He lodged in one of those old stately hotels near the palace of Holyroodhouse, which had formerly been occupied by the noblemen attendant upon the Scottish court, but which have latterly become so completely overrun by the lower class of citizens. Let it not be supposed that he possessed the whole of one of these magnificent hotels. He only occupied two rooms in one of the floors or “flats” into which all such buildings in Edinburgh are divided; and these he possessed only in the character of a lodger, not as tenant at first hand. He was, nevertheless, as comfortably domiciled as most old gentlemen who happen to have survived the period of matrimony. His room—for one of them was so styled par excellence—was cased round with white-painted panelling, and hung with a number of portraits representing the latter members of the house of Stuart, among whom the Old and Young Chevaliers were not forgotten.[[15]] His windows had a prospect on the one hand of the quiet and cloistered precincts of Chessels’ Court, and on the other to the gilded spires and gray, time-honoured turrets of Holyroodhouse. Twice a year, when he held a card party, with three candles on the table, and the old joke about the number which adorn that of the laird of Grant, was he duly gratified with compliments upon the comfortable nature of his “room,” by the ancient Jacobite spinsters and dowagers, who, in silk mantles and pattens, came from Abbeyhill and New Street to honour him with their venerable company.
[15]. Some rascally picture-dealer had imposed upon him a nondescript daub of the female face divine as a likeness of the beautiful Queen Mary. How he accomplished this it is not easy to say; probably he was acquainted with Mr Halket’s ardent devotion to the cause of the house of Stuart, at every period of its history, and availed himself of this knowledge to palm the wretched portrait upon the old gentleman’s unsuspecting enthusiasm. Certain it is that the said portrait was hung in the place of honour—over the mantelpiece—in Mr Halket’s apartment, and was, on state occasions, exhibited to his guests with no small complacency. Many of his friends were, like himself, too blindly attached to everything that carried a show of antiquity to suspect the cheat; and others were too good-natured to disturb a harmless delusion, from the indulgence of which he derived so much satisfaction. One of them, however, actuated by an unhappy spirit of connoisseurship, was guilty of the cruelty of undeceiving him, and not only persuaded him that the picture was not a likeness of the goddess of his idolatry,—Queen Mary,—but possessed him with the belief that it represented the vinegar aspect of the hated Elizabeth. Mr Halket, however, was too proud to acknowledge his mortification by causing the picture to be removed, or perhaps it might not have been convenient for him to supply its place; and he did not want wit to devise a pretext for allowing it to remain, without compromising his hostility to the English queen one whit. “Very well,” said he, “I am glad you have told me it is Elizabeth; for I shall have the pleasure of showing my contempt of her every day by turning my back upon her when I sit down to table.”
Halket was an old man of dignified appearance, and generally wore a dress of the antique fashion above alluded to. On Sundays and holidays he always exhibited a sort of court-dress, and walked with a cane of more than ordinary stateliness. He also assumed this dignified attire on occasions of peculiar ceremony. It was his custom, for instance, on a particular day every year, to pay a visit to the deserted court of Holyrood in this dress, which he considered alone suitable to an affair of so much importance. On the morning of the particular day which he was thus wont to keep holy, he always dressed himself with extreme care, got his hair put into order by a professional hand, and, after breakfast, walked out of doors with deliberate steps and a solemn mind. His march down the Canongate was performed with all the decorum which might have attended one of the state processions of a former day. He did not walk upon the pavement by the side of the way. That would have brought him into contact with the modern existing world, the rude touch of which might have brushed from his coat the dust and sanctitude of years. He assumed the centre of the street, where, in the desolation which had overtaken the place, he ran no risk of being jostled by either carriage or foot-passenger, and where the play of his thoughts and the play of his cane-arm alike got ample scope. There, wrapped up in his own pensive reflections, perhaps imagining himself one in a court-pageant, he walked along, under the lofty shadows of the Canongate,—a wreck of yesterday floating down the stream of to-day, and almost in himself a procession.
On entering the porch of the palace he took off his hat; then, pacing along the quadrangle, he ascended the staircase of the Hamilton apartments, and entered Queen Mary’s chambers. Had the beauteous queen still kept court there, and still been sitting upon her throne to receive the homage of mankind, Mr Halket could not have entered with more awe-struck solemnity of deportment, or a mind more alive to the nature of the scene. When he had gone over the whole of the various rooms, and also traversed in mind the whole of the recollections which they are calculated to excite, he retired to the picture-gallery, and there endeavoured to recall, in the same manner, the more recent glories of the court of Prince Charles. To have seen the amiable old enthusiast sitting in that long and lofty hall, gazing alternately upon vacant space and the portraits which hang upon the walls, and to all appearance absorbed beyond recall in the contemplation of the scene, one would have supposed him to be fascinated to the spot, and that he conceived it possible, by devout wishes, long and fixedly entertained, to annul the interval of time, and reproduce upon that floor the glories which once pervaded it, but which had so long passed away. After a day of pure and most ideal enjoyment, he used to retire to his own house, in a state of mind approaching, as near as may be possible on this earth, to perfect beatitude.[[16]]
[16]. He paid a visit, in full dress, with a sword by his side, to the Crown Room, in Edinburgh Castle, immediately after the old regalia of the kingdom had been there discovered in 1818. On this occasion a friend of the author saw him, and endeavoured to engage him in conversation, as he was marching up the Castle Hill; but he was too deeply absorbed in reflection upon the sacred objects which he had to see, to be able to speak. He just gazed on the person accosting him, and walked on.
Mr Halket belonged, as a matter of course, to the primitive apostolical church, whose history has been so intimately and so fatally associated with that of the house of Stuart. He used to attend an obscure chapel in the Old Town; one of those unostentatious places of worship to which the Episcopalian clergy had retired, when dispossessed of their legitimate fanes at the Revolution, and where they have since performed the duties of religion, rather, it may be said, to a family, or at most a circle of acquaintances, than to a congregation. He was one of the old-fashioned sort of Episcopalians, who always used to pronounce the responses aloud; and, during the whole of the Liturgy, he held up one of his hands in an attitude of devotion. One portion alone of that formula did he abstain from assenting to—the prayer for the Royal Family. At that place, he always blew his nose, as a token of contempt. In order that even his eye might not be offended by the names of the Hanoverian family, as he called them, he used a prayer-book which had been printed before the Revolution, and which still prayed for King Charles, the Duke of York, and the Princess Anne. He was excessively accurate in all the forms of the Episcopalian mode of worship; and indeed acted as a sort of fugleman to the chapel; the rise or fall of his person being in some measure a signal to guide the corresponding motions of all the rest of the congregation.
Such was Alexander Halket—at least in his more poetical and gentlemanly aspect. His character and history, however, were not without their disagreeable points. For instance, although but humbly born himself, he was perpetually affecting the airs of an aristocrat, was always talking of “good old families, who had seen better days,” and declaimed incessantly against the upstart pride and consequence of people who had originally been nothing. This peculiarity, which was, perhaps, after all, not inconsistent with his Jacobite craze, he had exhibited even when a shopkeeper in Fraserburgh. If a person came in, for instance, and asked to have a hat, Halket would take down one of a quality suitable, as he thought, to the rank or wealth of the customer, and if any objection was made to it, or a wish expressed for one of a better sort, he would say, “That hat, sir, is quite good enough for a man in your rank of life. I will give you no other.” He was also very finical in the decoration of his person, and very much of a hypochondriac in regard to little incidental maladies. Somebody, to quiz him on this last score, once circulated a report that he had caught cold one night, going home from a party, in consequence of having left off wearing a particular gold ring. And it really was not impossible for him to have believed such a thing, extravagant as it may appear.
THE GRAVE-DIGGER’S TALE.
It was one cold November morning, on the day of an intended voyage, when Mrs M‘Cosey, my landlady, tapped at my bed-chamber door, informing me that it was “braid day light;” but on reaching the caller air I found, by my watch and the light of the moon, that I had full two hours to spare for such sublunary delights as such a circumstance might create. A traveller, when he has once taken his leave, and rung the changes of “farewell,” “adieu,” “goodbye,” and “God bless you,” on the connubial and domestic harmonies of his last lodgings, will rather hazard his health by an exposure to the “pelting of the pitiless storm,” for a handful of hours, than try an experiment on his landlady’s sincerity a second time, within the short space of the same moon. If casualty should force him to make an abrupt return, enviable must be his feelings if they withstand the cold unfriendly welcome of “Ye’re no awa yet!” delivered by some quivering Abigail, in sylvan equipment, like one of Dian’s foresters, as she slowly and uninvitingly opens the creaking door—a commentary on the forbidding salute. He enters, and the strong caloric now beginning to thaw his sensibilities, he makes for his room, which he forgets is no longer his; when, though he be still in the dark, he has no need of a candle to enable him to discover that some kind remembrancer has already been rummaging his corner cupboard, making lawful seizure and removal (“‘convey’ the wise it call”) of the contents of his tea-caddy, butter-kit, sugar-bowl, and “comforter;” to which he had looked forward, on his return, as a small solace for the disappointment of the morning, affording him the means of knocking up a comfortable “check,” without again distressing the exchequer.
I had therefore determined not to return to Mrs M‘Cosey’s; for “frailty, thy name is woman;” and I felt myself getting into a sad frame of mind, as I involuntarily strolled a considerable distance along the high road, pondering on the best means of walking “out of the air,” as Hamlet says, when, as the moon receded behind a black cloud, my head came full butt against a wall; the concussion making it ring, till I actually imagined I could distinguish something like a tune from my brain. Surely, said I, this is no melody of my making; as I now heard, like two voices trolling a merry stave—