George Buchanan, the humanist and reformer, was a citizen of Edinburgh for many years. He was not one of those whom his royal pupil took with him across the Border. It was in a first-floor room in Kennedy’s Close,—a close no longer existing,—that George Buchanan died, in his seventy-sixth year. When he was dying, he was visited by Andrew Melville and his nephew, and was discovered giving a first reading lesson to a small boy—“a, b, ab; b, a, ba.” When his visitors expressed mild wonder at his occupation, the dying scholar, perhaps with some gleam of remembrance of his own boyhood in Dumbartonshire, replied, “Better this than stealin’ nowts.” Andrew Melville had brought with him some of the proof sheets of Buchanan’s Latin history, and—the small boy having probably slipped willingly off to play—these were discussed. They contained some allusions to his former pupil, the absent King James, now so alienated from the doctrines of Buchanan; and Andrew Melville hinted gently that these might be indiscreet, and productive of trouble. “Are they true?” demanded the historian. To Melville’s mind they had this quality. “Then I’ll bide his dreid and a’ his kin’s!”
In 1550 there was born at Merchiston Castle, on the southern outskirts of Edinburgh, John Napier, the great mathematician, the inventor of logarithms, the chief representative of science in Scotland in his generation, and the correspondent of Kepler. He died in 1617 in the castle where he had been born; and this castle still remains, and none can pass the gateway in the wall, and glance through across the green sward to the old stone battlements, without remembering Napier of Merchiston.
During the reigns of James VI. and Charles I. an eminent Scotsman, of another, but equally patriotic, kind was living within a few miles of Edinburgh. This was Drummond of Hawthornden, Episcopalian and royalist, scholar and gentleman, who spent his meditative hours, wrote his poems, loved books and music and the æsthetic possibilities of existence and every form of ennobling beauty,—“all great arts and all good philosophies,” in his—
Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estranged live.
And “all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most familiar ride or walk? Every other week must he not have been actually in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church, and known to have his favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite the Cross?”[51]
Another notable citizen of this reign was Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate. He was the grandson of that John de Hope, of the family of Des Houblons in Picardy, who had come over with Madeleine, James V.’s first queen, from France, in 1537, and from whom are descended, either directly or indirectly, many of the good old Scottish families,—the Hopes, the Hopetouns, some of the Erskines, the Bruces of Kinross, and others. John de Hope had been a staunch Catholic; but his son, Edward, was “chairged to waird in the Castell” for his usage of the priests; and the grandson, Sir Thomas Hope, King’s Advocate, was one of the two lawyers who drew up the National League and Covenant. He lived in a big mansion in the Cowgate, which he built in 1616, with a wide arched entrance, a central stair, oak-panelled rooms, and decorated ceilings. The house was pulled down and the Public Library was built in 1890 on its site; but the carved inscription, TECVM. HABITA (from the fourth satire of Persius) which was above the lintel in the dwelling of the old Covenanting Advocate, is now preserved above an inner doorway of the Public Library. This Sir Thomas Hope had several sons, three of whom were judges; and there is an interesting portrait of him, in the possession of one of his descendants, representing him as wearing his legal robe and a kind of laurel wreath,—for it was not considered fitting, in those days of parental dignity, for a father to plead bareheaded before his sons.
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh was King’s Advocate later on in the century, in the reigns of Charles II. and James VII., and his house, which had formerly been the “lodging” of the Abbots of Melrose, stood in Strichen’s Close, then called Rosehaugh Close, off the High Street, and had a large garden down to the Cowgate, and up part of the opposite slope. Sir George Mackenzie was a man of letters, and the friend and correspondent of Dryden, and the founder of the Advocates’ Library; but, ex officio, he was the prosecutor of the Covenanters,—and this is all that is known of him in the popular local mind. He is buried in Greyfriars’ Churchyard,—where the Covenant was signed on the flat tombstones,—and in old days little boys used to prove their daring by calling out at the door of his mausoleum—
Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye daur!
Lift the sneck, and draw the bar!
But they never waited so see if their invitation were to be accepted.
It was in this gloomy refuge that James Hay, a youth of sixteen, under sentence of death for robbery, hid for six weeks after escaping from the Tolbooth. He was an old Heriot Hospital boy, and the other Herioters loyally braved Mackenzie’s ghost, and fed their schoolmate till the hue and cry was passed.