II.
The house, which fronts us as we approach the termination of the drive, is a modern edifice, built by Sir James, the third Baronet, in 1761, after he had returned from a residence in Italy, saturated with classical ideas. It was erected entirely from the Baronet’s own designs; but, doubtless, these were produced under the influence of Robert Adam, the celebrated architect, whose sister had been married in 1753 to John Clerk, author of the “Naval Tactics,” Sir James’s younger brother. Consequently the present house does not possess the interest of having been the meeting-place of Allan Ramsay, who died in 1758, and his friends and patrons of the Clerk family; an association erroneously assigned to the present structure by Dr. Daniel Wilson in his “Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh,” a work which contains many curious particulars regarding the Clerks, and especially of the Baron, the second Baronet. The house in which the poet and the antiquary spent together many a genial evening of “honest talk and wholesome wine” no longer exists. It occupied a site close behind the present mansion, on whose completion it was removed. Some of the old cellars remain under the earthen mound to the south, and are still in use. We may sigh a little over the memories and associations of old Penicuik House, over the vanished picturesqueness of its “crowstep” gables and its circular corkscrew turrets, of which a shadow still survives in the sketch by John Clerk, reproduced in the Bannatyne Club issue of his etchings; but doubtless the present mansion is vastly more commodious and in better harmony with modern ideas of comfort than was its predecessor, and it takes its place excellently in the landscape; its effect not greatly marred by the more recent wings added by Bryce in 1857-8; its straight perpendicular and horizontal lines contrasting excellently with the flowing curves of ground and trees, in that fashion which Turner recognised and loved, and emphasised so delightfully in his early drawings of four-square English mansions set amid the rounded forms of wood and hill and stream.
As we turn our eye towards the offices of Penicuik House, which are situated a little to our right, two objects of rather singular aspect arrest our attention. Regarding one of them—a tall, very ecclesiastical-looking steeple garnished with the usual large gilded clock-face, which in the oddest fashion surmounts the stables—a curious bit of tradition lingers in the neighbourhood. It seems that Sir James designed not only his own mansion, but also the parish church of Penicuik. When the plan of the latter, however, was submitted to the heritors or kirk-session, it appears that they would have none of the steeple,—for what reason is not recorded, whether it was that their architectural tastes did not chime in with those of the Baronet, or that they considered it as too decorative a feature to be in accordance with severe Presbyterian principles, or whether, finally, the expense was too great for their pockets. Declined, at any rate, the steeple was, so local tradition affirms. But Sir James was by no means willing that the structure which his brain had devised should only be dimly visible upon paper, and never take substantial embodiment in stone and lime; so he reared it, at his own proper cost, in his stable-yard, where it still forms so imposing and unusual a feature.
The other curious erection is a rounded dome on the opposite side of the court, raising its height above the stable buildings. This is nothing less than an accurate reproduction of “Arthur’s O’on,” which formerly existed on the north bank of the Carron, a mile and a half from Falkirk, believed by “Sandy Gordon,” the great antiquarian friend of the second Baronet of Penicuik, to be a Roman Sacellum, or chapel in which military standards and insignia were deposited, and fully described and discussed in his “Itinerarium Septentrionale,” that precious folio which Oldbuck had captured and was beginning to examine when we make his acquaintance in the opening chapters of “The Antiquary.”
Turning, however, to the house itself, we may remark, as we enter, that the ornaments of the front—the stone vases that break the sky-line, and the graceful “Chippendale” shield of arms, furnished with the decorative, not heraldic, adjunct of wings—were designed by John Clerk of Eldin, author of the “Naval Tactics,” a cadet of the family. Also that the grisaille painting on the lower side of the roof of the raised portico was executed—so James Jackson’s “Account of the Parish of Penicuik” informs us—by Alexander Runciman, when he was an apprentice with John Norie, the well-known decorative painter and landscapist of Edinburgh, and that it was the ability displayed in this work that induced Sir James to assist in sending the youth for four or five years to Rome, whence he returned to execute the mural paintings of the St. Margaret Staircase and the Ossian Hall of Penicuik House. The motto, from Cicero’s De Officiis with which the portal is inscribed, was chosen by the Earl of Perth, grandson of John Drummond, the attainted Earl of Melfort, a close friend of Sir James’s; and a letter regarding it may be transcribed, as a quaint example of the stately epistles of our ancestors.
“Sir,—Upon considering the manner of your House of Pennicueik, where I had the pleasure of beeing some days in November last, and admiring the Architecture of it, after 40 years ponderating (sic) in my mind a Precept of Cicero’s,
Non Domo Dominus, sed Domino Domus honestanda est,
found for the first time that it was obtemperate, and should wish for leave to inscribe it on Pennicueik House as the real sentiment of
Your most obedient
Servant and Cousin
Perth.
“Lundin House, Ap. 22, 1771.”