[CONVIVIALIA.]
‘Auld Reekie! wale o’ ilka toon
That Scotland kens beneath the moon;
Where coothy chields at e’enin’ meet,
Their bizzin’ craigs and mous to weet,
And blithely gar auld care gae by,
Wi’ blinkin’ and wi’ bleerin’ eye.’
Robert Fergusson.
Tavern dissipation, now so rare amongst the respectable classes of the community, formerly prevailed in Edinburgh to an incredible extent, and engrossed the leisure hours of all professional men, scarcely excepting even the most stern and dignified. No rank, class, or profession, indeed, formed an exception to this rule. Nothing was so common in the morning as to meet men of high rank and official dignity reeling home from a close in the High Street, where they had spent the night in drinking. Nor was it unusual to find two or three of His Majesty’s most honourable Lords of Council and Session mounting the bench in the forenoon in a crapulous state. A gentleman one night stepping into Johnnie Dowie’s, opened a side-door, and looking into the room, saw a sort of agger or heap of snoring lads upon the floor, illumined by the gleams of an expiring candle. ‘Wha may thae be, Mr Dowie?’ inquired the visitor. ‘Oh,’ quoth John in his usual quiet way, ‘just twa-three o’ Sir Willie’s drucken clerks!’—meaning the young gentlemen employed in Sir William Forbes’s banking-house, whom of all earthly mortals one would have expected to be observers of the decencies.
