[238] A tall house of several stories so called in Edinburgh.
[239] Crookshanks’s Hist. Ch. of Scot., ii. 127.
[240] Sketches of Perthshire (1812), quoted in Letters on Demonology.
[241] Sir George Mackenzie’s Hist. Affairs of Scot., p. 7.
[242] See Wodrow’s Analecta, i. 84.
[243] Balbegno is the name of a small estate in that county, near Middleton’s patrimonial property. It was bought in 1690 by Middleton’s brother.—Wood’s Peerage.
[244] Law cites the following couplet, apparently as the last words of the apparition:
‘Plumashes above, and gramashes below,
It’s no wonder to see how the world doth go.’
Plumashes are plumages; gramashes, coarse hose used as gaiters. The words seem to be used allegorically to express the two opposite conditions of life—that of the gay cavalier and the plain hard-working man.
[245] ‘Lord Middleton used to assert that a certain palmister, whom he met in his youth, had predicted his elevation to the supreme command of his country; but the end of this prediction he always concealed, which made his companions suspect it was tragical, as afterwards it did indeed prove.’—Kirkton’s Church History.