[400] Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 244.
[401] He died on January 28, 1836.
[402] Humphry Clinker, ii. 224. Lodging-house keepers are entered in the Edinburgh Directory as Room-Setters and Boarders. Some were both, others only Room-Setters.
[403] Johnson repeated these lines with great emotion at the excellent inn at Chapel-House in Oxfordshire. Boswell’s Johnson, ii. 452.
[404] Since writing the above I have learnt with great pleasure that this interesting but ruinous old building will not only be preserved, but preserved to good uses. It has been purchased by Dr. A. H. F. Barbour and his sister Mrs. Whyte, and by them presented to the Edinburgh Social Union. It will be put into a state of thorough repair, and let out to poor tenants on the plan followed by Miss Octavia Hill in London. I am informed that the two sides of the Close had been repaired by the Social Union before my visit, and that the pleasant outside staircases and open galleries which caught my eye were its work.
[405] Chambers’s Traditions of Edinburgh, p. 68.
[406] Pringle seems to have kept on a house in Edinburgh though he was for the most part living at this time in London. See Hume’s Letters to Strahan, p. 117.
[407] The Scotch called each set of rooms on every floor a house, and each block a land. Thus Hume had once lived in Jack’s Land, in the Canongate. A land of thirteen stories, such as was shown to Johnson at the foot of the Post-house Stairs would contain twenty-six houses—two on every floor.
[408] Marmion. Introduction to Canto iv.
[409] Mr. Alexander Grieve. I find a bookbinder of the same name living in Bell’s Wynd in 1773. Edinburgh Directory for 1773-4, Appendix, p. 5.