In the course of a long successful practice, the original of Pleydell acquired some wealth; and, at the time when the New Town of Edinburgh began to be built, with an enthusiasm prevalent at the period, he conceived the best way of laying out his money to be in the erection of houses in that noble and prosperous extension of the city. He therefore spent all he had, and ran himself into considerable debt, in raising a structure which was to surpass all the edifices yet erected, for making the design of which he employed that celebrated architect, Mr. James Craig, the nephew of Mr. Thomson, who planned the New Town on its projection in 1767. The house which Mr. Crosbie erected was to the north of the splendid mansion built by Sir Lawrence Dundas, which subsequent times have seen converted into an excise-office; and as the beauty of Mr. C.’s house was in a great measure subservient to the decoration of Sir Lawrence’s, that gentleman, with his accustomed liberality, made his tasteful neighbour a present of five hundred pounds. Yet this bonus proved, after all, but an insufficient compensation for the expense which Mr. Crosbie had incurred in his sumptuous speculation; and the unfortunate barrister, who, by his taste, had attracted the wonder and envy of all ranks, was thought to have made himself a considerable loser in the end. While it was yet unfinished, he removed from Allan’s Close, and, establishing himself in one of its corners, realized Knickerbocker’s fable of the snail in the lobster’s shell. He lived in it for some time, in a style of extravagance appropriate to the splendour of his mansion; till, becoming embarrassed by his numerous debts, and beginning to feel the effects of other imprudencies, he was at last obliged to resort to Allan’s Close, and take up with his old abode and his diminished fortunes. About this period his constitution appeared much injured by his habits of life, and he was of course unable to attend to business with his former alacrity. An incipient passion for dogs, horses, and cocks, was another strong symptom of decay. To crown all, he made a low marriage with a woman who had formerly been his menial, and (some said) his mistress; and as this tended very much to take away the esteem of the world, his practice began to forsake, and his friends to neglect him.
It was particularly unfortunate that, about this time, he lost the habit of frequenting one particular tavern, as he had been accustomed to do in his earlier and better years. The irregularity consequent upon visiting four or five of a night, in which he drank liquors of different sorts and qualities, was sufficient to produce the worst effects. Had he always steadily adhered to Clerihugh’s or Douglas’s, he might have been equally fortunate with many of his companions, who had frequented particular taverns, through several generations of possessors, seldom missing a night’s attendance, during the course of fifty years, from ill health or any other cause.
It is a melancholy task to relate the end of Mr. Crosbie. From one depth he floundered down to another, every step in his conduct tending towards a climax of ruin. Infatuation and despair led him on, disrespect and degradation followed him. When he had reached what might be called the goal of his fate, he found himself deserted by all whom he had ever loved or cherished, and almost destitute of a single attendant to administer to him the necessaries of life. Bound by weakness and disease to an uneasy pallet, in the garret of his former mansion, he lingered out the last weeks of life in pain, want, and sickness. So completely was he forsaken by every friend, that not one was by at the last scene to close his eyes or carry him to the grave. Though almost incredible, it is absolutely true, that he was buried by a few unconcerned strangers, gathered from the street; and this happened in the very spot where he had been known all his life, in the immediate neighbourhood of hundreds who had known, loved, and admired him for many years. He died on the 25th of February, 1785.
DRIVER.
Mr. Crosbie’s clerk was a person named Robert H——, whose character and propensities agreed singularly well with those of Mr. Pleydell’s dependant, Driver. He was himself a practitioner before the courts, of the meaner description, and is remembered by many who were acquainted with the public characters of Edinburgh, towards the end of last century. He was frequently to be seen in the forenoon, scouring the closes of the High Street, or parading the Parliament Square; sometimes seizing his legal friends by the button, and dragging them about in the capacity of listeners, with an air and manner of as great importance as if he had been up to the very pen in his ear in business.
He was a pimpled, ill-shaven, smart-speaking, clever-looking fellow, usually dressed in grey under-garments, an old hat nearly brushed to death, and a black coat, of a fashion at least in the seventh year of its age, scrupulously buttoned up to his chin. It was in his latter and more unfortunate years that he had become thus slovenly. A legal gentleman, who gives us information concerning him, recollects when he was nearly the greatest fop in Edinburgh—being powdered in the highest style of fashion, wearing two gold watches, and having the collar of his coat adorned with a beautiful loop of the same metal. After losing the protection of Mr. Crosbie, he had fallen out of all regular means of livelihood; and unfortunately acquiring an uncontrollable propensity for social enjoyments, like the ill-fated Robert Fergusson, with whom he had been intimately acquainted, he became quite unsettled—sometimes did not change his apparel for weeks—sat night and day in particular taverns—and, in short, realized what Pleydell asserted of Driver, that “sheer ale supported him under everything; was meat, drink, and cloth—bed, board, and washing.” In his earlier years he had been very regular in his irregularities, and was a “complete fixture” at John Baxter’s tavern, in Craig’s Close, High Street, where he was the Falstaff of a convivial society, termed the “Eastcheap Club.” But his dignity of conduct becoming gradually dissipated and relaxed, and there being also, perhaps, many a landlady who might have said with Dame Quickly, “I warrant you he’s an infinite thing upon my score,” he had become unfortunately migrative and unsteady in his taproom affections. One night he would get drunk at the sign of the Sautwife, in the Abbeyhill, and next morning be found tipping off a corrective dram at a porter-house in Rose Street. Sometimes, after having made a midnight tumble into “the Finish” in the Covenant Close, he would, by next afternoon, have found his way (the Lord and the policeman only knew how) to a pie-office in the Castlehill. It was absolutely true that he could write his papers as well drunk as sober, asleep as awake; and the anecdote which the facetious Pleydell narrated to Colonel Mannering, in confirmation of this miraculous faculty, is also, we are able to inform the reader, strictly consistent in truth with an incident of real occurrence.
Poor H—— was one of those happy, thoughtless, and imprudent mortals, whose idea of existence lies all in to-day, or to-morrow at farthest,—whose whole life is only a series of random exertions and chance efforts at subsistence—a sort of constant Maroon war with starvation. His life had been altogether passed in Edinburgh. All he knew, besides his professional lore, was of Edinburgh; but then he knew all of that. There did not exist a tavern in the capital of which he could not have winked you the characters of both the waiters and the beefsteaks at a moment’s notice. He was at once the annalist of the history, the mobs, the manners, and the jokes of Edinburgh—a human phial, containing its whole essential spirit, corked with wit and labelled with pimples.
H—— was a man rich in all sorts of humour and fine sayings. His conversation was dangerously delightful. Had he not unhappily fallen into debauched habits, he possessed abilities that might have entitled him to the most enviable situations about the Court; but, from the nature of his peculiar habits, his wit was the only faculty he ever displayed in its full extent—pity it was the only one that could not be exerted for his own benefit! To have seen him set down “for a night of it” in Lucky F——’s, with a few cronies as drowthie as himself, and his Shadow (a person who shall hereafter be brought to light), was in itself a most exquisite treat. By the time that the injunction of “another half-mutchkin, mistress,” had been six times repeated, his lips, his eyes, and his nose, spoke, looked, and burned wit—pure wit! “He could not ope his mouth, but out there flew a trope.” The very sound of his voice was in itself a waggery; the twinkle of his eye might have toppled a whole theatre over into convulsions. He could not even spit but he was suspected of a witticism, and received the congratulation of a roar accordingly. Nay, at the height of such a tide as this, he would sometimes get the credit of Butler himself for an accidental scratch of his head.
His practice as a writer (for so he is styled in Peter Williamson’s Directory) lay chiefly among the very dregs of desperation and poverty, and was withal of such a nature as to afford him the humblest means of subsistence. Being naturally damned, as he himself used to say, with the utmost goodness of heart, he never hesitated at taking any poverty-struck case by the hand that could hold forth the slightest hope of success, and was perfectly incapable of resisting any appeal to his sense of justice, if made in forma pauperis. The greater part of his clients were poor debtors in the Heart of Midlothian, and he was most frequently employed in cases of cessio, for the accomplishment of which he was, from long practice, peculiarly qualified. He had himself a sort of instinctive hatred of the name of creditor, and would have been at any time perfectly willing to fight gratis upon the debtor’s side out of pure amateurship. His idle and debauched habits, also, laid him constantly open to the company of the lowest litigants, who purchased his advice or his opinion, and, in some cases, even his services as an agent, for the paltriest considerations in the shape of liquor; and, unfortunately, he did not possess sufficient resolution to withstand such temptations—his propensity for social enjoyments, which latterly became quite ungovernable, disposing him to make the greatest sacrifices for its gratification.
Yet this man, wretched as he eventually was, possessed a perfect knowledge of the law of Scotland, besides a great degree of professional cleverness; and, what with his experience under Mr. Crosbie, and his having been so long a hanger-on of the Court, was considered one of the best agents that could be employed in almost any class of cases. It is thought by many of his survivors that, if his talents had been backed by steadiness of application, he might have attained to very considerable eminence. At least, it has been observed, that many of his contemporaries, who had not half of his abilities, by means of better conduct and greater perseverence, have risen to enviable distinction. Mr. Crosbie always put great reliance in him, and sometimes intrusted him with important business; and H—— has even been seen to destroy a paper of Mr. Crosbie’s writing, and draw up a better himself, without incurring the displeasure which such an act of disrespect seemed to deserve. The highest compliment, however, that could be paid to Mr. H——’s abilities, was the saying of an old man, named Nicol,[12] a native of that litigious kingdom, Fife, who, for a long course of years, pestered the Court, in forma pauperis, with a process about a dunghill, and who at length died in Cupar jail—where he had been disposed, for some small debt, by a friend, just, as was asserted, to keep him out of harm’s way. Old John used to treat H—— in Johnnie Dowie’s, and get, as he said, the law out o’ him for the matter of a dram. He declared that “he would not give H——’s drunken glour at a paper for the serious opinions of the haill bench!”