The word ‘as’ is obliterated. The words are, in modern English, simply the well-known scriptural command: ‘Love God above all, and thy neighbour as thyself.’ Perched upon the corner above the door is a small effigy of the Reformer, preaching in a pulpit, and pointing with his right hand to a stone above his head in that direction, which presents in rude sculpture the sun bursting from clouds, with the name of the Deity inscribed on his disc in three languages:
ΘΕΟΣ
DEUS
GOD
Dr M’Crie, in his Life of John Knox, states that the Reformer, on commencing duty in Edinburgh at the conclusion of the struggles with the queen-regent, ‘lodged in the house of David Forrest, a burgess of Edinburgh, from which he removed to the lodging which had belonged to Durie, Abbot of Dunfermline.’ The magistrates acted liberally towards their minister, giving him a salary of two hundred pounds Scottish money, and paying his house-rent for him, at the rate of fifteen merks yearly. In October 1561 they ordained the Dean of Guild, ‘with al diligence, to mak ane warm studye of dailles to the minister, Johne Knox, within his hous, aboue the hall of the same, with lyht and wyndokis thereunto, and all uther necessaris.’ This study is generally supposed to have been a very small wooden projection, of the kind described a few pages back, still seen on the front of the first floor. Close to it is a window in the angle of the building, from which Knox is said by tradition to have occasionally held forth to multitudes below.
The second floor, which is accessible by two narrow spiral stairs, one to the south, another to the west, contains a tolerably spacious room, with a ceiling ornamented by stucco mouldings, and a window presented to the westward. A partition has at one time divided this room from a narrow one towards the north, the ceiling of which is composed of the beams and flooring of the attic flat, all curiously painted with flower-work in an ancient taste. Two inferior rooms extend still farther to the northward. It is to be remarked that the wooden projection already spoken of extends up to this floor, so that there is here likewise a small room in front; it contains a fireplace, and a recess which might have been a cupboard or a library, besides two small windows. That this fireplace, this recess, and also the door by which the wooden chamber is entered from the decorated room should all be formed in the front wall of the house, and with a necessary relation to the wooden projection, strikes one as difficult to reconcile with the idea of that projection being an afterthought; the appearances rather indicate the whole having been formed at once, as parts of one design. The attic floor exhibits strong oaken beams, but the flooring is in bad order.
In the lower part of the house there is a small room, said by tradition to have been used in times of difficulty for the purpose of baptising children; there is also a well to supply the house with water, besides a secret stair, represented as communicating subterraneously with a neighbouring alley.
From the size of this house, and the variety of accesses to it, it becomes tolerably certain that Knox could have occupied only a portion of it. The question arises, which part did he occupy? Probability seems decidedly in favour of the first floor—that containing the window from which he is traditionally said to have preached, and where his effigy appears. An authentic fact in the Reformer’s life favours this supposition. When under danger from the hostility of the queen’s party in the castle—in the spring of 1571—‘one evening a musket-ball was fired in at his window, and lodged in the roof of the apartment in which he was sitting. It happened that he sat at the time in a different part of the room from that which he had been accustomed to occupy, otherwise the ball, from the direction it took, must have struck him’ (M’Crie). The second floor is too high to have admitted of a musket being fired in at one of the windows. A ball fired in at the ground-floor would not have struck the ceiling. The only feasible supposition in the case is that the Reformer dwelt in the first floor, which was not beyond an assassin’s aim, and yet at such a height that a ball fired from the street would hit the ceiling.[223]
JOHN KNOX’S MANSE.