[252] Archæologia Scotica, i.
[253] A newspaper, giving an account of Lord Palmerston’s visit to Edinburgh in 1865, mentions that his lordship, during his stay in the city, was made aware that an aged woman of the name of Peggie Forbes, who had been a servant with Dugald Stewart, well remembered his lordship when under the professor’s roof in early days. Interested in the circumstance, Lord Palmerston took occasion to pay her a visit at her dwelling, No. 1 Rankeillor Street, and expressed his pleasure at renewing the acquaintance of the old domestic. Dr John Brown had discovered the existence of this old association, and with it a box of tools which were the property of ‘young Maister Henry’ of those days. The sight of them called up within the breast of the Premier further associations of days long bygone.
[254] Robertson, in his Rural Recollections (Irvine, 1829), says: ‘The earliest evidence that I have met with of potatoes in Scotland is an old household book of the Eglintoune family in 1733, in which potatoes appear at different times as a dish at supper.’ They appear earlier than this—namely, in 1701—in the household book of the Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth, where the price per peck is intimated at 2s. 6d.—See Arnot’s History of Edinburgh, 4to, p. 201.
[255] A noted brewer, much given to preaching. Of him Claudero says:
‘Our souls with gospel he did cheer,
Our bodies, too, with ale and beer;
Gratis he gospel got and gave away;
For ale and beer he only made us pay.’
[256] This thriving parliamentary burgh originated in a cottage built, and long inhabited, by a retired seaman of Admiral Vernon’s squadron, who gave it this name in commemoration of the triumph which his commander there gained over the Spaniards in 1739. There must have been various houses at the spot in 1753, when we find one ‘George Hamilton, in Portobello,’ advertising in the Edinburgh Courant that he would give a reward of three pounds to any one who should discover the author of a scandalous report, which represented him as harbouring robbers in his house. The waste upon which Portobello is now partly founded was dreadfully infested at this time with robbers, and resorted to by smugglers; see Courant. [Portobello, while remaining one of the ‘Leith burghs’ for parliamentary purposes, was municipally incorporated with Edinburgh in 1896. Claudero’s ‘Frigate Whins’ are better known as the ‘Figgate Whins.’]
[257] Claudero could have little serious expectation that several of these predictions would come to pass before he had been forty years in his grave.