‘In Thomas Robertson his new land[238] near to the Parliament House,’ one James Row kept a coffee-house, probably the first such establishment known in Edinburgh. On Sunday the 28th of October 1677, he so far risked the wrath of his neighbours the Privy Councillors, as to have an unlawful preacher holding forth in his house during the time of ordinary service in the churches. Robert Johnston, town-major, who had authority from the Privy Council to see after such matters, came to the place with some of his myrmidons, and found the ‘turnpike’ or common stair filled with people, the overflowing of the congregation. Making his way to the ordinary door of Row’s house, and demanding admission, he was kept there for some time, during which he heard a great noise of furniture and of people within. On being admitted, he found that the minister and his auditors had been smuggled out by ‘a laigh or privat entry.’ Johnston then returned to the street, and was walking quietly at the Cross, when Row came up and ‘did upbraid, threaten, and abuse him for coming to his house, and told him that he durst not for his hanging come to his house again and do the like, or, if he came that gait, he should not win so weel away.’ Thus he railed at the town-major all the way ‘from the Cross Well to the Stane Shop, shouting and crying so loud as the people gathered in multitudes,’ though, seeing what sort of affair it was, they soon dispersed. Afterwards, Row went to the magistrates and told them ‘he could not get God worshipped in his own house for that officious fellow the town-major, thereby insinuating that the due execution of his majesty’s laws did prejudge the worship of God.’
Row was fined in five hundred merks, and obliged to ask Johnston’s pardon; and immediately after, his coffee-house was ordered to be shut up.—P. C. R.
1673.
People were already accustomed to go to coffee-houses in order to learn the news of the day. In 1680, there was an order of the Privy Council, that ‘the gazettes and news-letters read in coffee-houses, be first presented to the Bishop of Edinburgh, or any other privy councillor, that they may consider them, and thereby false and seditious news and slanders may be prevented.’—Foun. And not long after—namely, in January 1681—by order of the Privy Council, the magistrates of Edinburgh called all the masters of coffee-houses before them, and obliged them to come under a bond for five thousand merks to suffer no newspapers to be read in their houses but such as were approved of by the officers of state.[239]
Dec. 11.
Mr Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, petitioned the Privy Council for liberty to print a translation, executed by himself, of the last hundred of the Psalms into the Irish tongue. The matter was referred to the approbation of the Earl of Argyle, and conferences were appointed about it, to take place at Inverary.
Mr Kirk’s translation of the Psalms into Gaelic was an important contribution to the means for establishing Protestant Christian worship in the Highlands. On account of the proficiency which he thus shewed himself to possess in the Gaelic language, he was sent for to London, to superintend the printing of the Irish translation of the Bible, prepared under the direction of Bishop Bedel, and published in 1685. He died in 1692, and was buried in the church-yard of Aberfoyle, under a stone bearing this inscription: ‘Robertus Kirk, A.M. Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen.’
1673.
‘To suppress the impudent and growing atheism of this age,’ Mr Kirk printed in 1691 a small treatise, ‘An Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People, heretofoir going under the Name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies ... as they are described by those having the Second Sight, &c.,’ which certainly forms a curious illustration of the quasi orthodox beliefs of a Highland minister of the seventeenth century. He describes the fairies as possessed of ‘light and changeable bodies of the nature of a condensed cloud,’ and living in little hillocks, where they are ‘sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and do such like services.’ Forced to shift their residences once a quarter, they are liable to be seen by second-sighted men on their travels at four seasons of the year; but are also often ‘seen to eat at funerals and banquets.’ At such festive meetings, each mortal guest is sometimes observed to have a double of himself ‘perfectly resembling him in all points,’ being one of these subterranean spirits. The ‘reflex-man’ or ‘co-walker’ haunts the original as his shadow, ‘whether to guard him from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as ane apertful ape to counterfeit all his actions.’ ‘Being invited and earnestly required, these companions make themselves known and familiar to men; otherwise, being in a different state and element, they neither can nor will easily converse with them.’