‘Heavens! what a splendid scene is here,
How bright those female seraphs shine!’ &c.
From the indications afforded by half-blank names, we may surmise that damsels styled Bower, Duncan, Reid, Ramsay, Dempster, and Bow—all of them names amongst the gentlefolks of the district—figured conspicuously at this meeting—
‘Besides a much more numerous dazzling throng,
Whose names, if known, should grace my artless song.’
The poet, too, appears to have paid 2s. 6d. for the insertion of his lines in the Caledonian Mercury.
From this time onward, an annual ball, given by ‘the Right Honourable Company of Hunters’ in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, is regularly chronicled. At one which took place on the 8th |1735.| January 1736—the Hon. Master Charles Leslie being ‘king,’ and the Hon. Lady Helen Hope being ‘queen’—‘the company in general made a very grand appearance, an elegant entertainment and the richest wines were served up, and the whole was carried on and concluded with all decency and good order imaginable.’ A ball given by the same fraternity in the same place, on the ensuing 21st of December, was even more splendid. There were two rooms for dancing, and two for tea, illuminated with many hundreds of wax-candles. ‘In the Grand Hall [the Gallery?], a table was covered with three hundred dishes en ambiqu, at which sate a hundred and fifty ladies at a time ... illuminated with four hundred wax-candles. The plan laid out by the council of the company was exactly followed out with the greatest order and decency, and concluded without the least air of disturbance.’
On the 27th January 1737, ‘the young gentlemen-burghers’ of Aberdeen gave ‘a grand ball to the ladies, the most splendid and numerous ever seen there;’ all conducted ‘without the least confusion or disorder.’ The anxiety to shew that there was no glaring impropriety in the conduct of the company on these occasions, is significant, and very amusing.[[730]]
The reader of this work has received—I fear not very thankfully—sundry glimpses of the frightful state of the streets of Edinburgh in previous centuries; and he must have readily understood that the condition of the capital in this respect represented that of other populous towns, all being alike deficient in any recognised means of removing offensive refuse. There was, it must be admitted, something peculiar in the state of Edinburgh in sanitary respects, in consequence of the extreme narrowness of its many closes and wynds, and the height of its houses. How it was endured, no modern man can divine; but it certainly is true that, at the time when men dressed themselves in silks and laces, and took as much time for their toilets as a fine lady, they had to pass in all their bravery amongst piles of dung, on the very High Street of Edinburgh, and could not make an evening call upon Dorinda or Celia in one of the alleys, without the risk of an ablution from above sufficient to destroy the most elegant outfit, and put the wearers out of conceit with themselves for a fortnight.
The struggles of the municipal authorities at sundry times to |1735.| get the streets put into decent order against a royal ceremonial entry, have been adverted to in our earlier volumes. It would appear that things had at last come to a sort of crisis in 1686, so that the Estates then saw fit to pass an act[[731]] to force the magistrates to clean the city, that it might be endurable for the personages concerned in the legislature and government, ordaining for this purpose a ‘stent’ of a thousand pounds sterling a year for three years on the rental of property. A vast stratum of refuse, through which people had made lanes towards their shop-doors and close-heads, was then taken away—much of it transported by the sage provost, Sir James Dick, to his lands at Prestonfield, then newly enclosed, and the first that were so—which consequently became distinguished for fertility[[732]]—and the city was never again allowed to fall into such disorder. There was still, however, no regular system of cleaning, beyond what the street sewers supplied; and the ancient practice of throwing ashes, foul water, &c., over the windows at night, graced only with the warning-cry of Gardez l’eau, was kept up in full vigour by the poorer and more reckless part of the population.