To the Jacobite gentlewomen of Edinburgh we owe many of our best-known Scottish songs. Baroness Nairne was of the old Jacobite and Episcopalian family of the Oliphants of Gask, and lived at Duddingston. Her house still stands, and is called Nairne Lodge. Mrs. Cockburn, the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” lived at one time in a close on the Castle Hill, and then on the first floor of a house at the end of Crichton Street, with windows looking along Potterrow. She, it may be remembered, was a friend of Scott’s mother, and wrote a prophetic letter about him when he was a child of six.
Adam Smith, after he came to Edinburgh in 1778 as Commissioner of Customs, lived for twelve years, till he died in 1790, in Panmure’s Close at the foot of the Canongate, and he is buried in Canongate Churchyard.
David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, was one of her notable inhabitants through nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. He was a rolling stone, for from 1751 to 1753 his home was in Riddle’s Land; thence he flitted to Jack’s Land, Canongate, was there for nine years, and deserted that for James’s Court. After this, like every one else, he joined in the rush to the New Town.
CHAPTER VI
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS
Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair;
Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air;
Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld;
Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld.
Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been;
Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen!
Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun,
And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run.
Scottish Ballad.[52]
WHEN James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his—as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle, and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets.
Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that Macbeth is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them. The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the freedom of the city.
Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh of that day,—the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that James VI. showed to his English guests.[53]
Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the Edinburgh Courant. This must have been after his release from the State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street (so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere, and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere else,—especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it. Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his Walks in Edinburgh. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of one vast castle.”
Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.”