[39] The narrow, crooked West Bow, descending very steeply from the Lawnmarket to the Grassmarket, has been almost wholly obliterated by Victoria Street, a comparatively wide and gradually sloping street which crosses the line of the old West Bow from George IV. Bridge. Victoria Street was built in 1835-40; and only a few houses on one side of the head of the Bow still stand, and these have been rebuilt.
[40] From whom it got its name—James’s Court.
[41] A ‘land’ still standing (1912) as it was when Hume lived there. It was also the residence of the Countess of Eglinton when she left the Stamp Office Close in the High Street. See [p. 192].
[42] Burton’s Life of Hume, ii. 173.
[43] Formerly called Blair’s Close ([p. 19]). The name was altered to Baird’s Close when the Gordon property passed into the possession of Baird of Newbyth.
[44] Mrs Cockburn, writing to Miss Cumming at Balcarres, describes ‘a ball’ she gave in this house. ‘On Wednesday I gave a ball. How do ye think I contrived to stretch out this house to hold twenty-two people, and had nine couples always dancing? Yet this is true; it is also true that we had a table covered with divers eatables all the time, and that everybody ate when they were hungry and drank when they were dry, but nobody ever sat down.... Our fiddler sat where the cupboard is, and they danced in both rooms. The table was stuffed into the window and we had plenty of room. It made the bairns all very happy.’—Mrs Cockburn’s Letters, edited by T. Craig Brown.
[45] His lordship died September 20, 1722 (Brunton and Haig’s Historical Account of the Senators of the College of Justice).
[46] A stuff brought, I believe, from Spain, and which was at one time much in fashion in Scotland.
[47] Lady Stair’s Close was originally a cul de sac. When the Mound was begun a thoroughfare was cut through the garden, making the close the principal communication between the Lawnmarket and Hanover Street, then the western extremity of the New Town. The name it first bore was ‘Lady Gray’s Close,’ after the wife of the builder of the house, and that of Lady Stair’s Close was given to it (The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, vol. iii.) early in the eighteenth century, when the house passed into the possession of the first Lady Stair, a granddaughter of Sir William Gray of Pittendrum. Lord Rosebery, who represents a branch of the Primroses (other than that to which the second viscount, mentioned below, belonged), restored the house and presented it to the city in 1907.
[48] ‘Grace, Countess of Aboyne and Moray, in her early youth, had the weakness to consult a celebrated fortune-teller, inhabiting an obscure close in Edinburgh. The sibyl predicted that she would become the wife of two earls, and how many children she was to bear; but withal assured her that when she should see a new coach of a certain colour driven up to her door as belonging to herself, her hearse must speedily follow. Many years afterwards, Lord Moray, who was not aware of this prediction, resolved to surprise his wife with the present of a new equipage; but when Lady Moray beheld from a window a carriage of the ominous colour arrive at the door of Darnaway, and heard that it was to be her own property, she sank down, exclaiming that she was a dead woman, and actually expired in a short time after, November 17, 1738.’—Notes to Law’s Memorials, p. xcii.