OLD ASSEMBLY-ROOM.
At the first angle of the Bow, on the west side of the street, is a tall picturesque-looking house, which tradition points to as having been the first place where the fashionables of Edinburgh held their dancing assemblies. Over the door is a well-cut sculpture of the arms of the Somerville family, together with the initials P. J. and J. W., and the date 1602. These are memorials of the original owner of the mansion, a certain Peter Somerville, a wealthy citizen, at one time filling a dignified situation in the magistracy, and father of Bartholomew Somerville, who was a noted benefactor to the then infant university of Edinburgh. The architrave also bears a legend (the title of the eleventh psalm):
IN DOMINO CONFIDO.
Ascending by the narrow spiral stair, we come to the second floor, now occupied by a dealer in wool, but presenting such appearances as leave no doubt that it once consisted of a single lofty wainscoted room, with a carved oak ceiling. Here, then, did the fair ladies whom Allan Ramsay and William Hamilton celebrate meet for the recreation of dancing with their toupeed and deep-skirted beaux. There in that little side-room, formed by an outshot from the building, did the merry sons of Euterpe retire to rosin their bows during the intervals of the performance. Alas! dark are the walls which once glowed with festive light; burdened is that floor, not with twinkling feet, but with the most sluggish of inanimate substances. And as for the fiddlers-room—enough:
‘A merry place it was in days of yore,
But something ails it now—the place is cursed.’[31]
Old Assembly-Room.
Dancing, although said to be a favourite amusement and exercise of the Scottish people, has always been discountenanced, more or less, in the superior circles of society, or only indulged after a very abstemious and rigid fashion, until a comparatively late age. Everything that could be called public or promiscuous amusement was held in abhorrence by the Presbyterians, and only struggled through a desultory and degraded existence by the favour of the Jacobites, who have always been a less strait-laced part of the community. Thus there was nothing like a conventional system of dancing in Edinburgh till the year 1710, when at length a private association was commenced under the name of ‘the Assembly;’ and probably its first quarters were in this humble domicile. The persecution which it experienced from rigid thinkers and the uninstructed populace of that age would appear to have been very great. On one occasion, we are told, the company were assaulted by an infuriated rabble, and the door of their hall perforated with red-hot spits.[32] Allan Ramsay, who was the friend of all amusements, which he conceived to tend only to cheer this sublunary scene of care, thus alludes to the Assembly: