Claudero occasionally dealt in whitewash as well as blackball, and sometimes wrote regular panegyrics. An address of this kind to a writer named Walter Fergusson, who built St James’s Square, concludes with a strange association of ideas:
‘May Pentland Hills pour forth their springs,
To water all thy square!
May Fergussons still bless the place,
Both gay and debonnair!’
When the said square was in progress, however, the water seemed in no hurry to obey the bard’s invocation; and an attempt was made to procure this useful element by sinking wells for it, despite the elevation of the ground. Mr Walter Scott, W.S., happened one day to pass when Captain Fergusson of the Royal Navy—a good officer, but a sort of Commodore Trunnion in his manners—was sinking a well of vast depth. Upon Mr Scott expressing a doubt if water could be got there, ‘I will get it,’ quoth the captain, ‘though I sink to hell for it!’ ‘A bad place for water,’ was the dry remark of the doubter.
[QUEENSBERRY HOUSE.]
In the Canongate, on the south side, is a large, gloomy building, enclosed in a court, and now used as a refuge for destitute persons. This was formerly the town mansion of the Dukes of Queensberry, and a scene, of course, of stately life and high political affairs. It was built by the first duke, the willing minister of the last two Stuarts—he who also built Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, which he never slept in but one night, and with regard to which it is told that he left the accounts for the building tied up with this inscription: ‘The deil pyke out his een that looks herein!’ Duke William was a noted money-maker and land-acquirer. No little laird of his neighbourhood had any chance with him for the retention of his family property. He was something still worse in the eyes of the common people—a persecutor; that is, one siding against the Presbyterian cause. There is a story in one of their favourite books of his having died of the morbus pediculosus, by way of a judgment upon him for his wickedness. In reality, he died of some ordinary fever. It is also stated, from the same authority, that about the time when his grace died, a Scotch skipper, being in Sicily, saw one day a coach-and-six driving to Mount Etna, while a diabolic voice exclaimed: ‘Open to the Duke of Drumlanrig!’—‘which proves, by the way,’ says Mr Sharpe, ‘that the devil’s porter is no herald. In fact,’ adds this acute critic, ‘the legend is borrowed from the story of Antonio the Rich, in George Sandys’s Travels.’[260]