Traditions of Edinburgh
By Robert Chambers, ll.d.
ILLUSTRATED BY
JAMES RIDDEL, R.S.W.
LONDON: 38 Soho Square, W.
W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED
EDINBURGH: 339 High Street
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA
1912
Edinburgh:
Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.
[INTRODUCTORY NOTICE.]
1868.
I am about to do what very few could do without emotion—revise a book which I wrote forty-five years ago. This little work came out in the Augustan days of Edinburgh, when Jeffrey and Scott, Wilson and the Ettrick Shepherd, Dugald Stewart and Alison, were daily giving the productions of their minds to the public, and while yet Archibald Constable acted as the unquestioned emperor of the publishing world. I was then an insignificant person of the age of twenty; yet, destitute as I was both of means and friends, I formed the hope of writing something which would attract attention. The subject I proposed was one lying readily at hand, the romantic things connected with Old Edinburgh. If, I calculated, a first part or number could be issued, materials for others might be expected to come in, for scores of old inhabitants, even up perhaps to the very ‘oldest,’ would then contribute their reminiscences.
The plan met with success. Materials almost unbounded came to me, chiefly from aged professional and mercantile gentlemen, who usually, at my first introduction to them, started at my youthful appearance, having formed the notion that none but an old person would have thought of writing such a book. A friend gave me a letter to Mr Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, who, I was told, knew the scandal of the time of Charles II. as well as he did the merest gossip of the day, and had much to say regarding the good society of a hundred years ago.