The genius of Scott has shed a peculiar interest upon this ancient structure, whose cant name of the Heart of Mid-Lothian has given a title to one of his happiest novels. It stood in a singular situation, occupying half the width of the High Street, elbow to elbow, as it were, with St Giles’s Church. Antique in form, gloomy and haggard in aspect, its black stanchioned windows opening through its dingy walls like the apertures of a hearse, it was calculated to impress all beholders with a due and deep sense of what was meant in Scottish law by the squalor carceris. At the west end was a projecting ground-floor, formed of shops, but presenting a platform on which executions took place. The building itself was composed of two parts, one more solid and antique than the other, and much resembling, with its turret staircase, one of those tall, narrow fortalices which are so numerous in the Border counties. Indeed, the probability is that this had been a kind of peel or house of defence, required for public purposes by the citizens of Edinburgh when liable to predatory invasions. Doubtless the house or some part of it was of great antiquity, for it was an old and ruinous building in the reign of Mary, and only narrowly saved at that time from destruction. Most likely it was the very pretorium burgi de Edinburgi in which a parliament assembled in 1438 to deliberate on the measures rendered necessary by the assassination of the poet-king, James I. In those simple days great and humble things came close together: the house which contained parliaments upstairs, presented shops in the lower story, and thus drew in a little revenue to the magistrates. Here met the Court of Session in its earliest years. Here Mary assembled her parliaments; and here—on the Tolbooth door—did citizens affix libels by night, charging the Earl of Bothwell with the murder of Darnley. Long, long since all greatness had been taken away from the old building, and it was condemned to be a jail alone, though still with shops underneath. At length, in 1817, the fabric was wholly swept away, in consequence of the erection of a better jail on the Calton Hill. The gateway, with the door and padlock, was transferred to Abbotsford, and, with strange taste on the part of the proprietor, built into a conspicuous part of that mansion.
EDINBURGH
from the Calton Hill.
The principal entrance to the Tolbooth, and the only one used in later days, was at the bottom of the turret next the church. The gateway was of tolerably good carved stone-work, and occupied by a door of ponderous massiness and strength, having, besides the lock, a flap-padlock, which, however, was generally kept unlocked during the day. In front of the door there always paraded, or rather loitered, a private of the town-guard, with his rusty red clothes and Lochaber axe or musket. The door adjacent to the principal gateway was, in the final days of the Tolbooth, ‘Michael Ketten’s Shoe-shop,’ but had formerly been a thief’s hole. The next door to that, stepping westward, was the residence of the turnkey; a dismal, unlighted den, where the gray old man was always to be found, when not engaged in unlocking or closing the door. The next door westward was a lock-up house, which in later times was never used. On the north side, towards the street, there had once been shops, which were let by the magistrates; but these were converted, about the year 1787, into a guard-house for the city-guard, on their ancient capitol in the High Street being destroyed for the levelling of the streets. The ground-floor, thus occupied for purposes in general remote from the character of the building, was divided lengthwise by a strong partition wall; and communication between the rooms above and these apartments below was effectually interdicted by the strong arches upon which the superstructure was reared.
On passing the outer door—where the rioters of 1736 thundered with their sledge-hammers, and finally burnt down all that interposed between them and their prey—the keeper instantly involved the entrant in darkness by reclosing the gloomy portal. A flight of about twenty steps then led to an inner door, which, being duly knocked at, was opened by a bottle-nosed personage, denominated Peter, who, like his sainted namesake, always carried two or three large keys. You then entered the Hall, which, being free to all the prisoners except those of the East End, was usually filled with a crowd of shabby-looking but very merry loungers. A small rail here served as an additional security, no prisoner being permitted to come within its pale. Here also a sentinel of the city-guard was always walking, having a bayonet or ramrod in his hand. The Hall, being also the chapel of the jail, contained an old pulpit of singular fashion—such a pulpit as one could imagine John Knox to have preached from; which, indeed, he was traditionally said to have actually done. At the right-hand side of the pulpit was a door leading up the large turnpike to the apartments occupied by the criminals, one of which was of plate-iron. The door was always shut, except when food was taken up to the prisoners. On the west end of the hall hung a board, on which were inscribed the following emphatic lines:
‘A prison is a house of care,
A place where none can thrive,
A touchstone true to try a friend,