theatre-Riots Therein -"Douglas" Performed-Mr. Digges and Mrs. Bellamy-St John's Close -St.John's Street and its Residents-The Hammerman's Close - Hors e Wynd,Abbey-House of Lord Napier.

LIKE most burghs in former ages, the Canongate had a piper, of whom repeated notices occur in the treasurer's accounts, with reference at times to his "claise and pascments thereto." This official was superseded in 1587 by a drummer, whose duty it was to beat through the streets at "four houres in the morning;" and of the sanitary state of the community in those days some idea may be gathered from the fact that swine ran loose in the Canon-gate till 1583, when an attempt was made to put down the nuisance. In the city this was done earlier, as we find that in 1490 the magistrates ordain "the lokman, quhairwer he fyndis ony swyne betwix the Castell and the Netherbow upon the Gaitt," to seize them, with a fine of fourpence ,upon each sow taken.
Again, in 1506, swine found in the streets or kennels are to be slaughtered by the " lokman" and escheated; and in 1513 swine were again forbidden ,to wander, under pain of the owners being banished, -and each sow to be escheat. At the same time fruit was forbidden to be sold on the streets, or in crames, " holden thairupon, under the pain of escheitt "-that is, of forfeit.

In 1562 no flesh was to be eaten or even cooked on Friday or Saturday, under a penalty of ten pounds and in 1563 all markets were forbidden in the streets upon Sunday.

Among the first operations of the Improvement Trust were the demolitions at the head of St. Mary's Wynd, including with them the removal of the Closes of Hume and Boyd, the first alleys at the head of the street on the south side, and the erection on their site of lofty and airy tenements in a species of Scottish style.

Four alleys to the eastward, Bell's, Gillon's, Gibbs and Pirie's Closes, all narrow, dark, and filthy, have been without history or record but Chessel's Court, numbered as 240, exhibits a very superior style of architecture, and in 1788 was the scene of that daring robbery of the Excise Office which brought to the gallows the famous Deacon Brodie and his assistant, thus closing a long career of secret villainy, his ingenuity as a mechanic giving lam every facility in the pursuits to which he addicted himself. " It was then customary for the shopkeepers of Edinburgh to hang their keys upon a nail at the back of their doors, or at least to take no pains in concealing them during the day. Brodie used to take impressions of them in putty or clay, -a piece of which he used to carry in the palm of his hand. He kept a blacksmith in his pay, who forged exact copies of the keys he wanted, and with these it was his custom to open the shops of his fellow tradesmen during the night."

In a house of Chessel's Court there died, in I854, an aged maiden lady of a very ancient Scottish stock-Elizabeth Wardlaw, daughter of Sir William Wardlaw, Bart., of the line of Balmule and Pitreavie in Fifeshire.

In the Playhouse Close, a cul-de-sac, and its neighbour the Old Playhouse Close, a narrow and gloomy alley, we find the cradle of the legitimate drama in Edinburgh.

In the former, in 1747, a theatre was opened, on such a scale as was deemed fitting for the Scottish capital, where the drama had skulked in holes and corners since the viceregal court had departed from Holyrood, in the days of the Duke of Albany and York. From 1727 till after 1753 itinerant companies, despite the anathemas of the clergy, used with some success the Tailors' Hall in the Cowgate, which held, in professional phraseology, from £40 to £45 nightly. In the first-named year a Mr. Tony Alston endeavoured to start a theatre, in the same house which saw the failure of poor Allan Ramsay's attempt, but the Society of High Constables endeavoured to suppress his "abomin-able stage plays;" and when the clergy joined issue with the Court of Session against him, his performances had to cease. But, according to Wodrow, there had been some talk of building anotther theatre as early as 1728
In 1746 the foundation of the theatre within a back area (near St. John's Cross), now called the Playhouse Close, was laid by Mr. John Ryan, a London actor of considerable repute in his day, who had to contend with the usual opposition of the ignorant or illiberal, and that lack of prudence and thrift incidental to his profession generally. The house was capable of holding £70; the box seats were half-a-crown, the pit one-and-sixpence ; and for several years it was the scene of good acting under Lee, Digges, Mrs. Bellamy, and Mrs. Ward.

After the affair of 1745 the audiences were apt to display a spirit of political dissension. On the anniversary of the battle of Culloden, in 1749, some English officers who were in the theatre commanded the orchestra, in an insolent and unruly manner, to strike up an obnoxious air known as Culloden ; but in a spirit of opposition, and to please the people, the musicians played "You're welcome, Charlie Stuart." The military at once drew their swords and attacked the defenceless musicians and players, but were assailed by the audience with torn-up benches and every missile that could be procured.

The officers now attempted to storm the galleries ; but the doors were secured. They were then vigorously attacked in the rear by the Highland chairmen with their poles, disarmed, and most ignominiously drubbed and expelled., but in consequence of this and similar disturbances, bills were put up notifying that no music would be played but such as the management selected.

Another disturbance ensued soon after, occa-sioned by the performance of Garrick's farce, " High Life below Stairs.," which the fraternity of footmen bitterly resented, and resolved to stop. On the second night of its being announced, Mr. Love, one of the management, came upon the stage and read a letter containing the most bitter denuncia-tions of vengeance upon all concerned if the piece should be performed. It was, nevertheless, proceeded with, and the gentlemen who were in the theatre having provided accommodation for their servants in the gallery, the moment the farce began " a prodigious noise was heard from that quarter."

The liverymen were ordered to be silent, but without success. Their masters, as-sisted by some others of the audience, en-deavoured to quiet them by force ; swords and sticks were freely re-sorted to, but it was not until after a tough battle that the gentlemen of the cloth were fairly expelled ; "and servants from this time were deprived of the freedom of the theatre."

About 1752 Mr. Lee purchased the Canongate Theatre from the original proprietors for £648 and £100 per annum during the lives of the lessees ; but he failed in his engagement, and James Callen-der, a merchant of the city, undertook to conduct the business, with Mr. Digges as stage manager.
Callender soon after resigned his charge to Mr. David Beatt, another citizen, who had ventured in the past time to read Prince Charles's proclamations at the Cross, Mr. Love also withdrew from the charge, and was succeeded by Mr. John Dawson of Newcastle ; but dissensions arose among the performers themselves. two parties were formed in the theatre, which, during a performance of " Ham-let," they utterly wrecked and demolished, and set on fire in a riot, to the supreme delight of all opponents of the drama.

Legal actions and counter-actions ensued; the house was again fitted up, and nothing of interest occurred till the night of the 14th December, 1756, when, to the dismay of all Scotland, there was rought out the tragedy of "Douglas," written by the pen of a minister of the kirk !
The original cast was thus :-Douglas, Mr. Digges; Lord Randolph, Mr. Younger; Glenalvon, Mr. Love; Norval, Mr. Hayman- Lady Randolph, Mrs. Ward; Anna, Mrs. Hopkins.

With redoubled zeal the clergy returned to the assault, and though they could no more crush the players, they compelled John Home, the author of the obnoxious tragedy, to "re-nounce the orders that had been tarnished by a composition so, unwonted and un-clerical." Ultimately he became captain in the Buc-cleuch Fencibles, and lived long enough to see the prejudices of many of his countrymen pass away; but he was long viewed with obloquy. "To account for this extraordinary phenomenon," says Dr, Carlisle, " so far down in the eighteenth cen-tury, it is to be observed that not a few well-meaning people and all the zealots of the time were seriously offended with a clergyman for writing a tragedy, even with a virtuous tendency, and with his brethren for giving him countenance. They were joined by others out of mere envy."

The Presbytery of Edinburgh suspended all clergymen who had witnessed the representation of "Douglas," and at the same time " emitted an admonition and exhortation, levelled against all who frequented what they supposed to be the Temple of the Father of Lies, and ordered it to be read in all the churches within their bounds."

The personal elegance of Digges and the rare beauty of Mrs. Bellamy were traditionally re-membered in the beginning of the present century, and made them even objects of interest to those by whom their scandalous life was regarded with just reprehension. They lived in a small country house at Bonnington near Leith.

It is remembered that Mrs. Bellamy was extremely fond of singing birds, and when visiting Glasgow was wont to have them carried by a porter all the way, lest they might suffer by the jolting of a carriage, and people wondered to hear of ten guineas being expended for such a purpose. " Persons under the social ban for their irregular lives often win the love of individuals by their benevolence and sweet-ness of disposition-qualities, it is to be remarked, not unlikely to have been concerned in their first trespasses.

This was the case with Mrs. Bellamy. Her waiting-maid, Anne Waterstone, who is men-tioned in her 'Memoirs,' lived many years after in Edinburgh and continued to the last to adore the memory of her mistress. Nay, she was, from this -cause, a zealous friend of all players, and would never allow a slighting remark upon them to pass unreproved. It was curious to find in a poor old Scotchwoman of the humbler class such a sympathy with the follies and eccentricities of the children of Thespis."

The erection of the New Theatre Royal in the extended royalty eclipsed its predecessor in the Canongate, which was deserted in 1767. The front land, through which an arch gives access to the old Playhouse Close, is a fine specimen of the Scottish street architecture in the time of Charles I. It has a row of dormer windows, with another of storm-windows on a steep roof, that reminds one of those in Bruges and Antwerp. Over a doorway within the close is an ornamental tablet, the inscription on which has become defaced, and the old theatre itself has long since given place to private dwellings. In one of these lived, in 1781, a man named Wilson Gavin, whose name appears in " Peter Williamson's Directory" as an " Excellent Shoemaker and Leather Tormentor."
The adjoining alley, St. John's Close, is open towards St. John's Street, Narrow and ancient, it shows over a door-lintel on its west side the legend, within a sunk panel, THE LORD IS ONLY MY SUPORT. The doorway is but three feet wide.

Near this a spacious elliptical archway gives access to St. John's Street, so named with reference to St. John's Cross, a broad, airy, and handsome thoroughfare, " one of the heralds of the New Town," and associated with the names of many of the Scottish aristocracy who lingered in the old city, with judges and country gentlemen. By a date over a doorway in it, this street had been in progress in 1768.

At the head of the street, with its front windows overlooking the Canongate, is the house on the first floor of which was the residence of Mrs. Telfer of Scotstown, the sister of Trobias Smollett, who was her guest in 1766, on his second and last visit to his native country, and where, though in feeble health, be mixed with the best society of the capital, the men and manners of which he so graphically portrays in his last novel, " Humphrey Clinker," a work in which fact and fiction are curiously blended, and in which he mentions that he owed an introduction into the literary circles to Dr. Carlyle, the well-known incumbent of Inveresk.

Mrs. Telfer, though then a widow with moder-ate means, moved in good society. She has been described as a tall, sharp-visaged lady, with a hooked nose and a great partiality for whist. Her brother had then returned from that protracted Continental tour, the experiences of which are given in his " Travels through France and Italy," in two volumes.

The novelist has been described as a tall and hand-some man, somewhat prone to satirical innuendo, but with a genuine vein of humour, polished manners, and great urbanity. On the latter Dr. Carlyle particularly dwells, and refers to an oc-casion when Smollett supped in a tavern with himself, Hepburn of Keith, Home the author of " Douglas," Commissioner Cardonel, and others. The beautiful "Miss R--n," with whom, Jerry Milford is described as dancing at the hunters' ball, was the grand-daughter of Susannah Countess of Eglinton, whose daughter Lady Susan became the wife of Renton of Lamerton in the Merse. The wlfe of the novelist, Anne Lascelles, the Narcissa of " Roderick Random," was a pretty Creole lady, of a somewhat dark complexion, whom he left at his death nearly destitute in a foreign land, and for whom a benefit was procured at the old Theatre Royal in March, 1784.

A sister of Miss Renton's was married to Smollett's eldest nephew, Telfer, who inherited the family estate and assumed the name of Smollett. She afterwards became the wife of Sharpe of Hoddam, and, " strange to say, the lady whose bright eyes had flamed upon poor Smollett's soul in the middle of the last century was living so lately as 1836."

The house in which Smollett resided with his sister in I766 was also the residence, prior to 1788, of James Earl of Hopetoun, who in early life had served in the Scots Guards and fought at Minden and of whom it was said that he " maintained the dignity and noble bearing of a Scottish baron with the humility of a Christian, esteeming the religious character of his family to be it's highest distinction. He was an indulgent landlord, a munificent benefactor to the poor, and a friend to all.

"No. 1 St. John Street was the house of Sir Charles Preston, Bart., of Valleyfield, renowned for his gallant defence of Fort St. John against the American general Montgomery, when major of the Cameronians. No. 3 was occupied by Lord Blantyre No. 5 by George Earl of Dalhousie, who was Commissioner to the General Assembly from 1777 to 1782 ; No. 8 was the house of Andrew Carmichael the last Earl of Hyndford.

In No. 10 resided James Ballantyne, the friend, partner, and confidant of Sir Walter Scott-when the Great Unknown-and it was the scene of those assemblies of select and favoured guests to whom " the hospitable printer read snatches of the forth-coming novel, and whetted, while he seemed to gratify, their curiosity by many a shrewd wink and mysterious hint of confidential insight into the literary riddle of the age." No. 10 must have been the scene of many a secret council connected with the publication of the Waverley Novels.

Scott himself, Lockhart who so graphically describes these scenes, Erskine, Terry, Sir William Allan, George Hogarth, W.S. (Mrs. Ballantyne's brother), and others, were frequent guests here. In this house Mrs. Ballantyne died in 1829, and Ballantyne's brother John died there on the 16th of June, 1821. The house is now a Day Home for Destitute Children.

In No. 13 dwelt Lord Monboddo and his beau-tiful daughter, who died prematurely of consumption at Braid on the 17th of June, 1790, and whom Burns-her father's frequent guest there-describes so glowingly in his " Address to Edinburgh
Fair Burnet strikes the adoring eye,
Heaven's beauties on my fancy shine;
I see the sire of Love on high,
And own his work indeed divine!
The fair girl's early death he touchingly com-memorates in a special ode. She was the ornament of the elegant society in which she moved; she was her old father's pride and the comfort of his domestic life. Dr. Gregory, whom she is said to have refused, also lived in St. John Street, as did Lady Suttie, Sinclair of Barrock, Sir David Rae, and Lord Eskgrove, one of the judges who tried the Reformers of 1793, a man of high ability and in-tegrity. He removed thither from the old Assem-bly Close, and lived in St. John Street till his death in 1804.

Among the residents there in 1784 were Sir John Dalrymple and Sir John Stewart of Allanbank, and afterwards the Earl of Aboyne. The first house on the west side of the street was the meeting place of the old Canongate Kilwinning lodge, where Burns was affiliated and crowned as poet laureate, in presence of Lord Napier and many other masonic worthies of the day.

A house a little to the south of this, having a gable to the street and a garden on the south, was, in 1780, the residence of the Earl of Wemyss, whose brother, Lord Elcho, was attainted after the battle of Culloden. A Lady Betty Charteris of this ancient family occupied the farthest house to the south on the same side. She had a romantic and melancholy history ; being thwarted in an affair of the heart, she lay in bed for six-and-twenty years, till removed by death.

No. 18 is the Royal Maternity Hospital, which was founded in 1835, an institution the benefits of which are cordially extended to all who come to it, though many patients are attended at their own homes.

Eastward of St. John's Street is the Bakehouse Close, on the east side of which stands the mansion built and occupied by Sir Archibald Acheson, Bart., of Glencairne, who was one of Charles I.'s Secretaries of State for Scotland. An archway, ornamented, and having a pendant keystone, gives access to the picturesque little quadrangle, three sides of which are formed by his house, which is all built of polished ashlar, with sculptured dormer windows, fine stringcourses, and other architectural details of the period.

The heavily moulded doorway, which measures only three feet by six, is surmounted by the date 1633, and a huge monogram including the initials of himself and his wife Dame Margaret Hamilton. Over all is a cock on a trumpet and scroll, with the motto Vigilantibus. He had been a puisne judge in Ireland, and was first knighted by Charles I., for suggesting the measure of issuing out a commission under the great seal for the sur-render of tithes. He was the friend of Drummond of Hawthornden and of Sir William Alexander Earl of Stirling.

A succession of narrow and obscure alleys follows till we come to the Horse Wynd, on the east side of which lay the royal stables at the time of Darnley's murder. In this street, on the site of a school-house, &c., built by the Duchess of Gordon for the inhabitants of the Sanctuary, stood an old tenement, in one of the rooms on the first floor of which the first rehearsal of Home's " Douglas " took place, and in which the reverend author was assisted by several eminent lay and clerical friends, among whom were Robertson and Hume the historians, Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk and the author taking the leading male parts in the cast, while the ladies were represented by the Rev. Dr. Blair and Professor Fergusson.

A dinner followed in the Erskine Club at the Abbey, when they were joined by the Lords Elibank, Kames, Milton, and Monboddo. To the south of this house was the town mansion of Francas Scott Lord Napier, who inherited that barony At the demise of his grandmother, Lady Napier, in 1706, and assumed the name of Napier, and died at a great old age in 1773.

At its southern end the wynd was closed by an arched gate in the long wall, which ran from the Cowgate Port to the south side of the Abbey Close.

CHAPTER LIV.THE CANONGATE (continued).
Separate or Detached Edifices therein-Sir Walter Scott in the Canongate The Parish Church-How it came to be built-Its Official Position -Its Burying Ground-The Grave of Fergusson-Monument to Soldiers interred there-Eccentric Henry Prentice-The Tolbooth Testimony as to its Age-Its later uses-Magdalene Asylum-- Linen Hall-Moray House-Its Historical Associations-The Winton House -Whiteford House-The Dark Story of Queensberry House.
THE advancing exigencies of the age and the necessity for increased space and modern sanitary improvements have made strange havoc among the old alleys and mansions of the great central street of the court suburb, but there still remain some to which belong many historical and literary associations of an interesting nature. Scott never weary of lingering among them, and recalling the days that were no more. " No funeral hearse," says Lockhart, crept more leisurely than did his landau up the Canongate ; and not a queer, totter-ing gable but recalled to him some long-buried memory of splendour or bloodshed, which, by a few words, he set before the hearer in the reality of life." The Canongate church, a most unpicturesque- looking edifice, of nameless style, with a species of Doric porch, was built in 1688.

The Abbey church of Holyrood had hitherto been the parish church of the Canongate, but in July, 1687, King James VII. wrote to the Privy Council, that the church of the Abbey " was the chapel belonging to his palace of Holyrood, and that the knights of the Most Noble Order of the Thistle, which he had now [re]erected, could not meet in St. Andrews' church ( i.e. the cathedral in Fife), being demolished in the Rebellion-, and so it was necessary for them to have this church, and the Provost of Edinburgh was ordained to see the keys of it given to them. After a long silence," says Fountainhall ' " the Archbishop of Glasgow told that it was a mansal and patrimonial church of the Bishopric of Edinburgh and though the see was vacant, yet it belonged not to the Provost to deliver the keys."

Yet the congregation were ordered to seek accommodation in Lady Yester's church till other could be found for them, and the Canongate church was accordingly built for them, at the expense, says Arnot, of £2,400 sterling. A portion of this consisted Of 20,000 merks, left, in 1649, by Thomas Moodie, a citizen, called by some Sir Thomas Moodie of Sauchtonhall, to re-build the church partially erected on the Castle Hill, and demolished by the English during the siege of 1650. -Two ministers were appointed to the Canongate church. The well-known Dr. Hugh Blair and the late Principal Lee have been among the incumbents.

It is of a cruciform plan, and has the summit of its ogee gable ornamented with the crest of the burgh-the stag's head and cross of King David's legendary adventure-and the arms of Thomas Moodie form a prominent ornament in front of it "In our young days," says a recent writer in a local paper, "the Incorporated Trades, eight in number, occupied pews in the body of the church, these having the names of the occupiers painted on them; and in mid-summer, when the Town Council visited it, as is still their wont, the tradesmen placed large bouquets of flowers on their pews, and as our sittings were near this display, we used to glance with admiration from the flowers up to the great sword standing erect in the front gallery in its splendid scabbard. This life is full of contrasts ; so when the magistrates, in ermine and gold, took their seats behind this sword of state in the front gallery, on the right of the minister, and in the gallery, too, were to be seen congregated the humble paupers from the Canongate poorhouse, now divested of its inmates and turned into a hospital.

Our dear old Canongate, too, had its , Baron Bailie and Resident Bailies before the Reform Bill in 1832 ruthlessly swept them away. Halberdiers, or Lochaber-axe-men, who turned out on all public occasions to grace the officials, were the civic body-guard, together with a body in plain clothes, whose office is on the ground flat under the debtors' jail."

But there still exists the convenery of the Canon-gate, including weavers, dyers, and cloth-dressers, &c., as incorporated by royal charter in 1630, under Charles I.

In the burying-ground adjacent to the church, and which was surrounded by trees in 1765, lie the remains of Dugald Stewart, the great philosopher, of Adam Smith, who wrote the " Wealth of Na-tions " Dr. Adam Fergusson, the historian of the Roman Republic; Dr. Burney, author of the " History of Music;" Dr. Gregory; David Allan Lord Cromarty; and many others who have left their " footprints on the sands of time."

There, too, is the grave of the ill-fated Fergusson the poet, above which is the tombstone placed at the order of Robert Burns by Gowans, a marble-cutter in the Abbey Hill, "to remain for ever sacred to the memory of him whose name it bears," with the inscription Burns penned :-
" HERE LIES ROBERT FERGUSSON.
Born Sept. 5th, 1751. Died October 16th, 1774.
No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay,
No storied urn nor animated bust;
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way
To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust."

Here, on the 16th of June, 1821, Sir Walter Scott attended the funeral of John Ballantyne, and displayed considerable emo-tion. "He cast his eyes along the overhanging line of the Calton Hill, with its gleaming walls and towers, and then turning to the grave again, 'I feel,' he whispered in Lockhart's ear, " I feel as if there would be less sun-shine for me from this day forth.'

In May 1880 there was erected here a monument of rose-coloured granite, twenty-six feet high, by Mr. Ford of the Holyrood Glass Works, "In memory of the soldiers who died in Edinburgh Castle, situated in the Parish of Canongate, interred here from the year 1692 to 1880." It is very ornate, has on its base sculptured trophies, and was inaugurated in presence of General Hope, his staff, and the 71st Highlanders. Prior to its erection the spot where so many soldiers have found their last home was only a large square patch covered by grass.
In the " Domestic Annals " we find recorded the death, ij 1788, of Henry Prentice, by whom the field culture of the potato was first introduced into the county of Edinburgh, in 1746. He had made a little money as a travelling merchant, was an eccentric character, and in 1784 sunk £140 with the managers of the Canongate poorhouse for a weekly subsistence. He had his coffin made, with the date of his birth thereon, 1703, and long had his gravestone conspicuously placed in the burgh churchyard, inscribed thus
Henry Prentice. Died..........
Be not curious to know how I lived
But rather how yourself should die."
He was, however, eventually interred at Restalrig.
At least three tenements of three Storeys each would seem to have occupied the site of the church.
One of the picturesque relics of the past in Edinburgh is the old Canongate Tolbooth, with its sombre tower and spire, Scoto-French corbelled turrets, huge projecting clock, dark-mouthed arch-way, its moulded windows, and many sculptured stones. Above the arch is the inscription ; S.L.B. PATRAE ET POSTERIS 1591. and in a niche are the usual insignia of the burgh, the stag's head and cross, with the motto SIC ITUR AD ASTRA, while the appropriate motto ESTO FIDUS surmounts the inner doorway to the courthouse. At the south-east comer is the old shaft of the cross and pillory, near the entrance to the police station.
Altogether it is a fine example of the polished edifices of the reign of James VI. In the tower are two bells, one inscribed SOLI DEO HONOR ET GLORIA, 1608, and a larger one, cast in 1796. Between the stately windows of the Council Hall is a pediment sur-mounted by a great thistle and the legend:-
J.R. 6. JUSTITIA ET PIETAS VALIDE SUNT PRINCIPIS ARCES.

Herein the magistrates who came as successors of the abbots of Holyrood as over-lords of the burgh, held weekly courts for the punishment of offenders, the adjustment of small debts, and the affairs of the little municipality. That the building is older than any of the dates upon it, or that it had a predecessor, the following extracts from the " Burgh Records " attest
Vndecimo decembris, an: 1567.

The quhilk day it was concludit, be the Baillies and Counsall, to pursew quhatsomever person that is known and brutit wt the braking of the Tolbooth of this burcht, the tyme of the furth letting of Janet Robertsoun, being werdit within the samyn, &c."

In 1572 the following item occurs:-
"To sax pynonis (pioneers?) att the Baillies command for taking doun of the lintel-stone of the Auld Tolbooth window-iij-s vi-d."
In 1654 several Scottish prisoners of war, confined here under a guard of Cromwell's soldiers, effected their escape by rending their blankets and sheets into strips. In January, 1675, the captain of the Edinburgh Tolbooth complained to the Lords of Council that his brother official in the Canongate used to set debtors at liberty at his own free will, or by consent of the creditor by whom they were imprisoned without permission accorded.

After the erection of the Calton gaol this edifice was used for the incarceration of debtors alone ; and the number therein in October, 1834, was only seventeen, so little had it come to be wanted for that purpose.

Within a court adjoining the Tolbooth was the old Magdalene Asylum, instituted in 1797 for the reception of about sixty females; but the founda-tion-stone of a new one was laid in October, 18O5, by the Provost, Sir William Fettes, Bart., in presence of the clergy and a great concourse of citizens. In the stone was deposited a sealed bottle, containing various papers relating to the rise, progress, and present state of the asylum."
This institution was afterwards trans-ferred to Dalry.

A little below St. John Street, within a court, stood the old British Linen Hall, opened in 1766 by the Board of Manufactures for the Sale and Custody of Scottish Linens-an institution to be treated of at greater length when we come to its new home on the Earthen Mound. Among the curious booth-holders therein was "old John Guthrie, latterly of the firm of Guthrie and Tait, Nicholson Street," who figures in " Kay's Portraits," and whose bookstall in the hall-after he ceased being a travelling chapman-was the resort of all the curious book collectors of the time, till he removed to the Nether Bow.
A little below the Canongate Church there was still standing a house, occupied in 1761 by Sir James Livingstone of Glentenan, which pos-sessed stables, hay-lofts, and a spacious flower -garden.

By far the most important private edifice still remaining in this region of ancient grandeur and modern squalor is that which is usually styled Moray House, being a portion of the entailed pro-perty of that noble family, in whose possession it remained exactly 200 years, having become the property of Margaret Countess of Moray in 1645 by an arrangement with her younger sister, Anne Home, then Countess of Lauderdale, by whom the mansion was built. "It is old and it is magni-ficent, but its age and magnificence are both dif-ferent from those of the lofty piled-up houses of the Scottish aristocracy of the Stuart dynasty."

Devoid of the narrow, suspicious apertures, barred and loopholed, which connect old Scottish houses with the external air, the entrances and proportions of this house are noble, spacious, and pleasing, though the exterior has little orna-ment save the balcony, on enormous trusses, pro-jecting into the street, with ornate entablatures over their great windows and the stone spires of its gateway. There are two fine rooms within, both of them dome-roofed and covered with de-signs in bas-relief.

The initials of its builder, M. H., surmounted by a coronet, are sculp-tured on the south win-dow, and over another on the north are the lions of Home and Dudley impaled in a lozenge, for she was the daughter of Lord Dud-ley Viscount Lyle, and then the widow of Alex-ander first Earl of Home, who accompanied James VI. into England. She erected the house some years before the coronation of Charles I. at Edinburgh. in 1633 ; and she contributed largely to the enemies of his crown, as appears by a repayment to her by the English Parlia-ment of £70,000 advanced by her in aid of the Covenanters; and hence, no doubt, it was, that when Cromwell gained his victory over the Duke of Hamilton in the north of England, we are told, when the (then) Marquis of Argyle conducted Cromwell and Lambert, with their army, to Edinburgh they kept their quarters at the Lady Home's house in the Canongate, according to Guthrie, and there, adds Sir James Turner, they came to the terrible conclusion " that there was a necessitie to take away the king's life; " so that if these old walls had a tongue they might reveal dark conferences connected with the most dreadful events of that sorrowful time.

In con-clave with Cromwell and Argyle were the Earls of Loudon and Lothian, the Lords Arbuthnot, Elcho, and Burleigh, with Blair, Dixon, Guthrie, and other Puritans. Here, two years subsequently, occurred, on the balcony, the cruel and ungenerous episode connected with the fallen Montrose, amid the joyous banquetings and revelry on the occasion of Lord Lorne's marriage-that Lorne better known as the luckless Earl of Argyle-with Lady Mary Stuart, of the House of Moray.

In the highest terrace of the old garden an ancient thorn-tree was pointed out as having, been planted by Queen Mary-a popular delusion, born of the story that the house had belonged to her brother, the subtle Regent; but there long remained the old stone summer-house, surmounted by two greyhounds-the Moray supporters-wherein, after a flight from " the Union cellar," many of the sig-natures were affixed to the Act of Union, while the cries of the exasperated mob rang in the streets without the barred gates.

When James VII, so rashly urged those measures in 1686 which were believed to be a prelude to the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy, under the guise of toleration, a new Scottish ministry was formed, but chiefly consisting of members of the king's own faith. Among these was the proprietor of this old house, Alexander Earl of Moray, a recent convert from Protestantism, then Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament, and as such the representative of royalty in festive hall as well as the Senate and his mansion, being in the very centre of what was then the most aris-tocratic quarter of the city, was admirably suited for his court receptions, all the more so that about that period the spacious gardens on the south were, like those of Heriot's Hospital, a kind of public promenade or lounging place, as would appear chiefly from a play called "'the Assembly," written by the witty Dr. Pitcairn in 1692.

The union of the kingdoms is the next historical event connected with Moray House; and that much of the intrigue and discussion, and of the foul and degrading bribery connected with that event took place within its walls, may safely be inferred from the fact that it was the residence of the Earl of Seafield, then Lord High Chancellor, and one of the commissioners for the negotiation of the treaty, by which he pocketed £490, paid by the Earl of Godolphin; and he it was who, on giving the royal assent by touching the Act of Union with the sceptre, said, with a brutal laugh, " There's an end of an auld sang."
From those days Moray House ceased, like many others, to be the scene of state pageantries. For a time it became the office of the British Linen Company's Bank. Then the entail was broken by a clause in one of the Acts of the North British Railway; and since 1847 it has fortunately become the property of the Free Church of Scotland, by whom it is now used as a training college or nor-mal school, managed by a rector and very efficient staff.

On the same side, but to the eastward, is Milton House, a large and handsome mansion, though heavy and sombre in style, built in what had been originally the garden of Lord Roxburghe's house, or a portion thereof, during the eighteenth century, by Andrew Fletcher of Milton, raised to the bench in 1724 in succession to the famous Lord Fountainhall, and who remained a senator of the Court of Session till his death. He was the nephew of the noble and patriotic Fletcher of Salton, and was an able coadjutor with his friend Archibald the great Duke of Argyle, during whose administration he exercised a wise control over the usually-abused Government patronage in Scotland. He sternly discouraged all informers, and was greatly esteemed for the mild and gentle manner in which he used his authority when Lord Justice Clerk after the battle of Culloden.

From the drawing-room windows on the south a spacious garden extended to the back of the Canongate, and beyond could be seen the hill of St. Leonard and the stupendous craigs. Its walls are still decorated with designs and landscapes, leaving rich floral borders painted in distemper, and rich stucco ceilings are among the decorations, and " interspersed amid the ornamental borders there are various grotesque figures, which have the appearance," says Wilson, " of being copies from an illuminated missal of the fourteenth century. They represent a cardinal, a monk, a priest, other churchmen, painted with great humour and drollery of attitude and expression. They so en-tirely differ from the general character of the com-position, that their insertion may be conjectured to have originated in a whim of Lord Milton's, which the artist has contrived to execute without sacri-ficing the harmony of his design."
Lord Milton was the guardian of the family of Susannah Countess of Eglinton for many years, and took a warm and friendly interest in her beau-tiful girls after the death of the earl in 1729 ; and the terms of affectionate intimacy in which he stood with them are amusingly shown in " The petition of the six vestal virgins of Eglinton," signed by them all, and addressed " To the honourable Lord Mil-ton, at his lodgings, Edinburgh" in 1735 -a curious and witty production, printed in the " Eglinton Memorials."

Lord Milton died at his house of Brunstane, near Musselburgh, on the 13th of December, 1766,. aged seventy-four. Four years after that event the Scots Magazine for 1770 gives us a curious account of a remarkable mendicant that had long haunted his gates:-
"Edinburgh Sept. 29th. A gentle-man, struck with the uncommon good appearance of an elderly man who generally sits bareheaded under a dead wall in the Canongate, opposite to, Lord Milton's house, requesting alms of those who pass, had the curiosity to inquire into his. history, and learned the following melancholy ac-count of him. He is an attainted baronet, named Sir John Mitchell of Pitreavie, and had formerly a very affluent estate. In the early part of his life he was a captain in the Scots Greys, but was broke for sending a challenge to the Duke of Marlborough, in consequence of some illiberal reflections thrown out by his Grace against the Scottish nation.

Queen Anne took so personal a part in his prose-cution that he was condemned to transportation for the offence and this part of his sentence was, with difficulty, remitted at the particular instance of John Duke of Argyle. Exposed, in the hun-dredth year of his age, to the inclemencies of the weather, it is hoped the humane and charitable of this city will attend to his distresses, and relieve him from a situation which appears too severe a, punishment for what, at worst, can be termed his spirited imprudence. A subscription for his annual support is opened at Balfour's coffee-house, where those who are disposed to contribute towards it will receive every satisfaction concerning the disposal of their charity and the truth of the foregoing relation."
The aged mendicant referred to may have been a knight, but the name of Mitchell is not to be found in the old list of Scottish baronets, and Pit-reavie belonged to the Wardlaws.

In later years Milton House was occupied as a Catholic school, under the care of the Sisters of Charity, who, with their pupils, attracted consider-able attention in 1842, on the occasion of the first visit of Queen Victoria to Holyrood, from whence they strewed flowers before her up the ancient street. it was next a school for deaf and dumb, anon a temporary maternity hospital, and then the pro-perty of an engineering firm.

Where Whiteford House stands now, in Edgar's map for 1765 there are shown two blocks of buildings (with a narrow passage between, and a garden 150 feet long) marked, "Ruins of the Earl of Winton's house," a stately edifice, which, no doubt, had fallen into a state of dilapidation from its extreme antiquity and abandonment after the attainder of George, fourth Earl of Winton, who was taken prisoner in the fight at Preston in 1715, -but who, after being sentenced to death, escaped to Rome, where he died in 1749, without issue, ac-cording to Sir Robert Douglas ; and, of course, is the same house that has been mentioned in history as the Lord Seton's lodging " in the Canongate " wherein on his arrival from England, "Henrie Lord Dernlie, eldest son of Matho, erle of Lennox," resided when, prior to his marriage, he came to Edinburgh on the 13th of February, 1565, as stated in the " Diurnal of Occurrents."

In the same house was lodged, in 1582, accord-ing to Moyse, Mons. De Menainville, who came as an extra ambassador from France, with instruc-tions to join La Motte Fenelon. He landed at Burntisland on the 18th of January, and came to Edinburgh where he had an audience with James VI. on the 23rd, to the great alarm of the clergy, -who dreaded this double attempt to revive French influence in Scottish affairs. One Mr. James Lawson " pointed out the French ambassaye" -as the mission of the King of Babylon, and charac-terised Menainville as the counterpart of the -blaspheming Rabshakeh.
Upon the 10th February, says Moyse, "La Motte having received a satisfying answer to his commis-sion, with a great banquet at Archibald Stewart's lodgings in Edinburgh took his journey homeward, and called at Seaton by the way. The said Mon-sieur Manzeville remained still here, and lodging -at my Lord Seaton's house in the Canongate, had daily access to the king's majesty, to whom he imparted his negotiations at all times.

"In this house died, of hectic fever, in December, 1638, Jane, Countess of Sutherland, grand-daughter -of the first Earl of Winton. She "was interred at the collegiat churche of Setton, without any funerall ceremoncy, by night."

In front of this once noble mansion, in which Scott lays some of the scenes of the "Abbot," there sprang up a kind of humble tavern, built chiefly of lath and plaster, known as "Jenny Ha's," from Mrs. Hall, its landlady, famous for her claret. Herein Gay, the poet, is said to "have boosed ,during his short stay in Edinburgh; " and to this tavern it was customary for gentlemen to adjourn after dinner parties, to indulge in claret from the butt.

On the site of the Seton mansion, and surrounded by its fine old gardens, was raised the present edifice known as Whiteford House, the residence of -Sir John Whiteford, Bart., of that ilk and Balloch-myle, a locality in Ayrshire, on which the muse of Burns has conferred celebrity, and whose father is said to have been the prototype of Sir Arthur Wardour in the "Antiquary." Sir John was one or the early patrons of Burns, who had been introduced to him by Dr. Mackenzie, and the grateful bard never forgot the kindness he accorded to him. The failure of Douglas, Heron, & Co., in whose bank he had a fatal interest, compelled him to dispose of beautiful Ballochmyle, after which he resided permanently in Whiteford House, where he died in 1803. To the last he retained a military bearing, having served in the army, and been a major in 1762.

Latterly, and for many years, Whiteford House was best known as the residence of Sir William Macleod Bannatyne, who was raised to the bench on the death of Lord Swinton, in 1799, and was long remembered as a most pleasing example of the old gentleman of Edinburgh "before its antique mansions and manners had fallen under the ban of modern fashion."

One of the last survivors of the Mirror Club, in private life his benevolent and amiable qualities of head and heart, with his rich stores of literary and historical anecdote, endeared him to a numerous and highly distinguished circle of friends.

Robert Chambers speaks of breakfasting with him in Whiteford House so late as 1832, "on which occasion the venerable old gentleman talked as familiarly of the levees of the sous-ministre for Lord Bute in the old villa at the Abbey Hill as I could have talked of the Canning administration, and even recalled, as a fresh picture of his memory, his father drawing on his boots to go to make interest in London on behalf of some men in trouble for the '45, particularly his own brother-in-law, the Clanranald of that day." He died at Whiteford House on the 30th of November, 1833, in the ninety-first year of his age. His mansion was latterly used as a type-foundry.

On the south side of the street, nearly opposite the site of the Seton lodging, the residence of the Dukes of Queensberry still towers up, a huge, dark, gloomy, and quadrangular mass, the scene of much stately life, of low corrupt intrigue, and in one instance of a horrible tragedy.

It was built by Lord Halton on land belonging to the Lauderdale family; and by a passage in Lord Fountainhall's folios would seem to have been sold by him, in June, 1686, to William first Duke of Queensberry and Marquis of Dumfries-shire, Lord High Treasurer and President of the Council, a noted money-lender and land-acquirer, who built the castle of Drumlanrig, and at the exact hour of whose death, in 1695, it is said, a Scottish skipper, being in Sicily, saw one day a coach and six driving to flaming Mount Etna, while a dia-bolical voice was heard to exclaim, " Way for the Duke of Drumlanrig! " He died in Queensberry House.

His daughter, Anne Countess of Wemyss, died a miserable death on the 16th of February, 1700. She set fire accidentally to her apron, " night-rail, and stenikirk. Her nose was burnt off and her eyes burnt out. Opening her mouth to call, the flame went in and burnt her tongue and throat."
His son James, the second duke, resigned all his many appointments under James VII., in-cluding the command of the Scots Horse Guards, and was received by William of Orange with great cordiality. He made him a captain in his Dutch Guards, and Lord of the Bedchamber and Treasury,. He was one of the commissioners for the treaty of Union, to achieve which the sum of £12,325 was paid hail by the Earl of Godolphin, and then he fled from Edinburgh but was elected as one of the peers to represent Scotland. On his return to London he was met by a cavalcade of noblemen and gentlemen, and was preceded to his house at Kensington by forty coaches and four hundred horsemen. Next day he was presented to the queen, who, to reward his services and servility, created him Duke of Dover, Marquis of Beverley, and Baron Ripon.

Connected with his residence in Queensberry House, against which the whole fury and male-dictions of the mobs were directed at the time of the Union, there is a tale of awful mystery and horror, His eldest son, James Earl of Drumlinrig, is simply stated in the old peerages " to have died young." It is now proved, however, that he was an idiot of the most wretched kind, rabid and gluttonous as a wild animal, and grew to an enormous stature, as his leaden and un-ornamented coffin in the family vault at Durisdeer attests at this day. This monstrous and unfortunate creature was always confined in a ground-floor room of the western wing of Queensberry House; and "till within these few years the boards, still remained by which the windows of the' dreadful receptacle were darkened to prevent the idiot from looking out or being seen."

On the day the Treaty of Union was passed all Edinburgh crowded to the vicinity of the Parlia-ment House to await the issue of the final debate, and the whole household of the duke-the High Commissioner-went thither en masse for that pur-pose, and perhaps to prevent him from being torn to pieces by the exasperated people, and among them went the valet whose duty it was to watch and attend the Earl of Drumlanrig.

Hearing all unusually still in the vast house, the latter contrived to break out of his den, and roamed wildly from room to room till certain savoury odours drew him into the great kitchen, where a little turnspit sat quietly on a stool by the fire. He seized the boy, took the meat from the fire, stripped and spitted him, and he was found devouring the half-roasted body when the duke returned with his train from his political triumph, to find dire horror awaiting him. "The common people, among whom the dreadful tale soon spread, in spite of the duke's endeavours to suppress it, said that it was a judgment upon him for his odious share in the Union. The story runs that the duke. who had previously regarded his dreadful offspring with no eye of affection, immediately ordered the creature to be smothered. But this is a mistake ; the idiot is known to have died in England, and to have survived his father many years, though he did not succeed him upon his death in 171I, when the titles devolved upon Charles, a younger brother."

The latter, who was born in Queensberry House, had been created Earl of Solway in 1706, says Douglas, " when very young, his elder brother being then alive." He married Catharine Hyde, the second daughter of Henry Earl of Clarendon and rochester, and they frequently resided in the old Canongate mansion. The duchess was altogether an extraordinary woman, whose eccentricity bordered on madness, and, indeed, prior to her marriage she had been confined in a strait-waist--coat. Her beauty has been celebrated coarsely by Pope, and her irrepressible temper by Prior:-

Thus Kitty, beautiful and young,
And wild as colt untamed,
Bespoke the fair from whom she sprung,
By little rage inflamed:
Inflamed with rage at sad restraint,
Which wise mamma ordained;
And sorely vexed to play the saint
Whilst wit and beauty reigned,"

After the duke and duchess had embroiled them-selves with the Court in 1729, in consequence of patronising the poet Gay, they came to Queensberry House, and brought him with them. Tradition used to indicate an attic in an old mansion opposite, as the place where--appropriate abode of a poet--Gay wrote the " Beggar's Opera "--" an entirely gratuitous assumption," says Mr. Chambers. " In the history of his writings nothing of consequence occurs at this time. He had finished the second part of the opera some time before, and after his return to the south he is found engaged in new writing a damned play, which he wrote several years before, called " The Wife of Bath," a task which he -accomplished while living with the Duke of Queens-berry in Oxfordshire, during the ensuing months of August, September, and October."

The Duchess Catharine disliked the Scots and their manners, particularly the use of a knife in lieu of a fork, on which she would scream out and beseech them not to cut their throats. " To the lady I live with," wrote Gay to Swift in 1729, " I owe my life and fortune. Think of her with respect, value and esteem her as I do, and never more despise a fork with three prongs." When in Scot-land she always dressed herself as a peasant-girl, to ridicule the stately dresses and demeanour of the Scottish dames who visited Queensberry House or Drumlanrig, and this freak of costume led to her being roughly repelled at a review. Her eldest son, the Earl of Drumlanrig, was altogether mad, and contracted himself to one lady while he mar-ried another, a daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun, He served two campaigns under the Earl of Stair, and commanded two battalions of Scots in the Dutch service.

But in 1754 the family malady proved so strong for him, that during a journey to London he rode on before the coach in which the duchess travelled, and shot himself with one of his pistols. It was given out that it had gone off by accident. His brother Charles, after narrowly escaping the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755, died in the following year.

On the death of their father, in 1778, the title and estates devolved on his cousin, the Earl of March, an old debauchee, better known as "Old Q." In his time, and before it, Queensberry House had other occupants than the Douglases, In 1747 the famous Marshal Earl of Stair died there; and in 1784 it was the residence of the Right Hon, James Montgomery of Stanhop, Lord Chief Baron of Exchequer-the first Scotsman who held that office after the establishment of the Court at the Union. Prior to his removal to Queensberry House (of which the duke gave him gratuitous use) he had occupied the third flat of the Bishop's Land, formerly occupied by the Lord President Dundas.

In 1801 the blasé "Old Q. " ordered Queens-berry House to be stripped of its decorations, and sold. With fifty-eight fire rooms, and a noble gallery seventy feet long, besides a spacious garden, it was offered at the singularly low upset price of £900, and was bought by Government as a barrack. It is now, and has been since 1853, a House of Refuge for the Destitute, in which upwards of 12,000 persons are relieved every year, or an average of thirty-three nightly for the twelvemonth, while during the same period nearly 40,000 meals of broth and bread are issued from the soup kitchen. A very handsome building, in baronial style, called Queensberry Lodge, adjoins it, for the reception and treatment of inebriates-but ladies only.

CHAPTER LV. THE CANONGATE (concluded).
Lothian Hut- Lord Palmerston-St. Thomas's Hospital -The Tennis Court and its Theatre-Queen Mary's Bath-The Houses of Croft an-Righ and Clockmill.

IN the map of the city engraved in 1787 for the quarto edition of " Arnot's History " there is shown, on the west side of the Horse Wynd, adjoining the Abbey Close, an edifice called Lothian Hut, surrounded by trees. This was the small but magnificently finished town mansion of the Lothian family, and was built by William, the third Marquis, about the year 1750, when Lord Clerk Register of Scotland, and who for some years had been Commissioner to the General Assembly. In this house he died, 28th July, 1767, as recorded in the Scots Magazine, and was succeeded by his son, Major -General the Earl of Ancrum, Colonel of the 11h Light Dragoons (now Hussars). His second son, Lord Robert, had been killed at Culloden.

His marchioness, Margaret, the daughter of Sir Thomas Nicholson, Bart., of Kempnay, who sur-vived him twenty years, resided in Lothian Hut till her death. It was afterwards occupied by the dowager of the fourth Marquis, Lady Caroline D'Arcy, who was only daughter of Robert Earl of Holderness, and great-granddaughter of Charles Louis, the Elector Palatine, a lady whose character is remembered traditionally to have been both grand and amiable. Latterly the Hut was the residence of Professor Dugald Stewart, who, about the end of the last century, entertained there many English pupils of high rank. Among them, per-haps the most eminent was Henry Temple, after-wards Lord Palmerston, whose education, com-menced at Harrow, was continued at the University of Edinburgh When he re-visited the latter city in 1865, during his stay he was made aware that an aged woman, named Peggic Forbes, who had been a servant with Dugald Stewart at Lothian Hut, was still alive, and residing at No. 12, Rankeillor Street. There the great statesman visited her, and expressed the pleasure he felt at renewing the acquaintance of the old domestic.

Lothian Hut, the scene of Dugald Stewart's most important ' literary labours, was pulled down in 1825, to make room for a brewery ; but a house of the same period, at the south-west corner of the Horse Wynd, bears still the name of Lothian Vale.

A little to the eastward of the present White Horse hostel and immediately adjoining the Water Gate, stood the Hospital of St. Thomas, founded in 1541 by George Crichton, Bishop of Dunkeld, " dedicated to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the saints." It consisted of an almshouse and chapel, the bedesmen of which were " to celebrate the founder's anniversary obit. by solemnly singing in the choir of Holyrood church yearly, on the day of his death, the Placebo and Dirige for the repose of his soul " and the soul of the King of Scotland " Special care," says Arnot, " was taken in allotting money for providing candles to be lighted during the anniversary mass of requiem, and the number and size of the tapers were fixed with a precision which shows the importance in which these circumstances were held by the founder. The number of masses, paternosters, ave-marias, and credos, to be said by the chaplain and bedes-men is distinctly ascertained."

The patronage of the institution was vested by the founder in himself and a certain series of re-presentatives named by him.
In 16l7, with the consent of David Crichton of Lugton, the patron, who had retained possession of the endowments, the magistrates of the Canongate purchased the chapel and almshouse from the chaplains and bedesmen, and converted the insti-tution into a hospital for the poor of the burgh. Over the entrance they placed the Canongate arms, supported by a pair of cripples, an old man and woman, with the inscription-
HELP HERE THE POORE, AS ZE WALD GOD DID ZOV. JUNE 19, 16l7-

The magistrates of the Canongate sold the patron-age of the institution in 1634 to the Kirk Session, by whom its revenues " were entirely embezzled ;" by 1747 the buildings were turned into coach-houses, and in 1787 were pulled down, and re-placed by modern houses of hideous aspect.
On the opposite side of the Water Gate was the Royal Tennis Court, the buildings of which are very distinctly shown in Gordon's map of 1647-. Maitland says it was anciently called the Catchpel, from Cache, a game now called Fives, a favourite amusement in Scotland as early as the reign of James IV. The house, a long, narrow building, with a court, after being a weavers' workhouse, was burned down in 1771, and rebuilt in the tasteless fashion of that period ; but the locality is full of interest, as being connected not only with the game of tennis, as played there by the Duke of Albany, Law the great financial schemer, and others, but the early and obscure history of the stage in Scotland.

In 1554 there was a "litill farsche and play maid be William Lauder," and acted before the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise, for which he was rewarded by two silver cups. Where it was acted is not stated. Neither are we told where was per-formed another play, " made by Robert Simple " at Edinburgh before the grim Lord Regent and others of the nobility in 1567, and for which the author was paid £66 13s- 4d.

The next record of a post-Reformation theatre is in the time of James VI. when several companies came from London for the amusement of the court, including one of which Shakspere was a member, though his appearance cannot be substantiated. In 1599 the company of English comedians was interdicted by the clergy and Kirk Session, though their performances, says Spottiswoode in his " Church History," were licensed by king!

This interdict was annulled by proclama-tion at the Market Cross. ln 1601 an English company , headed by Laurence Fletcher, "comedian to his Majestie," was again in Scotland and Mr. Charles Knight, in his" Life of Shakspere," con-cludes that the illustrious dramatist must have been in Scotland with Fletcher, and thus sketched out the plan of his great Scottish tragedy. Accord-ing to the same testimony, the name of Shak-spere has been invariably associated with the Tennis Court Theatre ; but from the departure of James VI. to England, in 16O3, till the arrival of his grandson the Duke of Albany and York, in 1680, there are doubts if anything like a play was performed in the Edinburgh of that gloomy period; though Sir George Mackenzie mentions that in June, 1669, "Thomas Sydserf, having pursued Mungo Murray for invading him in his Playhouse, &c., that invasion was not punished as hamesucken, but with imprisonment;" and a " Playhouse," kept at Edinburgh in the same month, when a thousand prisoners, after Bothwell Bridge, were confined in the Greyfriars Churchyard, is referred to in the Acts of Council in 1679.

Some kind of a drama, called " Marciano, or The Discovery," was produced on the festival of St. John by Sir Thomas Sydserff (the same referred to), before His Grace the Earl of Rothes, High Commissioner, at his court at Holyrood, and soon after the theatre in the Tennis Court was in the zenith of its brief prosperity, in defiance of the city pulpits. 'There, on the 15th November, 1681 " being the Queen of Brittain's birthday," as Fountainhall records, while bonfires blazed in the city and salutes were fired by cannon, there was performed, " before their Royall Hynesses," a comedy, called " Mithridates, King of Pontus," wherein the future Queen Anne and the ladies of honour were the only actresses.

The drama vanished from Scotland at the Revolution; and though a concert was given in 1705 in the Tennis Court, under the patronage of the Duke of Argyle, and " The Spanish Friar" is said to have been performed there before the members of the Union Parliament, no more is heard of it till 1714, when " Macbeth " was played at the Tennis Court, in presence of a brilliant array of Scottish nobles and noblesse, after an archery meeting. On this occasion many present called for the song, ." The king shall enjoy his own again," while others opposed the demand; where-upon swords were resorted to, and-as an antici-pation of the battle of Dunblane-a regular mélé enstud.

A little to the north-eastward of the Tennis Court stands the singularly picturesque, but squat little corbelled tower called Queen Mary's Bath, in what was of old the open garden ground attached to the palace. The tradition of its having the Queen's bath is of considerable antiquity. Pennant records an absurd story to the effect that she was wont to use a bath of white wine ; but the spring of limpid water that now wells under the earthen floor attests that she resorted to no other expedient than aqua pura to exalt or shield her charms. And the story is also referred to in a poem called " Craigmillar," published about 1770.

" That chamber where the queen, whose charms divine
Made wond'ring nations own the power of love,
Oft bathed her snowy limbs in sparkling wine,
Now proves a lonely refuge for the dove."
In 1789, when a house was built adjoining this edifice, a turret staircase that led to the roof was demolished, and in the sarking thereof was found a richly-inlaid dagger of ancient workmanship, which was, not without much reason, supposed to have belonged to one of Rizzio's murderers, some of whom made their escape through the royal gardens in that quarter. This house was entirely removed when the bath was completely re-paired in 1852, and its ancient surroundings in some degree restored.

The old-fashioned suburb at the Abbey Hill that rose around the northern skirts of the palace, lies beyond what was of old the Artillery Park and this little tower, and pos-sesses still some mansions that formed the residence of Scottish courtiers in the days of other years. The most remarkable of these is the ancient house of Croft-an-Righ, or the Field of the King. Corbelled turrets adorn its southern gable, and dormer windows its northern front, while many of the ceilings exhibit elaborate stucco details, including several royal insignia. Traditionally this house, which, in 1647, was approached from the Abbey burying-ground by an arched gate between two lodges, has been erroneously associated with Mary of Guise; but is supposed to be the mansion that was purchased by William Graham, the last Earl of Airth, who died in 1694, from the Earl of Linlithgow. By him it is described as being situated at the back of Holy-rood, and having before belonged to Lord Elphinstone.

The "History of Holyrood," published in 1821, states that the old house of Croft-an-Righ, an edifice of the sixteenth century, had been the residence of the Regent Moray, and with its garden was gifted, along with several of the adjoining properties, by James VI. to a favourite servant of the name of French."
For repairing the house and making it suitable for the keeper of the royal gardens, Government paid £420 in 1859. At the same time £840 was paid for the re-purchase of Queen Mary's Bath, with the tenement thereunto adjoining and now removed.

Eastward of Croft-an--Righ House, there stood, until it was removed as unsightly, another old mansion, gloomy, dark, and quadrangular, named the Clockmill House, sur-rounded by ancient trees. Long anterior to its existence the locality is referred to in a process before the Supreme Court, 7th May, 1569, concerning the privilege of sanctuary " fra the Girth Corse doun to the Clokisrwne Mylne." Before that tribunal (as quoted from the Acta Dom Concili et Sessionis), it is stated that "Our Soverane Lordis predecessouris, Kingis of Scot-land, for the tyme, has of auld, at the foundation of the said Abbey of Halirudhouse, grantit the privilige of the Girth (protection and sanctuary) to the hail boundis of the said Abbey, and to that part of the burghe of the Cannogait, fra the Girth Corse (cross) down to the Clokisrwne Mylne, quhilk privilige has bene inviolabhe observit to all manner of personis cumond wytin the boundes aforsaid, not committand the crymes expresslie exceptit for all maner of girth, and that in all tymes bigane past memorie of man.