Jan. 30.
The funeral of Lady Anne Hall, wife of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, took place at the old church near her husband’s seat, and was attended by a multitude of the nobility and other distinguished persons. A quarrel happened between the respective coachmen of the Earls of Lothian and Roxburgh, for precedence, ‘which was very near engaging the masters, but was prevented.’ It appears that the two noble earls were aspirants for promotion in the peerage, and thus were rendered more irritable.[[247]]
Mar. 2.
After the Mercurius Caledonius had come to the end of its short and inglorious career in 1661, there was no other attempt at a newspaper in Scotland till 1680, when one was tried under the name of the Edinburgh Gazette. This having likewise had a short life, nineteen years more were allowed to elapse before the craving of the public mind for intelligence of contemporary events called for another effort in the same direction.
There was a gentleman hanging about Edinburgh, under the |1699.| name of Captain Donaldson; originally in trade there; afterwards an officer in the Earl of Angus’s regiment, for which he had levied a company at his own charge. He had been wounded in seven places at the battle of Killiecrankie, and was confined for several weeks by the Highlanders in Blair Castle. Finally turned adrift at the peace of Ryswick, with no half-pay, he found himself in want of both subsistence and occupation, when he bethought him of favouring his fellow-citizens with periodical news.[[248]] Having issued two or three trial-sheets, which were ‘approven of by very many,’ he now obtained from the Privy Council an exclusive right to publish ‘ane gazett of this place, containing ane abridgment of foraine newes, together with the occurrences at home;’ and the Edinburgh Gazette (the second of the name) accordingly began to make its appearance at the date marginally noted.
Wisely calculating that news were as yet but a poor field in our northern region, Donaldson supplemented the business of his office with a typographical device on which more certain dependence could be placed. He informed the Privy Council that he had fallen upon a wholly new plan for producing funeral-letters—namely, to have the principal and necessary parts done by characters ‘in fine writ,’ raised on ingots of brass, leaving blanks for names, dates, and places of interment. Stationery in this form would be convenient to the public, especially in cases of haste, ‘besides the decencie and ornament of a border of skeletons, mortheads, and other emblems of mortality,’ which he had ‘so contrived that it may be added or subtracted at pleasure.’ The Lords, entering into Donaldson’s views on this subject, granted him a monopoly of his invention for nineteen years.
Very few months had the Gazette lived when it brought its author into trouble. On the 8th of June he was suddenly clapped in prison by the Privy Council, ‘for printing several things in his Gazette which are not truths, and for which he has no warrant.’ Five days after, he came before them with a humble petition, in which he set forth, that he had begun the Gazette under a sense of its probable usefulness, ‘notwithstanding he was dissuaded by |1699.| most of his friends from attempting to undertake it, as a thing that could not defray the charges of printing, intelligence, &c.’ Trusting that their Lordships must now ‘see how useful it is,’ he begged them to overlook what was amiss in a late number, and ‘give him instructions how to act for the future.’ They liberated him, and at the same time made arrangements for having the Gazette duly revised by a committee of their own body before printing.[[249]]
Donaldson will reappear before us under date February 19, 1705.
Mar. 16.
Robert Logan, cabinet-maker, professed to have made an invention which even the present inventive age has not seen repeated. He averred that he could make kettles and caldrons of wood, which could ‘abide the strongest fire,’ while boiling any liquor put into them, ‘as weel as any vessels made of brass, copper, or any other metal,’ with the double advantage of their being more durable and only a third of the expense. The Earl of Leven having made a verbal report in favour of the invention, Robert obtained a monopoly of it for ‘two nineteen years.’[[250]]