Edinburgh, before the sudden extension of its boundaries at the end of the eighteenth century, was thus a small, compact city, measuring in its proudest days but a mile in length and a half mile in width; but, though it was small, it was densely populated. Bounded in its growth by deep ravines and by a wall and a great loch—defences against the English—it extended itself in the only way it could, upwards towards the sky, whence it need fear “no enemy, but winter and rough weather.” Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets, with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite incomprehensible to the modern citizen.
The nobles of Scotland, before the Union drew them away to London, had their fine old town residences in Edinburgh—the “lands”[35] bearing their names. These were generally within closes, “obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes,” as Taylor has it; but many were in the Cowgate, a fashionable suburb, or in the Canongate, which, being nearest Holyrood, was the court end of the city. It is down this “fairest and goodliest streete” that the tourist of to-day drives from the Castle to Holyrood, or up from Holyrood to the Castle. The driver will point with his whip at a gabled house standing forward into the street, and tell him it is John Knox’s house. At the Church of St. Giles he will probably stop the cab and descend, and, finding the door locked, will wander round the building and gaze down at the heart marked on the stones where once stood the Tolbooth, and at the initials I. K. where Knox is supposed to be buried, though another version has it that his grave is below the equestrian statue of Charles II. And so he will find himself in the precincts of Parliament House, built on ground which in past ages was the graveyard of the parish church. If he enter and have a glimpse of the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. And so his day in Edinburgh will leave him with a confused impression of a long squalid street full of draggled women and barefooted children, of groups of soldiers from the Castle, of carts and cries, of open “fore-stairs” and street wells, of ancient gabled roofs and of flapping garments hung out of windows on poles to dry, of pious legends and obliterated carvings, of an appalling number of drunken men, and of dark entries giving glimpses of tortuous obscurities, or leading steeply down some narrow tunnel with a flashing vista of the New Town in a blaze of sunshine at the end of it.
But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood, the tourist drives right through the history of Old Edinburgh, through centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots go by, with music and the tramp of feet; or a prisoner driven to his death; or, most familiar sight of all in ancient Edinburgh, to watch a “tulzie,” a quarrel settled “à la mode d’Edimbourg,” as they said on the Continent,—a duel to the death, or a street fight between armed men, followers of great rival houses, the popular side ably assisted by the fighting burghers with their spears. In the month of August 1503 the ladies of Edinburgh gathered on the decorated fore-stairs, “gay as beds of flowers,” to see King James IV. ride into the town with his Tudor bride on her palfrey. During the minority of James V. the windows were crowded with excited faces, whilst the terrific “Cleanse the Causeway” raged below, and the townspeople handed out spears to the Douglases, and the dead Hamiltons blocked the entries to the closes. Here Queen Mary rode, a dishevelled prisoner, after the battle of Carberry Hill, after she had parted with Bothwell, and “as she came through the town the common people cried out against Her Majesty at the windows and stairs, which it was a pity to hear. Her Majesty again cried out to all gentlemen and others that passed up and down the causeway, declaring how that she was their native princess, and doubted not but all honest subjects would respect her as they ought to do, and not suffer her to be mishandled.”[36]
When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas! are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it recalling a hundred memories,—but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to modern buildings. But some closes remain; and, as one makes one’s way down from the Castle to the Canongate one can turn aside here and there, crossing and recrossing the street to dive down some steep entry, and, standing within it, where the broken plaster shows the bare oaken rafters overhead, may read half-obliterated Latin, or trace armorial bearings over doorways, or gaze through the open doors up spiral wooden stairs, or—over the heads of the swarming little children playing in the courts—at ancient gabled roofs and rounded turrets and beautiful old windows, whence once fair ladies peeped, and where now the ever-present “washings” hang suspended on poles, and add impressionist touches of colour to the scene.
Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take several volumes to tell all there is to be told. And so that invidious and vexing thing, a selection, must be made, and a few of the thousand crowding names taken haphazard.
Off the Lawnmarket there is a wide quadrangle called, after its architect, Mylne’s Court. There was a long line of royal master masons of that name, descending from father to son, from the reign of James III. This close, built in 1690 by Robert Mylne, the seventh royal master mason, whose handiwork is to be seen in many of the beautiful bits of Old Town architecture, had a graceful doorway with a peaked arch over it, grateful to the eye of the old master who designed it, but now broken and defaced. When the close was built it enclosed some building of earlier date, for another doorway had 1580 engraved over it, with the legend “Blissit be God in al his Giftis”—the most popular of all the numberless pious mottoes, Latin and English, that embellish the homes of the Old Town. This building is now gone.
James’s Court, close by, is connected with the names of David Hume and of James Boswell, and Boswell’s two guests, Paoli the Corsican, and Dr. Johnson; but the buildings in it where they lived were burnt down in the middle of the nineteenth century. Next to it—leading from it—is Lady Stair’s Close, quite recently restored by Lord Rosebery, after whose ancestress it is named. Originally it was called Lady Gray’s Close, and the coat-of-arms and the initials W G and G S carved under the words “Feare the Lord and depart from evill” are those of the original owners, Sir William (afterwards Lord) Gray of Pittendrum and his wife Egidia Smith, and the date 1622 is the date when they built it.[37] This Lord Gray was a wealthy Scottish merchant in Charles I.’s time, and was one of those who were ruined by their adherence to Montrose. He lost all his wealth by heavy fines, and, after imprisonment in the Castle and in the Tolbooth, died in 1648. Three years before his death, his daughter had died of the plague in this close. Lady Gray survived her husband, but apparently left the house “they had built to be so happy in,” and it then became the residence of the Dowager Lady Stair. It must have been a stately home in those days, with the Lawnmarket in front, and terraced gardens behind, stretching down to the Nor’ Loch. The romantic story of Lady Stair (born Lady Eleanor Campbell, grand-daughter of the Earl of Loudoun, the Covenanting Chancellor of Charles I.’s time, and married first to James, Viscount Primrose, and afterwards to the Earl of Stair) forms the plot of Scott’s Aunt Margaret’s Mirror. Scott used to own that he liked to “put a cocked hat” on to a story; and the cocked hat on this one is very evident. Lord Stair died in 1647—the year before Lord Gray; so it was probably just after she became a widow for the second time that Lady Stair came to live in the close that now bears her name; and here she lived for about twelve years, till her death in 1659. She had long reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society; in her old age she was noted and much envied for that luxury, a black servant—the only one in Edinburgh; and whatever truth there is in Sir Walter’s story, her troubles had not taken the colour from her life or from her speech. When the Earl of Dundonald accused Lady Stair of libelling Lady Jane Douglas (whose case was then before the Court of Session), and further gave the world leave to call him “a damned villain” if he did not speak the truth, the high-spirited old gentlewoman, Lady Stair, went off straight to Holyrood, where the Duke and Duchess of Douglas were, and there, before them and their attendants, said she had lived to a good old age and never till now got entangled in any “clatters,”[38] and struck the floor thrice with her stick, each time calling the Earl of Dundonald “a damned villain,”—and then retired.
Baxter’s Close, where Burns stayed in 1786, is now part of Lady Stair’s Close, and from the moment the tourist enters James’s Court he is surrounded to-day by a mob of intelligent small Scots, with bare feet and eager eyes, and told by a chorus of voices that “Robbie Burrrns lived in yon hoose”—“It was yonder Robbie Burrrns stoppit”; and, if the tourist linger to read the carvings, he is hastily helped: “Fear the Lorrrd and depairt frae evil—but it’s over yonder Robbie Burrrns’s hoose is!”
On the other side of the street is Brodie’s Close, where Deacon Brodie, the daring burglar, one of Edinburgh’s picturesque criminals, lived. There is a fine old archway inside the close, and a pleasant and innocent odour of burnt treacle from a bakery near by. Riddle’s Close has also been lately renovated, and was