The shop and workshop of George Heriot existed in this neighbourhood till 1809, when the extension of the Advocates’ Library occasioned the destruction of some interesting old closes to the west of St Giles’s Kirk, and altered all the features of this part of the town. There was a line of three small shops, with wooden superstructures above them, extending between the door of the Old Tolbooth and that of the Laigh Council-house, which occupied the site of the present lobby of the Signet Library. A narrow passage led between these shops and the west end of St Giles’s; and George Heriot’s shop, being in the centre of the three, was situated exactly opposite to the south window of the Little Kirk. The back windows looked into an alley behind, called Beith’s or Bess Wynd. In confirmation of this tradition, George Heriot’s name was discovered upon the architrave of the door, being carved in the stone, and apparently having served as his sign. Besides this curious memorial, the booth was also found to contain his forge and bellows, with a hollow stone, fitted with a stone cover or lid, which had been used as a receptacle for and a means of extinguishing the living embers of the furnace, upon closing the shop at night. All these curiosities were bought by the late Mr E. Robertson of the Commercial Bank, who had been educated in Heriot’s Hospital, and by him presented to the governors, who ordered them to be carefully deposited and preserved in the house, where they now remain. George Heriot’s shop was only about seven feet square! Yet his master, King James, is said to have sometimes visited him and been treated by him here. There is a story that one day, when the goldsmith visited His Majesty at Holyrood, he found him sitting beside a fire, which, being composed of perfumed wood, cast an agreeable smell through the room. Upon George Heriot remarking its pleasantness, the king told him that it was quite as costly as it was fine. Heriot said that if His Majesty would come and pay him a visit at his shop, he would show him a still more costly fire.
‘Indeed!’ said the king; ‘and I will.’ He accordingly paid the goldsmith a visit, but was surprised to find only an ordinary fire. ‘Is this, then, your fine fire?’ said he.
‘Wait a little,’ said George, ‘till I get my fuel.’ So saying, he took from his bureau a bond for two thousand pounds which he had lent to the king, and laying it in the fire, added: ‘Now, whether is your Majesty’s fire or mine most expensive?’
‘Yours most certainly, Master Heriot,’ said the king.
Adjacent to George Heriot’s shop, and contiguous to the Laigh Council-house, there was a tavern, in which a great deal of small legal business used to be transacted in bygone times. Peter Williamson, an original and singular person, who had long been in North America, and therefore designated himself ‘from the other world,’ kept this house for many years.[85] It served also as a sort of vestry to the Tolbooth Church, and was the place where the magistrates took what was called the Deid-chack—that is, a refreshment or dinner, of which those dignitaries always partook after having attended an execution. The Deid-chack is now abjured, like many other of those fashions which formerly rendered the office of a magistrate so much more comfortable than it now is.[86]
The various kirks which compose St Giles’s had all different characters in former times. The High Kirk had a sort of dignified aristocratic character, approaching somewhat to prelacy, and was frequented only by sound church-and-state men, who did not care so much for the sermon as for the gratification of sitting in the same place with His Majesty’s Lords of Council and Session and the magistrates of Edinburgh, and who desired to be thought men of sufficient liberality and taste to appreciate the prelections of Blair. The Old Kirk, in the centre of the whole, was frequented by people who wished to have a sermon of good divinity, about three-quarters of an hour long, and who did not care for the darkness and dreariness of their temple. The Tolbooth Kirk was the peculiar resort of a set of rigid Calvinists from the Lawnmarket and the head of the Bow, termed the Towbuith-Whigs, who loved nothing but extempore evangelical sermons, and would have considered it sufficient to bring the house down about their ears if the precentor had ceased, for one verse, the old hillside fashion of reciting the lines of the psalm before singing them. Dr Webster, of convivial memory, was long one of the clergymen of this church, and deservedly admired as a pulpit orator; though his social habits often ran nigh to scandalise his devout and self-denying congregation.
The inhabitants and shopkeepers of the Parliament Square were in former times very sociable and friendly as neighbours, and formed themselves into a sort of society, which was long known by the name of The Parliament-Close Council. Of this association there were from fifty to a hundred members, who met once or twice a year at a dinner, when they usually spent the evening, as the newspaper phrase goes, ‘in the utmost harmony.’ The whim of this club consisted in each person assuming a titular dignity at the dinner, and being so called all the year after by his fellow-members. One was Lord Provost of Edinburgh, another was Dean of Guild, some were bailies, others deacons, and a great proportion state-officers. Sir William Forbes, who, with the kindness of heart which characterised him, condescended to hold a place in this assemblage of mummers, was for a long time Member for the City.
Previous to the institution of the police-court, a bailie of Edinburgh used to sit, every Monday, at that part of the Outer Parliament House where the statue of Lord Melville now stands, to hear and decide upon small causes—such as prosecutions for scandals and defamation, or cases of quarrels among the vulgar and the infamous. This judicature, commonly called the Dirt Court, was chiefly resorted to by washerwomen from Canonmills and the drunken ale-wives of the Canongate. A list of Dirt-Court processes used always to be hung up on a board every Monday morning at one of the pillars in the piazza at the outside of the Parliament Square; and that part of the piazza, being the lounge of two or three low pettifoggers who managed such pleas, was popularly called the Scoundrels’ Walk. Early on Monday, it was usual to see one or two threadbare personages, with prodigiously clean linen, bustling about with an air of importance, and occasionally accosted by viragoes with long-eared caps flying behind their heads. These were the agents of the Dirt Court, undergoing conference with their clients.
There was something lofty and august about the Parliament Close, which we shall scarcely ever see revived in any modern part of the town; so dark and majestic were the buildings all round, and so finely did the whole harmonise with the ancient cathedral which formed one of its sides! Even the echoes of the Parliament Square had something grand in them. Such, perhaps, were the feelings of William Julius Mickle when he wrote a poem on passing through the Parliament Close of Edinburgh at midnight,[87] of which the following is one of the best passages: