‘He found a warmer world, a milder clime,
A home to rest, a shelter to defend,
Peace and repose, a Briton and a friend.’
Another member of the family, William Ged, originally a goldsmith in Edinburgh, was the inventor of stereotype printing. The Misses Ged were described by their friends as of the Geds of Baldridge, near Dunfermline; thorough Fife Jacobites every one of them. The old ladies kept a portrait of the Chevalier in their parlour, and looked chiefly to partisans of the Stuarts for support. They had another relative of less dignity, who, accepting a situation in the Town-guard, became liable to satiric reference from Robert Fergusson:
‘Nunc est bibendum, et bendere bickerum magnum,
Cavete Town-guardum, Dougal Geddum, atque Campbellum.’
Dougal had been a silversmith, but in his own conceit his red coat as a Town-guard officer made him completely military. Seeing a lady without a beau at the door of the Assembly Room, he offered his services, ‘if the arm of an old soldier could be of any use.’ ‘Hoot awa, Dougal,’ said the lady, accepting his assistance, however; ‘an auld tinkler, you mean.’
THE LAST OF THE LORIMERS.
To return for a moment to the archiepiscopal palace. It contained, about eighty years ago, a person calling himself a Lorimer—an appellative once familiar in Edinburgh, being applied to those who deal in the ironwork used in saddlery.[196]