“The old Parliament Hall has been at a stand-still for some time; but Mr. Blanc has drawings for the windows and doors completed, and estimates for them are now being taken. Here is a point on which I would like to be enlightened. You say in your ‘Memorials of Edinburgh:’ ‘From the occasional assembling of the Parliament here, while the Scottish monarchs continued to reside in the Castle, it still retains the name of the Parliament House.’ Now at a gathering of eminent men of Edinburgh that I had at the Castle some time ago, Mr. Dickson of the antiquarian department of the Register Office took it upon him to give an address to the party when they were in the said hall; and he said in the course of it that it was quite a misnomer to connect the word parliament with the building, as the old Scottish Parliament met in the Tolbooth, and there does not exist any evidence to show that any of its meetings were ever held in the old Parliament Hall. What do you say to this, my dear old fellow? A few lines about the matter by return of mail from you will be a favour. By the way, a discovery has been made lately in regard to the building which will interest you. It is that the walls are much older than the corbels, the latter having been found to have been stuck into them: Mr. Blanc is of opinion about two hundred years after they were built. What do you say to this discovery?”
I was out of the reach of mails, as well as of books; and so August had passed into September ere an answer could be penned to the above queries. “The hall,” as I wrote in reply, “was undoubtedly the great banquet-hall of the Castle, where, when the king resided there, he occupied the daïs, along with the nobles in attendance, while inferior guests and retainers sat at the table below. But such halls were available for any large assembly; and in truth Scotland had no regular Parliament House till the reign of Charles I. Old Parliaments for the most part followed the Court, and found a place for meeting as they best could—in the hall of some great abbey or royal castle; or failing either, in a church or town hall. When, for example, Philip IV. of France quarrelled with the Pope in 1302, the only place of meeting that Paris could furnish for the States General was the church of Notre Dame. When the English Court was at Westminster, the Parliament turned St. Stephen’s Chapel to like account; and the Blackfriars’ Monastery at Perth, in all probability, afforded the usual place of meeting for the Scottish Parliament, till the assassination of James I. in 1437 led to the transference of the Court to Edinburgh, with a view doubtless to safe royal residence within the Castle. Only one Parliament, the thirteenth of his reign, met at Edinburgh, in what hall is not specified. But, immediately after the death of the poet-king, the first Parliament of the new reign assembled there; and the record for once leaves no doubt. It runs thus: ‘Quo die comparentibus tribus regni statibus apud Edinburgh, omnes comites, nobiles, et barones, ac liberi-tenentes dicti regni, venientes ad Castrum de Edinburgh.’ From that memorable date may possibly have originated the tradition which survived when, in the middle of last century, Maitland described the hall as ‘a large ancient edifice, formerly the Parliament House, now converted into a barrack.’ As to the Tolbooth, the one we know of was only erected in the reign of James V., and while it was building the council met in the Holy Blood aisle of St. Giles’s Church.”
This and much more, in response to the welcome letter from beyond the sea, was all fully set forth; for the subject gave occasion for frequent correspondence between us, as one in which his sympathies were largely enlisted, and which engaged his latest thoughts; and so it claims a place here. But the letter was never to meet the eye of him for whom it had been penned. His keen appreciation of the humorous aspect that lurks at times in the gravest proceedings was very familiar to his friends, and a touching illustration of it claims notice now. Much that has transpired since his death shows how fully he realized the uncertainty of life, and the fact that the days of his years had already reached man’s allotted span. Of this the ample provision in his will for the completion of the works he had undertaken for his native city furnishes the best proof. But on one of his visits to the Castle, in company with friends interested in the progress of the work there, a university professor who was of the party, after satisfying himself as to the extent and character of the designed restorations, proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. Nelson. The proceeding itself was one peculiarly distasteful to him; but in the course of some eulogistic remarks the professor somewhat inopportunely expressed a hope that Mr. Nelson would be spared to see the completion of his costly and patriotic undertaking. As the work was already so far advanced that the finishing of it was a matter of months only, he dryly replied that the learned professor must surely mean to assign him a very brief term of life, for he hoped to see the work finished before the year was out; and as for the cost, he believed it would prove one of the best investments he had ever made. If the lasting appreciation of a generous, public-spirited act furnishes an adequate compensation for such liberality, it was indeed so. But the ominous remark was all too apt. Within three months of that memorable gathering, the words were recalled by some of those who had been present, as they bent in sorrow over his grave.
One of the noticeable gifts of William Nelson was a memory of rare compass and accuracy. An incident distinctly recalled by him in recent years was proved by its association with the death of an aunt to date at a period when he was only two and a half years old. His recollections of playmates went back to early childhood; and he seemed to retain in well-defined and even minute detail events associated with many schoolmates and fellow-students of later years. Numerous as they were, the tie of such early fellowship was never slighted. There was only one point in which his memory failed. A wrong done to himself retained no place in his thoughts; nor did he allow the failures due to misconduct to dull his ear to the appeal of the needy for help. The number of such that made claim to his charity was large. But of friendship in its true sense his conception was high. Of those who were admitted to that intimate relationship he seemed to hold in memory the minutest incidents of a life-long intercourse, and startled them at times by the accuracy with which he recalled the events of long-forgotten years. His large-heartedness was such that he seemed to identify himself with every interest of theirs, with a rare tenderness, as of a love “passing the love of women.” One on whom an intimate knowledge of the enduring sacredness of one of his earliest friendships had made a strong impression, thus wrote to me shortly after his death: “The friendship uniting you seemed to me one of the charming things so rarely met in life. That two men with wives and families, business cares, and different pursuits and tastes, should so cleave to one another from early youth onward was refreshing to realize. I always delight in such friendships being possible. They seem the gems shining out from the dull mass of common humanity.”
There is no exaggeration here, for the subject of this memoir was of a rare type of humanity; though, if those who most resemble him in all other respects are marked by a like sensitive shrinking from publicity, we may indulge in the pleasant belief that they are more numerous than the world imagines. But it is vain to linger over such fancies. The memory so prompt in business, so retentive in its literary reminiscences, and so responsive to all the sympathetic impulses of love and friendship, suddenly failed. At the very time when his long-desired visit to the classic scenes of Greece was to have been carried out, and every arrangement was completed for the journey, he seemed to lose his hold on the past. The vessel had been determined upon, and the day of departure fixed, when symptoms, little heeded at first, developed into the fatal malady which brought all his plans to a close. The silver cord was loosed. He had finished his course; and on the 10th of September 1887, the very day on which he was to have set out for Greece, he passed from the circle that for so many happy years had been gladdened with the sunshine of his presence, to join the loved ones who had gone before him to the heavenly home. He was one whose creed found its full expression in deeds, not in words. Only in rare moments of confidence did he give utterance to his simple faith. At best the highest efforts of the biographer but dimly approximate to the original. God sends many a beautiful soul into this world to do its appointed work, and then to live only in the memories of the loved ones left behind. Perhaps in this case also it had been better if no biography had been attempted; but he seems to me to have realized in his life that “pure religion” which the apostle James had in view: “To visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”
The wide-spread manifestations of grief when the news of William Nelson’s death became known abundantly manifested the sense of a great public loss. At the urgent request of the city authorities the desire of the family for a strictly private funeral was abandoned. The Lord Provost and magistrates of Edinburgh and the Provost and magistrates of Kinghorn attended in their robes; and along with them the Principal and many of the professors of the University, the President and members of the Royal Scottish Academy, with leading citizens, clergymen, and others, many of whom came from great distances to mark their respect for one whose loss was so widely deplored. The shops were closed as the mournful procession, headed by the employés from Parkside, moved on to the Grange Cemetery, where his remains were laid beside those of his loved father and mother and his brother John, with the graves of Dr. Chalmers and Hugh Miller near by. The turf was fragrant with the wreaths of flowers laid there by many sincere mourners; and it continued to be visited from day to day by crowds, including many humble admirers who deplored the loss of their benefactor, until the turf around was trodden out and had to be replaced. Now that his remains are laid at rest in the quiet cemetery among those of loved ones who formed the happy home circle of his early years, and the busy outer world has resumed its wonted avocations, his widow has erected a memorial tablet to mark the sacred spot, aptly inscribed with the text: “After he had served his generation by the will of God, he fell asleep.”
THE END.
