JOHN KNOX'S HOUSE.
After that you may visit the John Knox house if you will, and read for your edification its motto. "Lyfe God aboune al and yi nicht-bour as yi Self," and buy a book or two in its book shop. I took particular pleasure in buying a girlish picture of Mary Queen, and a book of the poems of Robert Fergusson, neither of which would have pleasured John.
After that you may look at the "I. K." in the pavement, and realize that Dr. Johnson's wish for Knox has been fulfilled—"I hope in the highway."
After that you may look on the heart stamped in the pavement near St. Giles, where once stood the Heart of Midlothian, the Old Tolbooth.
There is only one other memory of High Street and of Scotland that for me equals that of Mary. It is Montrose. Up the Canongate comes the rumbling of a tumbril, like the French Revolution. And out of the high lands there look the hundreds of Covenanting folk, triumphant for the moment. And on the balcony of Moray House, within which the marriage of Lady Mary Stewart to the Marquis of Lorne has just been celebrated, there stands the wedding party, and among them the Earl of Argyle. Up the street comes the cart. And within it clad like a bridegroom—"fyne scarlet coat to his knee, trimmed with silver galoons, lined with taffeta, roses in his shoon, and stockings of incarnet silk"—stands the Marquis of Montrose, the loyalest Scotsman that ever lived.
After the field of Kylsyth, after the field of Philipshaugh, and the flight to the North and the betrayal, he has been brought back to Edinburgh, to a swift and covenanting sentence, and to death at the Tron.
His eyes meet proudly those of Argyle who has deserted his king and who thinks to stand in with the Covenant and with the future. It is the eyes of Argyle which drop. And Montrose goes on.
His head is on the picket of the Netherbow Port. His four quarters are sent to the four corners of the kingdom, Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Inverness.
But the end is not yet. The tables turn, as they turned so often in those unstable times. It is Argyle who goes to the scaffold. Charles is king, the Second Charles. There is an edict. The body of Montrose is dug up out of the Boroughmoor. It is buried in Holyrood. The four quarters are reassembled from Glasgow and Perth and Aberdeen and Inverness. A procession fairly royal moves from Holyrood to St. Giles. At the Netherbow it pauses. The head is taken down from the pike. The body of Montrose is whole again. An honourable burial takes place in the cathedral sanctuary.