The statue of the Duke of Buccleuch shows immediately under the tower of the Cathedral, backed by the modernised west end of the building. Farther down the High Street, to the east, is the Tron Church, while to the right of the picture is a portion of the new County Hall. On the extreme left is the entrance from Lawnmarket to Baxter’s Close, where Burns once lodged. (See “Lady Stair’s Close.”)
of a chapel at Holyrood. The Regent Albany founded chapels[23]; and storks built nests in the roof. Every one seemed busy building in the church.
In 1454 William Preston of Gorton bequeathed to St. Giles’s a much-prized relic—“the arm-bone of Sanct Gele,” which he had procured from France; and the Provost and magistrates built the “Preston Aisle” as a mark of gratitude, with “a brass for his lair,” and a chaplain “to sing at the altar from that time forth”; and the male representative of the Preston family, until the Reformation, bore the sacred relic in all processions.
In 1467 St. Giles’s was transformed from a parish church into a collegiate church, having a Provost, a perpetual Vicar having care of souls, a minister of the choir, fourteen canons or prebendaries, a sacristan, a beadle, a secular clerk, and four choristers taught by the best-qualified canon. By the time St. Giles’s became a collegiate foundation it was rich in chaplainries and altarages; and afterwards there were many more endowments. Each trade that formed into a Guild maintained its own altar; and, as these Guilds were rich, this was a great source of wealth. The last endowment before Flodden was an annuity of twenty-three merks from Walter Chepman, the earliest Scottish printer, to found a chaplaincy at the altar of St. John the Evangelist. This was confirmed by charter of James IV., on the 1st of August 1513—eight days before Flodden.
Ah, the summer days of Edinburgh in the year 1513! The King reading the poems of his Franciscan friar Dunbar, printed by the honoured and pious Chepman, who endowed the altars of St. Giles’s, where the young Poet-Provost, of the proud race of Douglas, walked at the end of the chanting procession amid the stone pillars, and went home afterwards to turn Virgil into Scottish verse....
Gavin Douglas had been made Provost by James IV. in 1501, when he was but twenty-six, and it was whilst he was living in the Provost’s dwelling, bounding the west side of the churchyard (where Parliament House now stands), that he wrote The Palace of Honour and King Hart, and turned Virgil’s Æneid into the vernacular. Gavin Douglas was the third son of that grim old statesman, the Earl of Angus, who had earned the sobriquet of “Archibald Bell-the-Cat” on the day when the haughty Scottish nobles hanged all James III.’s plebeian favourites over the bridge at Lauder.
Son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line,
Scott makes the Earl of Angus say; but “Gawain” penned many a line, and penned the last of the Æneid on the 22nd of July 1513, when
For to behold, it was a gloir to see
The stabled windes and the calmed sea,
The soft seasoun, the firmament serene,
The lowne illumined air, and firth amene,
. . . . . . . . . .
Towers, turrets, kirnels, pinnacles hie
Of kirks, castells, and ilke fair city,
Stood painted, every fyall, fane and stage,
Upon the plain ground by their own umbrage.