This picture was made from the playing-grounds of the school, and shows part of the terrace which entirely surrounds this noble building. A portion of the Royal Infirmary appears in the distance.
of “makars,”[47] men and women, who were Edinburgh citizens. There is a bevy of Scottish queens of society, each in her generation; clever and brilliant women, who, if they did not contribute to literature themselves, were the patrons and inspirers of those who did. James V. enlivened Edinburgh by the foundation of the Court of Session, since which time her society has been dominated by lawyers, and many a Scottish judge has left his name for wit and oddity among the glories of the Parliament House. James VI. enriched Edinburgh by the foundation of a University; and thence onwards she counted among her citizens many a learned scholar of eccentric dress and speech. Edinburgh has had her architects, her philanthropists, her great soldiers, and her explorers; and she has always been especially noted for her printers and her publishers. Nor is Edinburgh, with her love for romance, likely to forget her illustrious criminals. To enumerate merely the names of the notable citizens of all sorts would form a small volume in itself: it must suffice to hurry through the centuries, picking out a name at random here and there, and especially those connected with houses still standing in the Old Town of Edinburgh. So-called “improvements” have swept away many of Edinburgh’s historic possessions, among them Sandilands’ Close, with the old mansion said to have been the residence of Bishop Kennedy.[48] This name carries one back to the days of James II. and the early part of James III.’s reign, when Bishop Kennedy, one of the most important figures in Scottish history, was the great man in Scotland, and he and the Earl of Angus were struggling against Mary of Gueldres, the Queen-Mother, for supremacy. Scotland was then a fighting nation; and bale-fires were erected on hill-tops, in sight of one another, from the Borders to Stirling and the North, and were watched day and night, ready to bring Scotland under arms within two hours of any hostile movement of the English. Edinburgh was thronged with citizens clad according to James II.’s arbitrary regulations: its women of humbler class muffled, as they went to kirk or market, “under penalty of escheat of their kerchiefs”; its Bailies’ wives in “clothes of silk and costly scarlet and the fur of martens”; its labourers in grey or white, and on “hailie daies” in light-blue or green or red. A gay little town it must have been,—a gay little town, safe inside its encircling wall, with the bells of St. Giles’s telling every one the hour, and the Royal Standard waving on the Castle. Law, so omnipresent in Edinburgh nowadays, was then represented by nine persons meeting twice a year to administer justice. Education was going on in divers ways; was not the royal child learning the love of peaceable arts and crafts, and that respect for artists and craftsmen that was to prove his undoing with his warlike nobles? The upper windows of many of the city homes must have commanded a prospect of trees and broom growing on the hillsides beyond the city, where the landowners were bidden by law to plant and to preserve the game, where wolves prowled by night, where any Englishman was lawfully the captive of his captor, and where a sturdy beggar or a wandering bard might be nailed by his ear to any convenient tree. A pleasant prospect from one’s back windows!
Through the reigns of James IV. and James V. Edinburgh possessed many brilliant citizens. There was the poet William Dunbar, James IV.’s friar of St. Francis, and his “King’s Messenger.” With Flodden, Dunbar totally disappears,—all his poetic fire, his droll humour, his Scottish force,—buried in obscurity and silence. It will never be known whether “the auld grey horse, Dunbar” was patriotically amongst those who followed their royal master and—
... on Flodden’s trampled sod,
For their king and for their country
Rendered up their souls to God,
or whether he survived and got his benefice at last, from the hands of the widowed Queen, or whether he died in broken-hearted poverty. Gavin Douglas, when he was Provost of St. Giles’s, lived in the Provost’s lodging beside the Church. Afterwards, when he became Bishop of Dunkeld, he lived in the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, in the Cowgate. The Cowgate was then a fashionable and but half-built suburb, lying below the main ridge of the city to the south, and communicating with the main city above it by numerous wynds and closes. The Flodden wall included the Cowgate, which the earlier wall had not done. Here were the palaces of many great Church dignitaries and many nobles,—the palace of the Bishops of Dunkeld, the town mansion of the Earl of Angus, (who in James III.’s reign was Gavin Douglas’s nephew); and in Blackfriars Wynd, which leads from the Cowgate up to the High Street, was the palace of the Archbishops of Glasgow (in Gavin Douglas’s day occupied by the famous Archbishop James Beaton). The memory of the great street fight known as “Cleanse the Causeway” clings round the sites of those three houses. This was the most famous of all the many fights that have taken place in the streets of Edinburgh, and was a political contest between the Douglases and the Hamiltons. From a conference held in the house of the Earl of Angus, the head of the Douglases, there hurried forth Bishop Gavin Douglas, his uncle, bearing a message from his nephew to the Earl of Arran, head of the Hamiltons, “to caution them against violence.” Finding them intent on violence, he appealed to his fellow-cleric, the Archbishop of Glasgow, who was with them. “On my conscience, I know nothing of the matter!” Archbishop Beaton assured Bishop Douglas, and struck his breast in emphasis. But the blow returned a rattling sound, betraying that the reverend Prelate was wearing armour below his rochet. “Your conscience clatters,[49] my Lord!” answered Gavin Douglas. So the peace mission failed, and the Hamiltons streamed through all the narrow wynds leading from the Cowgate into the High Street, and there found the Douglases awaiting them in a compact mass, and amid cries of “A Douglas! A Douglas!” and “A Hamilton! A Hamilton!” the slaughter began. When the causeways and the closes were piled with the dead, and the battle had been won by the Douglases, the Earl of Arran cut his way through his enemies and escaped by swimming the Nor’ Loch on a collier’s horse. Archbishop Beaton sought sanctuary in Blackfriars, and was dragged out from behind the Altar, and was saved, not by his clattering armour, but by the timely intercession of Gavin Douglas.
The next Scottish poet after Gavin Douglas was Lindsay, who was Lyon-King-at-Arms to James V. He also was a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh, and, like Gavin, has left poems addressed to it:—
Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant toun,
Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been,
Of true merchands the root of this regioun
Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen!
Thy policy and justice may be seen:
Were devotioun, wisdom, and honesty,
And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.
James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, for six years Queen Regent of Scotland, had her palace and her oratory on the north side of the Castle Hill, where she was well protected by the guns of the Castle. It was accessible through narrow closes until 1846, with some remains of its former grandeur to be seen in lofty ceilings, in mouldings and carvings, the words “Laus et Honor Deo” and a monogram of the Virgin on the residence, and “Nosce Teipsum” and the date 1557 on the oratory. Now, its place knoweth it no more, and the United Free Assembly Hall reigns in its stead.
But, though the palace of the Frenchwoman, who struggled so hard against the wave of the Reformation as it swept over Scotland, is gone, the manse of the Reformer, her enemy, John Knox, remains,—not only preserved from destruction, but turned into a species of museum, with a custodian to click on the electric light. John Knox’s house[50] forms one of the popular sights of Edinburgh, and is a conspicuous and picturesque object, standing half-way down the High Street, with its angle of wooden frontage jutting out into the street, and its “fore-stair” and its gables. Over the door is the half-obliterated legend “Lufe God abufe al and yi nychtbour as yi self,” and there is a small effigy of Knox preaching, his hand pointing to a sun on which is engraved the name of God in English, in Greek, and in Latin. The house is three-storeyed. It is supposed that the Reformer occupied the first storey, where are shown the window from which he is said to have preached to the populace below, and his tiny study, with the old Scottish pin or risp on the door.
In James VI.’s reign there was many a notable inhabitant of Edinburgh; though James carried off some of them to England, to enliven the English Court, as he carried off the most valuable of the Holyrood pictures, and everything else he could lay his hands on. There was George Heriot, “Jingling Geordie”; and there was “Tam o’ the Cowgate,” the first Earl of