Wha formed me in sae blithe a shape,

And gave me lasting honours;

Take up my ladle, fill and lap,

And say: “Fair fa’ the donors.”’

Oct. 17.

The genius of Scott has lent an extraordinary interest to a murder perpetrated at this date. Nicol Mushet appears to have been a young man of some fortune, being described as ‘of Boghall,’ and he had studied for the profession of a surgeon; but for some time he had led an irregular and dissipated life in Edinburgh, where he had for one of his chief friends a noted profligate named Campbell of Burnbank, ordnance store-keeper in the Castle. The unhappy young man was drawn into a marriage with a woman named Hall, for whom he soon discovered that he had neither affection nor respect; and he then became so eager to be free from the connection, as to listen to a project by Burnbank for obtaining a divorce by dishonourable means. An obligation passed between the parties in November 1719, whereby a claim of Burnbank for an old debt of nine hundred merks (about £50) was to be discharged by Mushet, as soon as Burnbank should be able to furnish evidence calculated to criminate the woman. Burnbank then deliberately hired a wretch like himself, one Macgregor, a teacher of languages, to enter into a plot for placing Mrs Mushet |1720.| in criminative circumstances; and some progress was made in this plan, which, however, ultimately misgave. It was then suggested by Burnbank that they should go a step further, and remove the woman by poison. One James Mushet and his wife—a couple in poor circumstances—readily undertook to administer it. Several doses were actually given, but the stomach of the victim always rejected them. Then the project for debauching her was revived, and Mushet undertook to effect it; but it was not carried out. Dosing with poison was resumed, without effect; other plans of murder were considered. James Mushet undertook to knock his sister-in-law on the head for twenty guineas, and got one or two in hand by anticipation, part of which he employed in burying a child of his own. These diabolically wicked projects occupied Mushet, his brother, his brother’s wife, and Burnbank, in the Christian city of Edinburgh, during a course of many months, without any one, to appearance, ever feeling the slightest compunction towards the poor woman, though it is admitted she loved her husband, and no real fault on her side has ever been insinuated.

At length, the infatuated Nicol himself borrowed a knife one day, hardly knowing what he wanted it for, and, taking his wife with him that night, as on a walk to Duddingston, he embraced the opportunity of killing her at a solitary place in the King’s Park. He went immediately after to his brother’s, to tell him what he had done, but in a state of mind which made all afterwards seem a blank to him. Next morning, the poor victim was found lying on the ground, with her throat cut to the bone, and many other wounds, which she had probably received in struggling with her brutal murderer.

Mushet was seized and examined, when he readily related the whole circumstances of the murder and those which had led to it. He was adjudged to be hanged in the Grassmarket on the ensuing 6th of January. His associate Burnbank was declared infamous, and sentenced to banishment. The common people, thrilled with horror by the details of the murder, marked their feelings in the old national mode by raising a cairn on the spot where it took place; and Mushet’s Cairn has ever since been a recognised locality.[[544]]

There was published this year in Edinburgh a small treatise at |1720.| the price of a shilling, under the title of Rules of Good Deportment and Good Breeding. The author was Adam Petrie, who is understood as having commenced life as domestic tutor in the family of Sinclair of Stevenston, and to have ended it in the situation of a parish schoolmaster in East Lothian. He dedicated his treatise to the magistrates of Edinburgh, acknowledging them to be ‘so thoroughly acquainted with all the steps of civility and good breeding, that it is impossible for the least misrepresentation of them to escape your notice.’

Adam sets out with the thesis, that ‘a courteous way gilds a denial, sweetens the sharpness of truth ... sets off the defects of reason, varnishes slights, paints deformities ... in a word, disguises everything that is unsavoury.’ Everything, however, required to have some reference to religion in that age, and Adam takes care to remind us that civility has a divine basis, in the injunctions, ‘Be courteous to all men,’ and ‘Give honour to whom honour is due.’