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EDINBURGH
SKETCHES & MEMORIES

BY

DAVID MASSON

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1892

PREFATORY NOTE

The following Papers, though in their collected state they have a certain continuity of general subject, were written at different times and for different purposes. One is a modified reprint of an article which appeared in the Westminster Review as long ago as 1856. Seven of the others were contributed, at intervals within the last twelve years, to Macmillan’s Magazine, The Scotsman, or The Scots Observer, and are reprinted now with courteous permission. The remaining five are from manuscript of various dates since 1867, and are now published for the first time. An occasional small recurrence of fact or of phrase in the series may be excused in consideration that the Papers, thus written separately, may still be read separately.

Edinburgh: March 1892.

CONTENTS

QUEEN MARY’S EDINBURGH[^[1]]

I.—QUEEN MARY’S RETURN TO SCOTLAND, AUGUST 1561

On a clear day the inhabitants of Edinburgh, by merely ascending the Calton Hill or any other of the familiar heights in or around their city, can have a view of nearly the whole length of their noble estuary, the Firth of Forth. To the right or east, its entrance from the open sea, between the two shires of Fife and Haddington, is marked most conspicuously on the Haddingtonshire side by a distant conical mound, called Berwick Law, rising with peculiar distinctness from the northward curve of land which there bounds the horizon. It is thither that the eye is directed if it would watch the first appearance of steamers and ships from any part of the world that may be bound up the Firth for Edinburgh by its port of Leith. Moving thence westward, the eye can command easily the twenty miles more of the Firth which these ships and steamers have to traverse. The outlines of both shores, though the breadth between them averages twelve miles, may be traced with wonderful sharpness, pleasingly defined as they are by their little bays and promontories, and by the succession of towns and fishing villages with which they are studded. Of these, Musselburgh on the near side marks the transition from the shire of Haddington to that of Edinburgh; after which point the Firth begins to narrow. Just below Edinburgh itself, where its port of Leith confronts the Fifeshire towns of Kinghorn and Burntisland, with the island of Inchkeith a little to the right between, the breadth is about six miles. There the main maritime interest of the Firth ceases, few ships going farther up; but, for any eye that can appreciate scenic beauty, there remains the delight of observing the continued course of the Firth westward to Queensferry and beyond, a riband of flashing water between the two coasts which are known prosaically as those of Linlithgowshire and West Fifeshire, but which, in their quiet and mystic remoteness, look like a tract of some Arthurian dreamland.

While something of all this is to be seen on almost any day from any of the eminences in or near Edinburgh, it is only on rare occasions that it can be all seen to perfection. Frequently, even in sunny weather, when the sky is blue above, a haze overspreads the Firth, concealing the Fifeshire shore, or blurring it into a vague cloud-like bank. Sometimes, on the other hand, when there is little sunshine, and the day seems rather sombre in the Edinburgh streets, the view of the Firth and of the other surroundings of the city from any of the higher spots is amazingly distinct to the utmost possible distance, though with the distinctness of a drawing in pen and ink. Worst of all the atmospheric conditions for a survey of the Firth, or of the scenery generally, from Edinburgh, is that of the thick, dull, drizzling, chilling, and piercing fog or mist, called locally a haar, which the easterly wind brings up at certain seasons from the sea. Up the Firth this haar will creep or roll, converting the whole aerial gap between the opposed shores into a mere continuous trough of seething and impenetrable mist, or of rain and mist commingled, drenching the Fifeshire hills on the one side, enveloping all Edinburgh on the other, and pushing itself still westward and inland over the higher and narrower reaches of the estuary, till the aforesaid tract of gleaming Arthurian scenery is absorbed into the long foggy gloom, and even Alloa and Stirling feel the discomfort. No chance then, from any height near Edinburgh, of seeing the ships and steamers in any part of their course from the mouth of the Firth to the port of Leith. If any there be, they are down in the vast abysm of mist, at anchor for safety, or piloting their Leithward course slowly and cautiously through the opaque element, with bells ringing, horns blowing, and now and then a boom from the cannon on the deck to warn off other vessels or ascertain their own whereabouts. So even during the day; but, when the haar lasts through the night, and the opaque gray of the air is deepened into an equally opaque black or umber, the confusion is still greater. The sounds of fog-signals from the bewildered vessels are incessant; the shore-lights from the piers and landing-places can throw their yellow glare but a little way into the turbid consistency; and, if any adventurous vessel does manage to warp herself into port in such circumstances, it is with excited vociferation and stamping among those on board, and no less hurry-skurry among the men ashore who assist in the feat. Happily, an Edinburgh haar at once of such dense quality and of long duration is a rare occurrence. April and May are the likeliest months for the phenomenon, and it passes usually within twenty-four hours. It may come later in the year, however, and may last longer.

Just after the middle of August 1561, as we learn from contemporary records, there was a haar of unusual intensity and continuance over Edinburgh and all the vicinity. It began on Sunday the 17th, and it lasted, with slight intermissions, till Thursday the 21st. “Besides the surfett weat and corruptioun of the air,” writes Knox, then living in Edinburgh, “the myst was so thick and dark that skairse mycht any man espy ane other the lenth of two pair of butts.” It was the more unfortunate because it was precisely in those days of miserable fog and drizzle that Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her thirteen years of residence and education in France, had to form her first real acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her realm.

She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th August, with a retinue of about 120 persons, French and Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen’s two most important uncles, indeed,—the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,—were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the Queen’s own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine uncles,—the Duke d’Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d’Elbeuf,—with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed the Scottish contingent of the Queen’s train, her four famous “Marys” included,—Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton. They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age, to share her new fortunes.

It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and exclaiming again and again, “Adieu, ma chère France! je ne vous verray jamais plus!” He tells us how, when at length they did lose sight of France, and were on the open sea northward with a fair wind, there was some anxiety lest they should be intercepted, and the Queen taken prisoner by an English fleet. In the peculiar state of the relations between England and Scotland at the time, this was not an impossibility, and would hardly have been against the law of nations. There had been some angry correspondence between Elizabeth and Mary respecting the non-ratification by Mary of a certain “Treaty of Edinburgh” of the previous year, stipulating that she would desist from her claim to Elizabeth’s throne of England. Elizabeth had consequently refused Mary’s application for a safeguard for her homeward journey; and there was actually an English squadron in the North Sea available for the capture of Mary if Elizabeth had chosen to give the word. But, though the English squadron does seem to have waylaid the French galleys, and one of the transports following the galleys was taken and detained for some reason or other, the galleys themselves, by rapid sailing or by English sufferance, threw that danger behind, and approached the Scottish coast in perfect safety. What then astonished Brantôme, and what he seems to have remembered all his life with a kind of horror in association with his first introduction to Queen Mary’s native climate and kingdom, was the extraordinary fog, the si grand brouillard, in which they suddenly found themselves. “On a Sunday morning, the day before we came to Scotland,” he says, “there rose so great a fog that we could not see from the stern to the prow, much to the discomfiture of the pilots and crews, so that we were obliged to let go the anchor in the open sea, and take soundings to know where we were.” Brantôme’s measure of time becomes a little incoherent at this point; and we hardly know from his language whether it was outside the Firth of Forth altogether, or inside of the Firth about Berwick Law, that the fog caught them, if indeed he remembered that there was such a thing as an estuary at all between the open sea and Leith. He distinctly says, however, that they were a whole day and night in the fog, and that he and the other Frenchmen were blaspheming Scotland a good deal on account of it before they did reach Leith. That, as other authorities inform us, was about ten o’clock in the morning of Tuesday the 19th.

The Leith people and the Edinburgh people were quite unprepared, the last intimation from France having pointed to the end of the month as the probable time of the Queen’s arrival, if she were to be expected at all. But the cannon-shots from the galleys, as they contrived to near Leith harbour, were, doubtless, a sufficient advertisement. Soon, so far as the fog would permit, all Leith was in proper bustle, and all the political and civic dignitaries that chanced to be in Edinburgh were streaming to Leith. Not till the evening, according to one account, not till next morning, according to another, did the Queen leave her galley and set foot on shore. Then, to allow a few hours more for getting her Palace of Holyrood, and her escort thither, into tolerable readiness, she took some rest in the house in Leith deemed most suitable for her reception, the owner being Andrew Lamb, a wealthy Leith merchant. It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was the procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber-window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood as the very completion of the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, “there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!” Whether Knox’s account of the Queen’s impressions of the serenade or Brantôme’s is to be accepted, there can be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary’s first night in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms for the Queen’s delectation to an accompaniment of violins.

Next day, Thursday the 21st, this memorable Edinburgh haar of August 1561 came to an end. Arthur Seat and the other heights and ranges of the park round Holyrood wore, we may suppose, their freshest verdure; and Edinburgh, dripping no longer, shone forth, we may hope, in her sunniest beauty. The Queen could then become more particularly acquainted with the Palace in which she had come to reside, and with the nearer aspects of the town to which the Palace was attached, and into which she had yet to make her formal entry.

II.—PLAN AND FABRIC OF THE TOWN IN 1561

Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now represented only by one beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been founded in the twelfth century by David I., and had been enlarged in the fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the right by a continued chateau-like frontage, of about the same height as the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this chateau-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four sides. That quadrangle of chateau, touching the Abbey to the back from its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural grandeur of the site,—a level of deep and wooded park, between the Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the other,—Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.

The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present “Old Town” which figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary’s time, and is in fact its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago. The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise altered.

The first part of the long ascent from Holyrood was the Canongate. Though occupying nearly half of the whole, and in complete junction with the Edinburgh proper up to which it led, it was a separate “burgh of regality,” which had formed itself, as its name implies, under the protection of the abbots and canons of Holyrood. By virtue of that original, it was not yet included in the municipal jurisdiction of the Edinburgh Magistrates and Town Council, but held out under a magistracy of its own. Hence some characteristics distinguishing this lower part of the ascent from the rest. The old Canongate was by no means the dense exhibition of dingy picturesqueness now known as the Canongate of Edinburgh, with repulsive entries and closes on both sides, leading to cages of crammed humanity of the poorer sort, or to inner recesses of bone-yards, pipe-clay yards, and the like. It had the sparseness and airiness of a suburb of the Court. The houses, whether of stone or partly of wood, were pretty thickly put together, indeed, along the immediate street-margins, with the inevitable access to many of them by entries and closes, but did not go so deeply back on either side as not to leave room for pleasant gardens and tracts of vacant ground behind. A paved and causewayed street, ascending continuously between two rows of houses, of irregular forms and varying heights, but few of them of more than three storeys; other houses at the backs of these to some little depth all the way, reached by closes from the street, and generally set gablewise to those in front; and, behind these again, garden grounds and grassy slopes and hollows: such was the ancient Canongate. In token of its claims to be a separate burgh, it had its own market cross, and, near this, its own Tolbooth or prison and council-house. The present Canongate Tolbooth, though an antique object, is only the successor of the older Canongate Tolbooth of Queen Mary’s time.

The ending of the Canongate and beginning of the High Street of Edinburgh proper was at a cross street, the left arm of which, descending from the ridge into the ravine on that side, was called St. Mary’s Wynd, while the arm to the right was called Leith Wynd. Here, to mark more emphatically the transition from the smaller burgh into the greater, one encountered the separating barrier of the Nether Bow Port. It has left no trace of itself now, but was a battlemented stone structure, spanning the entire breadth of the thoroughfare, with an arched gateway in the middle and gates for admission or exclusion. That passed, one was in the lower portion of the High Street, called specifically the Nether Bow. Here, it was not merely the increasing breadth of the thoroughfare and the increasing height of the houses that showed one had come within the boundaries of the real civic and commercial Edinburgh. No such sparseness of building now as in the Canongate; no mere double fringe of houses to a short depth, with entries and closes ending in gardens and vacant ground; but a sense of being between two masses of densely-peopled habitations, clothing the declivities from the ridge to their lowest depths on both sides, and penetrable only by those courts and wynds of which one saw the mouths, but the labyrinthine intricacy of which in the course of their descent baffled conception.

The same sensation accompanied one on advancing still upwards into the middle and broadest part of the High Street. Here the street had much the same striking appearance as now. One saw a spacious incline of oblong piazza, rather than a street, lined by buildings, some of solid stone throughout and very tall, others lower and timber-fronted, all of quaint architecture from their basements to their peaked roofs and chimneys, and not a few with “fore-stairs,” or projecting flights of steps from doors on the first floor down to the causeway. It was here, too, that the lateral fringes of habitation down the steep alleys were of greatest width. That on the right was stopped only at the bottom of the ravine on that side by a lake called the North Loch, while that on the left, after reaching the bottom of the other ravine, mingled itself there with an independent and very aristocratic suburb that had grown up in the ravine itself, under the name of the Cowgate, as a southern parallel of relief to the main Edinburgh of the ridge above. This low-lying, aristocratic suburb, though accessible from the piazza of the High Street by the wynds and closes on the southern side, did not come easily into the cognisance of a stranger that might be exploring the piazza itself. He had enough to arrest his attention where he was. One difference between the old High Street and the present, despite their general resemblance, consisted in a huge obstruction, now removed, which interrupted the old High Street at its very midmost point, immediately above the Town Cross. Just above the spot now marked in the causeway as the site of this Town Cross, and beginning exactly where the great church of St. Giles protrudes its complex pile on the left and raises into the sky its remarkable tower and open octagonal crown of stonework, there stood in the old High Street a stack of lofty masonry, stretching up the centre of the street for a considerable way, and leaving only a gloomy and tortuous lane for pedestrians along the buttresses of the church on one side, and a somewhat wider channel,—called the Luckenbooths,—for shops and traffic, on the other. The lower portion of this obstructive stack of masonry belonged to the Luckenbooths, and was included in the name, the basement being let out in shops or stalls for goods, while the upper floors were parcelled out as dwellings. The higher and larger portion, separated from the lower by a narrow suture called “The Kirk Stile,” was nothing less than the famous Heart of Midlothian itself, or Old Tolbooth, which had served hitherto as the prætorium burgi, at once the jail of Edinburgh, its Town Council House, the seat of the Supreme Courts of Justice for Scotland, and the occasional meeting-place of a Scottish Parliament. Little wonder if one lingered round this core of the High Street and of the whole town. The channel of the Luckenbooths on one side of the street, the lane between the Tolbooth and St. Giles’s on the other, and the cross passage or Kirk Stile, were worth more than one perambulation, if only on account of their amusing interconnection; at the back of St. Giles’s Church, overhanging the Cowgate, was St. Giles’s Churchyard, the chief cemetery of the town; and the Tolbooth alone might well detain one by its look and the interest of its associations. In 1561 they were voting it to be too old and decayed, if not too unsightly, for the various and important purposes which it had hitherto served; and within a few months from our present date there was to be an order for its demolition, and for the erection of another building more suitable for those purposes, and especially for the accommodation of the Lords of Council and Session. But, though they did then begin to take it down, and though a “New Tolbooth” or “Council House” was built near it in the same part of the High Street, the old or original Tolbooth escaped its doom, and was left standing after all. A little re-edified, it was to survive its more modern substitute, and to be known till 1817 as at least the Jail of Edinburgh and real old Heart of Midlothian. Some persons still alive can remember it.

The Tolbooth having been passed, one was again in an open piazza of tall or tallish houses, nearly as broad as the former piazza, but farther up the incline, and known indifferently as the High Street above the Tolbooth or as the Lawnmarket. Here, also, one could not but note the number of the closes and wynds on both sides, plunging down the house-laden slopes with break-neck precipitancy from the vertebral street. At the head of this piazza, however, where it began to narrow, and where there was an obstruction across it in the form of a clumsy building called the Butter Tron or Weigh-House, there was one offshoot to the left of greater consequence than any mere wynd or close. This was the West Bow, a steep zigzag or spiral kind of street of antique houses, bringing one down to the deeply-sunk Grassmarket or Horsemarket, i.e. to a large square space opening out from the end of the Cowgate, and convenient for the country people coming into the town with cattle. Refraining from this descent by the West Bow, and keeping still to the vertebral street, one reached the last portion of the long causewayed and inhabited ridge. This was the Castle Hill, a narrowish continuation of the High Street, so steep as to require climbing rather than walking, but up which, nevertheless, there was still a plentiful straggling of houses, perched anyhow, with closes and paved yards reticulating what lateral depth of earth they could cling to, and with views of dizzying profundity from their back windows.

All civic Edinburgh thus left behind, and a military portal having been passed, one entered the precincts of the Castle itself,—the high, rocky stronghold which was more ancient than anything recognisable as most ancient in the Edinburgh beneath, which indeed had fostered that Edinburgh into its first existence and growth, and in which there were relics of days older than those of Malcolm Canmore and David I., older than the infancy of Holyrood Abbey. After the long walk upwards between the two lines of close-packed houses, with perpetual mouths of mere wynds and closes for a whole mile, it was something to emerge into the open air, even in the battlemented exterior esplanade or courtyard of this Castle, slanting up the hillside to the moat and drawbridge. It was more to be allowed to pass the drawbridge and the other defences, and so to pursue the winding, rock-hewn track by which one mounted to the fortified aggregate of guard-houses, store-rooms, and royal towers, heaved together on the cliff-bound summit. What a platform then to stand on, beside the cannon, in any of the ledges of the embrasured parapet! The feeling for scenery, they say, had not been much developed in the sixteenth century; but no more in that century than in this could any human eye have gazed with indifference on the vast panorama of Scottish land and water that burst into the vision from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. To the north there were villages and farmsteads dotting the range of fields towards the Firth which is now covered with the streets of the New Town, and beyond these always the unwearying loveliness of the face of the Firth, with the boundary of the Fifeshire hills; to the west, the near Corstorphines, and over these also a tract of varied country, fading away up the course of the Firth into a purple suggestion of Stirling and the first spurs of the Highlands; to the south, the Braids and the Pentlands, hiding the pastoral territory of the Esks and the Upper Tweed, with its sleepy stretch towards the Borders and England. Scores of castles and keeps, each the residence of some nobleman or laird of distinction, could be counted within this sweep of the eye, north, west, and south, over the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. But, if one’s interest were still rather in the town itself, it was the eastward glance that would help most to complete and define the previous impressions. The whole sea-approach to Edinburgh by the Firth was now splendidly visible, with the already described curve of the hither coast from Berwick Law to Leith; the road from Leith to Holyrood was plainly discernible; and the Canongate and Edinburgh could be looked down upon together, and seen in connected shape and ground-plan.

However slight the defences of the Canongate and Holyrood, Edinburgh proper, it could now be seen, was carefully enclosed and bastioned. On the north side, the North Loch, washing the base of the Castle Rock and filling the valley through which the railway now runs, was sufficient protection; but all the rest of the town was bounded in by a wall, called the Flodden Wall. It had been constructed mainly in the panic after the battle of Flodden in 1513 to supersede an older and less perfect circumvallation, but had been much repaired and modified since. It started from the east end of the North Loch and ran thence along Leith Wynd and St. Mary’s Wynd, crossing the High Street at the Nether Bow Port, and so shutting out the Canongate; it then went so far south as to include the whole of the Cowgate and some space of the heights beyond the ravine of the Cowgate; and the west bend of its irregular rectangle, after recrossing this ravine a little beyond the Grassmarket, riveted itself to the Castle Rock, on its most precipitous side, at the head of the High Street. There were several gates in the circuit of the wall besides the Nether Bow Port, the chief being the Cowgate Port, which was also to the east, the Kirk of Field Port (afterwards Potter Row Port) and Greyfriars Port (afterwards Bristo Port), both to the south, and the West Port, just beyond the Grassmarket and the sole inlet from the west. When these gates were closed, Edinburgh could rest within herself, tolerably secure from external attack, and conscious of a reserve of strength in the cannon and garrison of the dominating Castle. Even if the town itself should yield to a siege, the Castle could hold out as a separate affair, impregnable, or almost impregnable, within her own fortifications. Successful assaults on Edinburgh Castle were among the rarest and most memorable accidents of Scottish history.

III.—THE EDINBURGH POPULATION IN 1561

Such having been the fabric or shell of Edinburgh in 1561, what was the contained life?

The entire population, the Canongate included, was probably less than 30,000; but, confined as this population was within such strait limits, obliged to accommodate itself to one such ridgy backbone of principal street, with off-going wynds and closes and but one considerable and low-lying parallel, and having to make up, therefore, by the vertical height of the houses for the impossibility of spreading them out, its compression of itself within the houses must have been exceedingly dense. As the political capital of the nation, the seat of Government and of the Central Law Courts, Edinburgh not only counted a number of families of rank among its habitual residents, but drew into it, for part of every year at least, representatives of the Scottish nobility, and of the lairds of mark and substance, from all the Lowland shires. Only a few of the greatest of these, however, had town mansions of their own, with any semblance of sequestered approaches and adjuncts, whether in the Canongate or the Cowgate. The majority of the nobles and lairds from the country, as well as of the habitual residents of highest rank and means, such as the Senators of the College of Justice, had to be content with the better portions of those several-flatted or many-flatted tenements,—insulæ they would have been called in ancient Rome, but “lands” was and is the special Edinburgh word for them,—which rose at the sides of the High Street or in the wynds and closes that ran thence down the slopes. Distributed through the same “lands” were the families of the “merchants” and the “craftsmen,” the two denominations that composed between them the whole body of the burghers proper. There was a chronic rivalry between these two denominations in the elections to the Town Council and in the management of affairs generally. The “merchants,” whose business was ship-owning, the export and import of goods, and the sale of the imported goods at first hand, affected the superiority on the whole. There were individuals among the “craftsmen,” however, as opulent as any of the “merchants.” This was particularly the case with the craft of the goldsmiths, always a prominent craft in Edinburgh, and there, as in London, combining the trade of money-lending with the more especial arts of gold-working, silver-working, and jewellery, and so allying itself with the merchants and their transactions. Among the other “crafts,” all regularly incorporated in brotherhoods, and each with its annually elected head, called the “deacon” of that craft, were the skinners or leather-dressers, the furriers, the wobsters or weavers, the tailors, the bonnet-makers, the hammermen or smiths and armourers, the waulkers or cloth-dressers, the cordiners or shoemakers, the wrights, the masons, the coopers, the fleshers or butchers, the baxters or bakers, the candle-makers, and the barbers or barber-surgeons. Printing had been introduced into Edinburgh in 1507; and there had been a lingering of the craft in the town ever since by patents or permissions, but on the very smallest scale. To the “merchants” and “craftsmen” and their families there have to be added, of course, the numerous dependents of both these classes of the burghers, called in the simple language of that time their “servandis.” Under that name were included not only the domestic servants of the wealthier merchants, but also their clerks and business assistants, and the journeymen and apprentices of the master-craftsmen, the last a very unruly portion of the community and known collectively as “the crafts-childer.” Imagine all these domiciled, as was then the habit, with their masters, and stowed away somehow, “up and down in hole and bore,” as one old document phrases the fact, in the workshops and “lands.” Even then there remains to be taken into account the miscellany of small retail traders, in shops and stalls, which such a town required, with the peripatetic hucksters of fish and other provisions, and the rabble of nondescripts, living by erratic and hand-to-mouth occupations, and hanging on about the hostelries. All these too were “indwellers” in Edinburgh, and housed in the wynds and closes in some inconceivable manner. Moreover, as we learn too abundantly from the old burgh records, actual vagrants and beggars, whether of the able-bodied and turbulent variety, or of the cripple, diseased, and blind, soliciting alms by obstreperous whining and by the exhibition of their deformities, swarmed in Old Edinburgh with a persistency which all the police efforts of the authorities, with examples of scourgings and hangings for several generations, had been unable to repress or diminish. Where they lived in overcrowded Edinburgh only St. Giles’s steeple could now tell.

The overcrowding had its natural consequences. The sanitary condition of most European towns in the sixteenth century, the best English towns included, was incredibly bad; Scottish towns generally were behind most English towns in this respect; but Old Edinburgh had a character all her own for perfume and sluttishness. It could hardly be helped. Impressively picturesque though the town was by site and architecture, its populousness and its structural arrangement were hardly compatible with each other on terms of cleanliness. Individual families, within their own domiciles in the various “lands,” might be as tidy as their cramped accommodations would permit; but the state of the common stair in each “land,”—and in the taller lands it was a dark stone “turnpike” ascending in corkscrew fashion from flat to flat,—depended on the united tastes and habits of all the families using it, and therefore on the habits and tastes of the least fastidious. It was worse in the wynds and closes. Not only did all the refuse from the habitations on both sides find its way into these, generally by the easy method of being flung down from the windows overnight; but the occupations of some of the ground-floor tenants, butchers, candle-makers, etc.,—added contributions heterogeneously offensive. Hardly a close that had not its “midding” or “middings” at its foot or in its angles. For generations the civic authorities had been contending with this state of things and uttering periodical rebukes and edicts for cleansing. There were two kinds of occasions on which these cleansing-edicts were apt to be most stringent and peremptory. One was the expected arrival of some illustrious stranger, or company of strangers, from England or from abroad. Then the inhabitants were reminded of the chief causes of offence among them, and put on the alert for their removal, so as not to shame the town. More strenuous still were the exertions made on any of those periodical outbreaks of the Plague, or alarms of its approach, of which we hear so frequently in the annals of Edinburgh, as of other towns, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. Then the authorities did bestir themselves, and the inhabitants too. But, after such occasions of spasmodic sanitary effort, there always came the relapse; and, though there was a standing order obliging each householder to see to the tidiness of his own little bit of precinct, the general apathy and obtuseness prevailed. It was providential when the heavens themselves interfered, and some extraordinary deluge of rain sent torrents down the closes.

Fortunately, the population did not need to remain within doors, or in the obscurities of the wynds and closes, more than it liked. It could pour itself out of doors into the main street; and it did so daily with a profusion beyond all modern custom. Any morning or afternoon about the year 1561 the High Street of Edinburgh, from the Castle to the Canongate, must have been one of the liveliest and most bustling thoroughfares in Europe. Need we cite, for witness, that chapter in The Abbot in which Scott takes occasion to describe it, just about this date, when he brings young Roland Græme for the first time into Edinburgh under the convoy of Adam Woodcock the falconer? Scott is so excellent an authority in such matters that his account may pass as hardly less authentic than that of a contemporary. We can see, with Roland Græme, the populace “absolutely swarming like bees on the wide and stately street”; we can see the “open booths projecting on the street,” with commodities of all sorts for sale, and especially Flanders cloths, tapestry, and cutlery; we can pick out in the crowd its most representative figures, such as the “gay lady, in her muffler or silken veil,” stepping daintily after her “gentleman usher,” or the group of burghers standing together, “with their short Flemish cloaks, wide trousers, and high-caped doublets.” Nor are we much surprised when there come upon the scene the two parties of richly dressed aristocratic gallants, with their armed retinues of serving-men, meeting each other with frowns in the middle of the causeway, and immediately falling upon each other in a desperate tulzie or street fight, in vindication of their right of way, and of the hereditary feud between their families. Scott required such a tulzie for his story, and therefore brought it in where it suited him best. But, though Edinburgh was famous for its tulzies or causeway-fights between noblemen and lairds at feud, they were hardly everyday occurrences. Once a week or once a month was about the rate in real history. For greater authenticity, therefore, we may seek glimpses of the High Street of Old Edinburgh in Scottish literature of earlier date than the Waverley Novels.

The Scottish poet Dunbar has left us two pieces picturing very distinctly the Edinburgh of 1500–1513, which he knew so well. He calls it “our nobill toun,” as if patriotically proud of it all in all; but it chances that in both the poems he is more sarcastic than complimentary. One is an express address of objurgation to the merchants of Edinburgh for their disgraceful neglect of the “nobill toun” and its capabilities. Why, he asks, do they let its streets be overrun by beggars, so that “nane may mak progress” through them; why do they let the fairest parts be given up to “tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyle”; why do they let the vendors “of haddocks and of scaittis,” and minstrels with but two wearisome tunes, which they repeat eternally, go everywhere bawling up and down? He complains more particularly of the High Street. He speaks of the projecting fore-stairs there as making “the houssis mirk”; he declares that at the Cross, where one should see “gold and silk,” one sees nothing but “crudis and milk,” and that nothing is sold in all the rest of that lower piazza but poor shellfish or common tripe and pudding; and he is positively savage on the state of the blocked isthmus between the two piazzas beside St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth. There, where the merchants themselves most resort, and where the light is held from their Parish Kirk by the stupid obstructions which they permit, they are hampered in a malodorous honeycomb of lanes, which may suit their tastes for exchange purposes, but is hardly to their credit! To these particulars about the High Street from one of the poems we may add, from the other, linen hung out to dry on poles from the windows, cadgers of coals with wheeled carts, cadgers of other articles with creels only slung over their horses, and dogs and boys in any number running in and out among the carts and horses. All in all, Dunbar’s descriptions of Edinburgh are satirical in mood, and sum themselves up in this general rebuke to the Edinburgh merchants in the first of the two poems—

Why will ye, merchants of renown,

Lat Edinburgh, your noble town,

For laik of reformatioun,

The common profit tine and fame?

Think ye nocht shame

That ony other regioun

Sall with dishonour hurt your name?

This is hardly the Edinburgh of subsequent romance, as we see it in Scott’s Abbot; but that Scott had good warrant for what he wrote there, other than his own imagination, appears from a supplement to Dunbar furnished by Sir David Lindsay. The Edinburgh which Sir David Lindsay knew was the Edinburgh of a later generation than Dunbar’s, say from 1513 to 1555; and, whether from this lapse of time or from difference in the tempers of the two poets, Sir David Lindsay’s Edinburgh is liker Scott’s than Dunbar’s. Thus, in one poem of Lindsay’s,—

Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant town,

Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been,

Of true merchánds the root of this regioun,

Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen!

Thy policy and justice may be seen:

Were dévotioun, wisdom, and honesty

And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.

In another of his poems he describes Edinburgh on a gala day, when there was a procession through its High Street, such as he himself, as Lyon King of Arms, might have marshalled. The occasion was the entry into Edinburgh in May 1537 of Magdalene, daughter of Francis I. of France, the young bride of James V.; and the dirge-like form of the description,—that of an indignant address to Death,—is accounted for by the fact that the poet is looking back on the splendours of her welcome into the Scottish capital when the too swift close of her fair young life, only a few weeks afterwards, had turned them into matter of mournful recollection,—

Thief! Saw thou nocht the great preparatives

Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?

Thou saw the people labouring for their lives

To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:

Sic pleasour never was in this regioun

As suld have been the day of her entrace,

With great propinis given to her Grace.

Thou saw makand richt costly scaffolding,

Depaintit weell with gold and silver fine,

Ready preparit for the upsetting;

With fountains flowing water clear and wine;

Disguisit folks, like creatures divine,

On ilk scaffold, to play ane sindry story:

But all in greeting turnit thou that glory.

Thou saw there mony ane lusty fresh galland,

Weell orderit for ressaving of their Queen;

Ilk craftisman, with bent bow in his hand,

Full galyartly in short clothing of green;

The honest burgess cled thou suld have seen,

Some in scarlot, and some in claith of grain,

For till have met their Lady Soverane;

Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,

The Senatours, in order consequent,

Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;

Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,

With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,

In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:

But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.

Syne all the Lordis of Religioun,

And Princes of the Priestis venerable,

Full pleasandly in their processioun,

With all the cunning Clerkis honourable:

But, theftuously, thou tyrane treasonable,

All their great solace and solemnities

Thou turnit intill duleful dirigies.

Syne, next in order, passing through the town,

Thou suld have heard the din of instruments,

Of tabron, trumpet, shalm, and clarioun,

With reird redoundand through the elements;

The Heralds, with their aweful vestiments;

With Macers, upon either of their hands,

To rule the press with burnist silver wands.

This outgoes Scott himself for the possible pomp of Old Edinburgh, and is poetically authentic. Later records, however, enable us to tone down Lindsay’s description of the High Street on a great gala day by the sight of it on any ordinary market day.

Since the reign of James III., it appears, there had been an authorised distribution of the markets for different kinds of commodities through prescribed parts of the town, with the general effect that, while live stock and such bulkier commodities as wood and fodder were sold and bought only in the Grassmarket and its low-lying purlieus, the markets for all other commodities were divided mainly between the two piazzas of the High Street, each having its own “tron” or weighing apparatus. Of late years, however, there had been encroachments by each piazza on the market rights of the other, with a good deal of mutual complaint and bad feeling. We hear more particularly that, about 1559, in consequence of temporary dilapidations in the lower piazza by recent English and French ravagings of the town, the upper piazza, or High Street above the Tolbooth, had drawn into it far more than its statutory share of the market traffic. The complaints of this by the inhabitants of the lower piazza had been such that the Provost, Bailies, and Council passed an order on the subject, which may be read in Dr. Marwick’s admirable Extracts from the Burgh Records. “Upoun consideratioun of the thraing of mercattis abone the Over Tolbuth, and that the passage upon all mercat dayis is sa stoppit be confluence of peple that nane may pas by are uther, as alsua upoun consideratioun that the saidis landis and fore-tenementis be-eist Nudryis Wynde [i.e. in the lower piazza] ar almaist desolait and nocht inhabitit, beand the fairest and braidest parts of the toun, for laik of merkattis and resort of peple thairto”: it was decreed that in all time coming the markets for hides, wool, and skins should be specifically in the lower piazza. For a while the order took effect; but, by the “procurment of certane particular personis having thair landis abone the Tolbuth,” the upper piazza had again obtained the advantage. Things seem to have rectified themselves eventually; but about 1561 there was still this war of the markets between the two piazzas, with a continued overthronging of the upper.

Whether in one of the piazzas or in both, one has but to imagine the litter that would be left on market days, and to add that to the litter disgorged into the street upwards from the closes, or flung down into the street from the fore-stairs, to see that a good deal of Dunbar’s earlier description must be allowed to descend through Lindsay’s intermediate and more gorgeous one, as still true of the ordinary Edinburgh of the date of Queen Mary’s return.

No one really knows a city who does not know it by night as well as by day. Night obscures much that day forces into notice, and invests what remains with new visual fascinations, but still so that the individuality of any city or town is preserved through its darkened hours. Every town or city has its own nocturnal character. Modern Edinburgh asserts herself, equally by night as by day, as the city of heights and hollows. From any elevated point in her centre or on her skirts, if you choose to place yourself there latish at night, you may look down upon rows of lamps stretched out in glittering undulation over the more level street spaces; or you may look down, in other directions, upon a succession of tiers and banks of thickly edificed darkness, punctured miscellaneously by twinkling window-lights, and descending deeply into inscrutable chasms. More familiar, and indeed so inevitable that every tourist carries it away with him as one of his most permanent recollections of Edinburgh, is the nightly spectacle from Princes Street of the northern face of the Old Town, starred irregularly with window-lights from its base to the serrated sky-line. Perhaps this is the present nocturnal aspect of Edinburgh which may most surely suggest Old Edinburgh at night three hundred years ago. For, though we must be careful, in imagining Old Edinburgh, to confine ourselves strictly and exactly to as much of the present Edinburgh as stands on the ancient site, and therefore to vote away Princes Street, the whole of the rest of the New Town, and all the other accretions, this aspect of the Old Town at night from the north cannot have changed very greatly. A belated traveller passing through the hamlets that once straggled on the grounds of the present New Town, and arriving at the edge of the North Loch, in what is now the valley of Princes Street Gardens, must have looked up across the Loch to much the same twinkling embankment of the High Street and its closes, and to much the same serrated sky-line, lowering itself eastward from the shadowy mass of the Castle Rock. If the traveller desired admission into the town, he could not have it on this side at all, but would have to go round to some of the ports in the town-wall from its commencement at the east end of the North Loch. He might try them all in succession,—Leith Wynd Port, the Nether Bow Port, the Cowgate Port, the Kirk of Field Port, Greyfriars Port, and the West Port,—with the chance of finding that he was too late for entrance at any, and so of being brought back to his first station, and obliged to seek lodging till morning in some hamlet there, or else in the Canongate. He could perform the whole circuit of the walls, however, in less than an hour, and might have the solace, at some points of his walk, of night views down into the luminous hollows of the town, very different from his first view upward from the North Loch.

While the belated traveller was thus shut out, the inhabitants within might be passing their hours till bed-time comfortably enough, whether in the privacy of their domiciles, or in more or less noisy loitering and locomotion among the streets and wynds. If it were clear moonlight or starlight, the wynds, and especially the stately length of the High Street, would be radiantly distinct, and locomotion in them would be easy. But even in the darkest nights the townsmen were not reduced to actual groping through their town, if ennui, or whim, or business, or neighbourly conviviality determined them to be out of doors. Not only would they carry torches and lanterns with them for their own behoof, especially if they had to find their way down narrow closes to their homes; not only were there the gratuitous oil-lights or candlelights from the windows of the fore-tenements in the streets and wynds, sending down some glimmer into the streets and wynds themselves; but, by public regulation, the tenants of the fore-stair houses in the principal thoroughfares were bound to hang out, during certain hours of the evening, lamps for the guidance of those that might be passing. One has to remember, however, that people in those days kept very early hours. By ten o’clock every night Auld Reekie was mostly asleep. By that hour, accordingly, the house-lights, with some exceptions, had ceased to twinkle; and from that hour, save for bands of late roysterers here and there at close-mouths, and for the appointed night-watches on guard at the different ports, or making an occasional round with drum and whistle, silence and darkness reigned till dawn.

The Provost of Edinburgh in 1561 was Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, a well-known laird of the great kin of the Angus Douglases. He had held the office continuously by annual election since 1553, with only two years of break. The four Bailies under him, answering to the Aldermen of an English town, were David Forster, Robert Ker, Alexander Home, and Allan Dickson, all merchant-burgesses. It would be possible, I believe, even at this distance of time, to give the names of as many as 1000 or 1500 other persons of the population, with particulars about not a few of them. In a town of such a size all the principal inhabitants must have been perfectly well acquainted with each other, and must have been known, by figure and physiognomy at least, to the rest of the community. We will name at present but one other inhabitant of the Edinburgh of 1561, who must have been about the best known of all. This was John Knox, the chief minister of the town, and the stated preacher, always on Sundays and often on week-days, in the great Church of St. Giles. His house, or the house of which he occupied a portion, if not then that very conspicuous projecting house of three storeys in the Nether Bow which visitors to Edinburgh now go to see as having been his, was certainly somewhere in that neighbourhood. From this point of what we have called the lower piazza of the High Street there is a direct view upwards to St. Giles’s Church, about 300 yards distant; and the walk in the other direction, down the Canongate, to Holyrood Abbey and Palace, is perhaps about twice as much. Divide a half-mile of sloping street into three equal parts, and Knox’s residence in Edinburgh, the house in which he sat on the day of young Queen Mary’s return among her Scottish subjects in August 1561, is to be imagined as just one-third down such a slope from the great Church of St. Giles, with the other two-thirds descending thence continuously, houses on both sides, to the Palace in which Mary had taken up her abode. Mary and Knox were to meet ere long.

ROBERT ROLLOCK AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY[^[2]]

The University of Edinburgh dates its existence from the year 1582, when James VI. was sixteen years of age and had been for fifteen years King of Scotland. Till that time there had been but three universities in Scotland,—that of St. Andrews (1413), that of Glasgow (1454), and that of King’s College, Aberdeen (1494). The want of a university in the metropolis had been long felt. Especially after the Reformation, people residing in or near Edinburgh had begun to think it a hardship that they had to send their sons over to St. Andrews, or away to Glasgow, or as far off as Aberdeen, to complete their education. Why should not Edinburgh have a university for itself? The Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh were particularly zealous in the project; and, as far back as the reign of Mary, they had, with the Queen’s sanction, taken some steps towards carrying the project into effect. They had fixed on the site of the intended new College. It was the site on which the University now stands, but was then a kind of suburb of gardens and straggling buildings, partly old church edifices, known by the name of St. Mary in the Fields, or, more shortly, Kirk o’ Field. They had purchased a certain right of property here; and here, accordingly, amid the old tenements that have been long swept away, as well as in the gardens and bits of green field which covered what is now the thoroughfare of South Bridge Street, we are to fancy the Edinburgh magistrates and ministers of Queen Mary’s reign, and perhaps John Knox himself, pottering about sometimes in their afternoon walks, looking at this and that, and anticipating the College that was to be established. But years passed on, and there were difficulties in the way. Funds were wanting, and there was strenuous opposition from the already existing universities; and, before any college-building could arise on the site of Kirk o’ Field, that site had been made unexpectedly memorable by one of the ghastliest of deeds. It was close to what is now the south side of the University quadrangle that there stood the fatal tenement in which Darnley was lodged on his return from Glasgow when he was recovering from the small-pox, and the explosion of which by gunpowder, on the night between the 9th and 10th of February 1567, hurled his corpse and that of his servant over the adjacent town-wall, and left Mary a widow. With other thoughts, therefore, than of the intended seat of learning, for the uses of which the ground had been partly purchased when this tragedy blackened it, must the citizens of Edinburgh for many a year afterwards have sauntered hereabouts in the evenings. But shocks of the kind are transient; and, when, in the quieter though still agitated days of King James, certain liberal citizens began to move anew for the foundation of the much-needed university,—chief among whom were Mr. James Lawson, Knox’s successor as minister of Edinburgh, Mr. William Little, afterwards Lord Provost, and his brother, Mr. Clement Little, an Edinburgh lawyer,—there was no dream of any other site for it than that which had been already chosen. With creditable quickness the Town Council proceeded to convert the long-cherished design into a reality. Masons and carpenters were set to work; and, what with the patching-up of old buildings already on the ground, what with the erection of frugal additions, a kind of make-shift beginning of a College was at last knocked together. A charter from King James, dated “Stirling, 14th April 1582,” made all right. It empowered the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council of Edinburgh to found and gradually complete within the city what should be to all intents and purposes a true University, or Studium Generale. King James, as has been said, was then still in his boyhood. His unhappy mother was in the fourteenth year of her captivity in England.

A material fabric for lodging the University of Edinburgh having been thus roughly provided, all that was further necessary was to procure teachers. There are now between thirty and forty chairs in the University of Edinburgh; but it is not to be imagined that the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh had to make that number of appointments in 1582 in order that their new College might begin operations. They were content with a much smaller equipment. They merely looked about for one qualified man to begin with; and, when they had got him, they could consider the institution fairly launched. This may require a little explanation.

The Charter of the new College contained provisions for its being eventually a university of complete dimensions, with not only a General Faculty or Faculty of Arts (then usually called the Faculty of Philosophy), but also the three special or professional Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine. But, though the Magistrates and Town Council looked forward, no doubt, to the attainment of this perfection by the University at some time or other, they were not so ambitious at first, and, indeed, had to accommodate their aims to the meagreness of their means. They thought that, if they succeeded in founding the general faculty, or Faculty of Arts, the most important part of their work would be done, and the rest might gradually follow. They gave all their attention at first, therefore, to the one Faculty of Arts. To set up this Faculty alone would, according to recent ideas of what is essential to its equipment, require at least seven appointments. Since 1858 the professorships of Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Logic and Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, and Rhetoric and English Literature have been, as it were, the Seven Golden Candlesticks of the Arts Faculty in the University of Edinburgh,—the seven chairs in that faculty privileged coequally above the rest in the curriculum for graduation. In those old days, however, there was no notion that even as many as seven separate candlesticks were needed. Latin was pre-eminent as the sine qua non for all the rest. It was the language in which all the formal instruction within every university was then given, and with which, so far as concerned the power of understanding it, speaking it, and to some extent writing it, all students were supposed to be acquainted before they commenced their university course. Further, in the other subjects, which were all taught through this medium of Latin, there was no such division of labour as at present. Mathematics and Natural Philosophy had not then attained such dimensions in the world of knowledge, nor were Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric so extricated from Logic and Metaphysics, nor was proficiency in any or all of those subjects deemed so incompatible with a competent knowledge of Greek, but that one and the same professor could be expected to take students through the whole series of studies by himself. Now it would be but a sad jumble of superficialities that would result from such a system of individual professorships of everything; but in those days the totum scibile had not come to be so monstrous or heterogeneous an aggregate but that it might be supposed capable of being carried with tolerable compactness under one able man’s hat, and of being taught by such a man more or less effectively by means of a series of established Latin text-books. The supposition, though absurd enough even then, was the less absurd because the subjects were made to follow each other in a regular order through a university course of four years. The professor began in his first year with the simpler subjects, and then carried the same students, in their second, third, and fourth years, through the more difficult subjects, until, at the end of the fourth year, he had fitted them for their graduation, or, as it was called, their “laureation,” in Arts. By this method, it will be seen, the number of Arts professors in every university required to be but four at the most,—each professor making his four years’ round with the same students till he had seen them made Masters of Arts, and then returning to receive a new class of freshmen or entrants with whom to repeat his round. In fact, in each of the already established universities of Scotland there were four such principal Arts professors, or Philosophy professors. In some universities, it is true, there were special professors in addition, relieving the general professors of particular kinds of work; but the four general or circulating professors were the essential complement of the Arts Faculty. They were called “regents,” by way of distinction.

It will be obvious now that, though the newly-founded University of Edinburgh required at least four Philosophy professors or regents before even its Arts Faculty could be considered fully equipped, yet one regent was enough to start with. All that was necessary was that one fit professor should be ready to receive the first set of students that should present themselves. For the first year this single professor could do the whole of the University work; and only when he had carried his students through the first year of their course, and had to pass on to the second year with them, would it be necessary to appoint a second regent, to follow him with the new set of students who would then come to the University doors. The third regent might be appointed the year after that, and the fourth not till a year later.

All this the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh, anxious for the success of the new institution, but bound to be careful of expenses, had calculated beforehand. It was, of course, a most serious question with them who should be the first regent. No one could tell how much depended on that. A bad appointment might wreck the University at the outset.

Fortunately, through the recommendation of that same Mr. James Lawson, Knox’s successor in the ministry of Edinburgh, who had already had so much to do with the founding of the University, the Magistrates and Town Council selected a man whose appointment neither the City nor the University had any cause afterwards to regret. This was Mr. Robert Rollock,—the Rev. Robert Rollock would be now the designation,—then one of the Philosophy professors in the University of St. Andrews. He was a Stirlingshire man by birth, had been educated at St. Andrews, was twenty-eight years of age, and had already won good opinions among those who knew him. A deputation having been sent to St. Andrews to invite him to the new post, he came to Edinburgh in September 1583 to offer himself for inspection; and on the 14th of that month an agreement was signed between him and the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council. Rollock, on his part, agreed to “enter to the Colledge newly foundit within the burgh,” and to “exerce the office of the Regent of the said Colledge, in instructioun, governament, and correctioun of the youth and persones whilk sall be committed to his chairge,” faithfully attending always to the rules and injunctions to be given him by the Provost, Bailies, and Council; “for the whilkis causis” they, on their part, “binds and oblesis thame and their successoris thankfullie to content and pay to the said Mr. Robert the soume of fortie pundis usual money of this realme, at twa termis in the yeir, Candlemes and Lammes, be twa equall portionis, and sall susteine him and are servand in their ordinar expensis.... Attour [i.e. moreover] the said Mr. Robert sall repare and have, for his labouris to be takin in instructing everie bairne repairing to the said Colledge, yearly, as followis: to wit, fra the bairnes inhabitants of the said burgh, fortie schillings, and fra the bairnes of uthers, nocht inhabitants therein, three pundis, or mair as the bairnes parentis please to bestow of their liberalitie.” Further prospects of remuneration and promotion were held forth to Mr. Rollock, and there was every disposition to make him comfortable.

An original portrait of Rollock now hangs in the Senate Hall of Edinburgh University. It is but a poor specimen of the painter’s art, and it does not suggest that Mr. Rollock can have been an Apollo. It exhibits, however, a very distinct physiognomy,—a physiognomy so distinct, so unlike anybody’s else, that, were Mr. Rollock to reappear any afternoon now in the Canongate or in Princes Street, there would be no difficulty in recognising him. The complexion, as the portrait tells us, and as we learn from a contemporary biographic sketch of him, was ruddy, or ruddy with a mixture of white (colore rubido cui candor quidam admistus); and the hair and beard,—both cut short, so as to give a character of round compactness to the head,—were of reddish hue (comâ subrufâ). The biographic sketch, which is by one who knew him well, adds that he was of middle stature and of rather weakly health, and bears testimony to his piety, conscientiousness, peaceful disposition, and pleasant sociability.

It was on the 1st of October 1583 that this round-headed, reddish-haired man, of Stirlingshire birth, but of St. Andrews training, opened the first session of the University of Edinburgh by an address delivered in the public hall of the new premises in the presence of a crowded audience of citizens and others. Next day, when he received the students who came to enroll themselves in the first class in the new University, their number, what with those supplied by Edinburgh itself, what with those attracted from other parts of the country, was found to be far greater than had been anticipated. Very soon, however, it appeared that this was not altogether a cause for congratulation. The motley body of the entrants had not been manipulated by Rollock for more than a week or two when he had to marshal them into two divisions. A considerable number had broken down in Latin,—were found to be so ill-grounded in that indispensable preliminary that it was hopeless to go on with them as members of the first University class proper, the teaching of which had to be through the medium of Latin. To meet this exigency Rollock proposed to the Town Council that they should at once appoint a second regent, and that this regent should have committed to his charge all who were backward in Latin, to be formed into a preparatory or Humanity class, and drilled as such for a year, while he himself should go on with the others in the first proper Arts or Philosophy class. Were that done, then, next year, when he himself should be carrying on his students into the second class, the other regent might form those that had been kept back, and qualified newcomers with them, into a properly sequent first class; and so the routine would be established. The advice was adopted; and, on Rollock’s recommendation, the person chosen to be Humanity teacher in the meantime, and second regent in regular course, was a Mr. Duncan Nairne, a young man from Glasgow University. Thus all was arranged; and the work of the first session of the University of Edinburgh proceeded,—Rollock teaching his “Bajans,” and Nairne following with the ragged troop whom he was working up in Latin to fit them for the “Bajan” class of next year.

The “session” in each of the Scottish universities extended then over ten, or even eleven, months of every year, i.e. from the beginning of October to, or well into, August. The practice was for the students, or a proportion of them, to reside within the University walls; and, though this practice soon fell into disuse in Edinburgh, it held good at first so far that at least some of the students were boarded and lodged in some rough fashion within the College. The original regulation also was that students should wear academic costume; but against this regulation Edinburgh opinion seems from the first to have set its face most determinedly. It was never really obeyed.

The infant years of the University were years of trial and rough usage. In the jars between the different political factions round the young King, and struggling for the possession of him, the infant institution was much shaken and disturbed. The Magistrates and Town Council, however, did their best; and Rollock was persevering and judicious. The severest interruption to his labours came in his second session, or 1584–5. That session had been begun with good prospects, the property of the College having been increased by a royal grant, and by a collection of about 300 volumes bequeathed by Mr. Clement Little to form the nucleus of a college library. Rollock was proceeding, accordingly, with his second or semi class; and Nairne, having worked up the laggards by this time, was teaching his first class of Bajans. But in the course of the winter Edinburgh was visited by that scourge, “The Plague,” of the frequency of the visits of which in those times, and their paralysing effects on industry of all kinds, no one can be aware who is not versed in the old annals of English and Scottish cities. In May 1585, most of the students having already dispersed, it was necessary to stop the session entirely. This would not have mattered so much, had not the alarm of the Plague continued into the following session. That session, the third in the history of the University, ought to have begun in October 1585; at which time, as Rollock would then have been carrying his students into their third or bachelor class, and Nairne would have been carrying his into their second or semi class, a third regent would have had to be appointed, to undertake the new class of freshmen. But it was not till February 1586, or four months after the proper beginning of the session, that the College was reopened, and then it was deemed best not to attempt a new Bajan class at all that year, but simply to go on with the semies and bachelors. Even in this arrangement there came a difficulty. Scarcely were the classes begun when the promising young Mr. Duncan Nairne died, and, in order that the semi class might be carried on at all, the Town Council had to elect a professor in his room. They chose Mr. Charles Lumsden, a young man who had been one of Rollock’s pupils at St. Andrews. The services of this, the third regent or Professor of Philosophy in the University, did not, however, outlast the remainder of the session in which he had been appointed. A College professorship was not then a post of such attraction that it could be thought strange that Mr. Lumsden should resign it when, in the following October, he received a call to be minister of Duddingston parish. By his resignation at that moment, however, the College would have been left crippled, had not two new regents been at once appointed. These new regents, chosen by competitive trial out of six candidates, were Mr. Adam Colt and Mr. Alexander Scrimgeour. The last of these, Scrimgeour, took charge of the new class of entrants or Bajans; as there had been no class of Bajans in the former year, the semi class was this year a blank; the former pupils of Lumsden and Nairne, now in the third or bachelor class, were entrusted to Mr. Colt; and Rollock himself, proceeding with the pupils who had already been continuously in his charge for three years, carried them through the last or magistrand class.

In August 1587, six months after the execution of Queen Mary at Fotheringay, the fourth session of Edinburgh University was brought to a close by the first act of laureation or graduation in its annals. Forty-seven of Rollock’s pupils, who had remained with him steadily through the entire four years, were then made masters of arts,—a larger number than was to be seen at any subsequent graduation for more than half a century. The signatures of the forty-seven are still to be seen in the preserved graduation-book, appended to a copy of that Scottish Confession of the Reformed Faith to which it was the rule that all graduates should swear everlasting fidelity. Several of the names are those of persons afterwards of some note in Scotland. To three of them is affixed in the graduation-book, in later handwriting, the dreadful word Apostata, signifying that those three disciples of Rollock afterwards apostatised from the Protestant religion.

Having thus followed Rollock through one complete cycle of his regency or professorship in Arts, one would like to know something as to the nature and methods of his teaching. On this head the information is as follows:—He began, as we have seen, by testing his students in the indispensable Latin. But, though ability to read ordinary Latin authors, to write in Latin, and also to speak Latin in some fashion and understand spoken Latin, were prerequisites to his course, the business of that course itself included necessarily much reading in particular Latin classics, whether for their matter or for their style. Very soon in his first class, however, he attacked Greek, teaching it from the grammar upwards, until easy Greek authors could be read. Greek was continued, for its own sake, into the second and third years of the course; but the chief business of those years, and of the fourth, was “Philosophy,” as divided into Logic, Ethics, and Physics. In each of these departments the philosophical teaching consisted chiefly of expositions of Aristotle. Whether in the original Greek, or, as is more probable, in Latin versions, Rollock, we are expressly told, read Aristotle daily with his pupils, beginning with the Organon Logicum, and then going through the Nicomachean Ethics and the Physics. The Physics came probably in the last year, and in this year also (for mathematics and physical science were then usually delayed till the end) certain additions to Aristotle: to wit, the principles of Arithmetic, a sketch of the Anatomy of the human body, Astronomy as taught in the then standard treatise of Joannes a Sacro Bosco De Sphæra, and finally Geography. Conceive the routine so sketched; conceive the steady plodding on day after day, for some hours every day, through four sessions of ten or eleven months each; and conceive also the disputations in Latin among the students themselves every Saturday, and the express catechisings of them in religion on Sundays: and you will have an idea of what it was to be under Rollock in the first years of the University of Edinburgh.

A still more minute account of what constituted the curriculum of study in the Faculty of Arts during the first age of the University is furnished by an abstract of the “Order of Discipline” in the University, drawn up in the year 1628. One cannot be sure that in every particular this “Order of Discipline” accords with what had been the practice of Rollock; but, as the abstract professes to be mainly a digest of rules and customs that had been already in force, it probably describes substantially the scheme of teaching introduced by Rollock and bequeathed by him to his successors. The scheme may be tabulated thus:—

First Year: Latin, Greek, and the Elements of Logic—(1) Latin: Exercises in turning English into Latin and in translation from Latin; with readings in Latin authors, chiefly Cicero. There seems also to have been practice in Latin verse-making. (2) Greek: The Greek Grammar of Clenardus; Readings in the New Testament, in the Orations of Isocrates, and, for poetry, in Phocylides, Hesiod, and Homer; also translation of Latin themes into Greek, and of Greek into Latin. Passages of the Greek authors read were got by heart, and publicly recited on Saturdays. (3) Logic: This was reserved till near the end of the session, and Ramus was the author used.—There were disputations on Saturdays, and catechisings on Sundays.

Second Year: Recapitulation of previous studies, with Rhetoric, Logic, and Arithmetic—(1) Recapitulation: For the first month, with a final examination in Greek. (2) Rhetoric: Talæus’s Rhetoric (a short and very flimsy compend on the figures of speech, with instructions in delivery), and portions of other manuals, such as Cassander’s Rhetoric and Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata (a collection of specimens of Greek composition to illustrate various styles); also oratorical exercises by the students themselves. (3) Logic: Perphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Organon, and then, in the Organon itself, the Categories, the Prior Analytics, and portions of the Topics and the Sophistics. (4) Arithmetic: towards the end of the session.—Disputations and declamations on Saturdays, and catechisings on Sundays.

Third Year: Recapitulation of previous studies, with Hebrew Grammar, Logic, Ethics, and Physical Science—(1) Recapitulation: This went back upon the Greek, and included examinations in Rhetoric and in Logical Analysis. (2) Hebrew Grammar: taught apparently from the beginning of the session. (3) Logic: The two Books of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. (4) Ethics: The first, second, half of the third, and the fourth and fifth Books of Aristotle’s Ethics. (5) Physical Science: Aristotle’s Acroamatics, taught partly textually, partly in compend, followed, at the close of the session, by a descriptive sketch of Human Anatomy.—Disputations on prescribed theses on Saturdays, and theological instruction on Sundays.

Fourth Year: Recapitulation of previous studies, with Astronomy, Cosmography, and other portions of Physics, and Disputations and other preparations for the Laureation. Among the books used in this year were the Sphæra of Joannes a Sacro Bosco, the books of Aristotle De Cælo, De Ortu, De Meteoris, and De Anima, and Hunter’s Cosmography. Atlases and the celestial globe were also in requisition, and the most notable constellations were pointed out in the heavens themselves. But much of the work of this session consisted in logical disputations in the evenings, whether among the magistrands, or between them and the third year’s men.—On Sundays, instruction in Dogmatic and Polemical Theology.

To return to Rollock personally:—We have spoken of him hitherto as only the first regent or Arts professor of Edinburgh University. In reality, however, since February 1586, when he was in his third session and had Nairne as his single fellow-regent, he had borne, along with his regency, the higher dignity of the Principalship,—the Town Council having concluded that the time had come for the institution of such an office in the University, and for Rollock’s promotion to it. Accordingly, when Rollock had the satisfaction of seeing the forty-seven students who had gone through their full four years’ curriculum with him made Masters of Arts, he was not only senior Regent, but also Principal of the University, with a right of superintendence over Colt and Scrimgeour, the other two regents. But no sooner had this first Edinburgh graduation taken place than there was a further change. Rollock, satisfied with having taken one class of students through the full course of four years, resigned his regency or Arts professorship, in order to become Professor of Divinity. As it was desirable that those of the new graduates and others who might be going forward to the Church should have the means of a theological education within Edinburgh, this was a natural arrangement. It amounted to the institution, though on a small scale, of a Theological Faculty in the University, in addition to the general Faculty of Arts or Philosophy. The Theological Faculty was represented solely by Rollock, who was also Principal of the University; while the Arts or Philosophical Faculty was represented for the time in Colt, Scrimgeour, and a third regent, Mr. Philip Hislop, one of Rollock’s recent graduates, appointed to the place which Rollock had just left vacant. In 1589, however, Mr. Charles Ferme, also one of Rollock’s graduates, was added to the staff of regents, so as to complete the number of four, necessary for the full conduct of the Arts classes.

No need to narrate here the rest of Rollock’s life in detail. Enough if we imagine him going on for ten years more in the exercise of the double duties of his Professorship of Theology and his Principalship in the infant University. As Professor of Theology, he may be said to have founded the Divinity School of Edinburgh. He trained up assiduously, not only by his lectures on Dogmatic and Polemical Theology, but also by his personal influence, the first ecclesiastics whom the University of Edinburgh gave to the Kirk of Scotland. Some of these attained subsequent distinction, and, remembering Rollock with reverence, carried his name into the next generation. Nor was his Principalship a sinecure. He visited the Philosophy classes, gave special lectures to them on Theology, and kept them and the regents to their work. Add to this much exertion beyond the bounds of the University. For a time he delivered Sunday evening sermons to crowded congregations in the East Kirk of St. Giles, by way of volunteer assistance to the four city ministers; and, latterly, when these four were increased to eight, and a division of the city-pastorate was made into eight districts or parishes, the full ministerial care of one of these city-charges was entrusted to Rollock. It was an anxious time, too, in the politics of the Kirk. King James had begun those efforts of his for the subversion of the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk, as it had been established by statute in 1592, in which he was to persevere so unflinchingly through the remainder of his resident reign in Scotland, though it was not till he removed to England, and could act upon his native kingdom from the vantage-ground of his acquired English sovereignty, that the results were fully seen in the abolition of the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk altogether and the substitution of Episcopacy. Already in Rollock’s time all Scotland was in anxious agitation in consequence of this anti-presbyterian policy of the King and the vehement resistance to it offered by the majority of the Scottish clergy and of the Scottish people. Rollock himself, as a public man and leading Edinburgh minister, had to take his part in the controversy. It was a mild part, it would seem, and not entirely satisfactory to the more resolute Presbyterian spirits, but truthful and characteristic. Without following him, however, over this dangerous ground, farther than to say that he was Moderator of the General Assembly held at Dundee in 1597, at which the King was present in person and there were some not unimportant attempts at a compromise, let us pass on to the year 1599, the last year but one of the sixteenth century.

Rollock was then in his forty-fourth year. He could look back on his services in connection with Edinburgh University as the most important work of his life. He had seen fifteen sessions of that University begun and ended, during four of which he had been senior regent or Arts professor, and during the remaining eleven Principal and Professor of Theology. He had seen eleven graduations and a total of 284 Edinburgh Masters of Arts sent forth by these graduations into the world. The University, it is true, remained still but a fragment of what a complete university ought to have been. It contained as yet no Faculty of Law and no Faculty of Medicine. For education in these professions Scottish students had still to resort to foreign universities, as indeed they had to do for more than a century yet to come. But it was something to have established a Theological Faculty and a Faculty of Arts. The Theological Faculty was still represented entire in Rollock’s own person; but in the Arts Faculty, on which the University depended most, he had seen thirteen regents after himself appointed. The tenure of office of most of these had been vexatiously short, drawn off as they had been by the more tempting emoluments of parish-charges and the like; but the four who were now in office as regents,—Mr. Henry Charteris, Mr. Charles Ferme, Mr. John Adamson, and Mr. William Craig,—were all graduates of the University itself, and therefore all Rollock’s own men. Moreover, the Arts Faculty had just been increased by the institution of a separate Professorship of Humanity, distinct from the four rotating regencies. To this professorship, the first holder of which was a certain excellent Mr. John Ray, fell a part of the work that had formerly been assigned to the regents of the first and second classes: viz. instruction mainly in Latin, but also in elementary Greek and the rudiments of rhetoric. Such was the staff of Edinburgh University as Rollock left it. Though yet but in the prime of manhood, he had been long in ill-health, and was now suffering from a painful and incurable disease. There are affectionate details of his death-bed doings and sayings: how he sent messages to the King, how the ministers and leading citizens of Edinburgh visited him, what advices he gave them, what pious ejaculations he uttered, and how, in especial, he spoke of the University of his love, and recommended it to the care of those who had the power to promote its interests. On the 9th of February 1599, the sixteenth session of the University being then in progress, he breathed his last. There was a great concourse of citizens of all ranks at his funeral, and all over Scotland the rumour ran that the nation was poorer by the loss of the eminent Rollock. Verses in Latin, Greek, and English, by old pupils and others, were showered upon his grave. He left a widow, whom the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh pensioned; and a daughter, posthumously born, was also provided for. In deference to his dying injunctions, the Town Council appointed Mr. Henry Charteris, his favourite pupil, and then one of the regents, to be his successor in the principalship and in the professorship of Divinity.

Looked back upon now through the dense radiance of the subsequent history of the University of Edinburgh, expanded as that University has been in the course of centuries into its present four-facultied completeness, each faculty of larger dimensions than Rollock could ever have dreamt of, and each with its memories of scores or hundreds of more or less shining celebrities that have belonged to it in past generations, Rollock himself, it must be admitted, dwindles into a mere telescopic star. That he is remembered at all now is due mainly to the fact that he was the first president of one of the most important institutions of the Scottish nation, and charged with the affairs of that institution in its struggling commencement, its “day of small things.” This in itself would be something. Many men have merited well of society simply because they have performed diligently the routine duties of the office they chanced to hold, and so have woven something of their own personality, though it may be hardly distinguishable afterwards, into the context of passing affairs and exigencies. Is this all, however, that we can say of Rollock? Not quite. Though the best of him is probably imbedded in the beginnings of the University of Edinburgh, and much of that even in the unrecorded beginnings, he has left some memorials of himself besides. His writings, all or nearly all of a theological nature, some published during his life, and others edited after his death by admiring friends, are so considerable in bulk that even the selection of them reprinted by the Wodrow Society fills two thick volumes. The more important and formal of them were dogmatic treatises or analytical Latin commentaries on portions of Scripture, some of which were of sufficient ability, after their kind, to have won recognition from Beza and other foreign theologians. More interesting, however, now are the specimens that remain of Rollock’s popular sermons in the vernacular English, or rather the vernacular Scots, of his day. Two extracts from one of these sermons will enable us to know Rollock somewhat more intimately, and will give an idea at the same time of the tastes of the Edinburgh folks of those days in the matter of pulpit oratory.

Understand that the text of the discourse is 2 Cor. v. 1, 2, running thus in the old version then in use: “For we knaw that, gif our earthly hous of this tabernacle be destroyit, we have a buylding given of God; that is, a house nocht made with hands, bot eternall in the heavens. For therefore we sigh, desiring to be clothed with our hous whilk is from heaven.” The thoughts suggested by this text being those of the evanescence of the present life and the aspiration after another life of higher expansion, Rollock’s handling of them takes this form:—

“The Apostle having spoken this, that his eye was set on that hevinly glory, it micht have been said, ‘Thou settis thine eye upon ane life above; bot tak heid, Paul! Thou sall die in the mean time; is not life and deith twa contrares? thou mon die, and that body of thine mon be dissolvit. Luikis thou ever to rise again? thinkis thou any other thing bot to be disappointed of life? Luikis thou that that body of thine, being dissolvit in dust, sall rise again to glory?’ This is are fair tentatioun, and sundry thinkis efter this maner.... Leirne ane lesson here. Ye see, while ane man is luiking to hevin, he will not be without tentatioun,—nay, not Paul himself, nor nae other man nor woman that hes their conversatioun in hevin. And the special tentatioun of him wha wald fain have life is deith, and the dreidful sicht of deith; and deith is ever in his eye. He was never born bot deith will tempt him, deith will be terrible to flesh and blude; and, when he is luiking up to that licht and glory in hevin, it will come in betwixt his eye and the sicht of hevin, as it were ane terrible black cloud, and some time will twin [sunder] him and that licht of hevin. As, when ane man is luiking up to the sun, ane cloud will come in on ane suddenty and tak the sicht of the sun frae him, sae when ane man is luiking up to the Sun of Richteousness, Christ Jesus, that cloud of deith will come in and cleik [catch] the sicht of Christ frae him. This is our estate here, and there is nane acquainted with hevinly things bot he will find this in experience as Paul did. But what is the remedy? In the first word of the text that we have read he says ‘we knaw,’ that is, ‘we are assured’; for the word imparts ane full assurance, and faith, and are full persuasion. Then the remedy aganis this tentatioun of deith is only faith, ane full persuasion and licht in the mind of the knawledge of God in the face of Christ, with ane gripping and apprehension thereof. This is the only remedy.”

“Thou mon have ane warrand of thy salvation in this life, or ellis I assure thee in the name of God thou sall never get to hevin. It is ane strait way to come to hevin, and it is wonder hard to get the assurance of it: it is nae small matter to get ane assurance of life everlasting efter death. Then luik what warrandis this man Paul had, that thou may preis to have the like. The first ground of his assurance is in this second verse. ‘For,’ says he, ‘this cause we sigh, desiring to be clothed’ (to put on as it were ane garment). Wherewith? ‘With our house whilk is frae hevin.’ Thir [these] are his wordis. Then his first warrand and ground of his assurance is ane desire of that samin glory. What sort of desire? Ane earnest desire, with siching and sobbing; not ane cauld desire, but day and nicht crying and sobbing for life. Trowis thou sae easily to get hevin that can never say earnestly in thy heart, ‘God give me that hevinly life!’ Na, thou will be disappointed; it is the violent that enters in hevin (Matt. xi. 12), as ye will see ane man violently thring [squeeze] in at are yett [gate]. Thou that wald gang to hevin, make thee for thringing through while [until] all thy guttis be almaist thrustit out. Paul, in the viii. chapter to the Romans, the 22 and 23 verses, usis thir argumentis againis those wickit men that cannot sich for hevin. First he takis his argument frae the elementis, the senseless and dumb creaturis, wha sobbis and groanis for the revelation of the sonnis of God. O miserable man, the eirth sall condemn thee; the flure thou sittis on is siching, and wald fain heave that carcase of thine to hevin. The waters, the air, the hevinis, all siching for that last deliverance, the glory apperteinis to thee; and yet thou is lauchand. What sall betide thee?”

There is evidence here that Rollock cannot have been merely a stiff scholastic and pedagogue, but was a man of some real, if coarsish, fervour of heart, of whom it might be expected that he would have the power on occasion of putting his hand on the shoulders of any promising youth among his pupils, and doing him good by some earnest words of moral and spiritual stimulus. On the whole, however, the impression from the sermons and the other writings is that he was by no means a man of such extraordinary calibre intellectually as it was desirable, and perhaps possible, that the University of Edinburgh should have had for its first regent and principal, the shaper of its methods and its tendencies from the outset. High forms of study and speculation were then asserting themselves in the intellectual world of the British Islands, the influence of which had never reached Rollock, or to which, in his place and circumstances, he remained necessarily impervious. His administration of the University could only be according to the lights in which he had himself been educated, and which he brought with him from St. Andrews. What if the Town Council of Edinburgh, instead of sending to St. Andrews for Rollock to be the first head of the new University, had invited their neighbour, Napier of Merchiston, to the post? He was Rollock’s senior by five years, the one man in all Scotland supremely fitted for the post; and, as he was to outlive Rollock eighteen years, how different might have been the infancy of the University had he been in Rollock’s place! But Napier was a layman and a laird; and the heavens would have fallen on the Edinburgh Town Council of 1583, as indeed they would have fallen on any subsequent Edinburgh Town Council till 1858, if they had thought of choosing any one but an ecclesiastic for the University Principalship. Besides, it is possible that the Laird of Merchiston, a man of many acres, and the owner and inhabitant of one of the finest turreted mansions near Edinburgh, would have regarded the offer as a joke.

It is in accordance with our estimate of Rollock all in all that, though, among the students sent forth from the University of Edinburgh during his Principalship, there were some who distinguished themselves subsequently by their force and hard-headedness in the routine affairs of the Scottish Kirk and State, we do not find any among them whom the historian of the higher thought and literature of Britain cares to remember now. Among the 284 Masters of Arts who left the University before Rollock died, the most memorable are perhaps these: Henry Charteris and Patrick Sands, pupils of Rollock’s own regency, and his successors in the principalship; Alexander Gibson of Durie, afterwards a judge of the Court of Session; James Sandilands, afterwards commissary of Aberdeen; Thomas Hope, afterwards Sir Thomas Hope, and of celebrity as a lawyer and as King’s Advocate; David Calderwood, the Presbyterian historian of the Kirk; and Robert Boyd of Trochrig, sometime minister in France, and afterwards Principal successively of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. To these may be added, as memorable on another ground, John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, and his brother Alexander Ruthven, the two young chiefs or victims of the mysterious Gowrie conspiracy of 1600. The elder brother, a favourite of Rollock’s, was a graduate of 1593, and the younger graduated in 1598. Other names of some interest to the Scottish literary antiquarian may be found in the list of the Edinburgh graduates of Rollock’s time, but hardly one now interesting to the general British muses. But, indeed, Scotland had then entered on a period of her history during which the higher and more meditative muses found themselves dismissed from her territory for a while. Precisely at the time when the University of Edinburgh was founded, the age of Scotland’s richest outburst in all forms of a thoroughly native literature had come to an end,—closed, we may say, by the deaths of Knox and Buchanan, save that in Napier of Merchiston there was one peculiar survivor. From that date onwards through the whole of the seventeenth century the energies of Scotland were to be locked up all but continually and exclusively in one protracted business of political and ecclesiastical controversy. From that date, accordingly, the successive batches of graduates sent forth from the four Scottish Universities,—or rather, we should now say, from the five Scottish Universities, for the University of Marischal College, Aberdeen, was added as a fifth in 1593,—were absorbed, as clerics, lawyers, soldiers, and what not, into the service of a troubled social element requiring labours that left little sap in them for literary delights or for purely speculative exertions. Exceptions, of course, there are; and the two most notable of these belong to the University of Edinburgh. Drummond of Hawthornden was a graduate of that University in 1605, six years after Rollock’s death. Robert Leighton, so dear to Coleridge as one of the finest Platonic spirits among the British theologians of the seventeenth century, was an Edinburgh graduate of 1631, and was Rollock’s sixth successor in the Principalship of the University, and known for ten years in that capacity before they induced him to become Bishop and Archbishop.

KING JAMES’S FAREWELL TO HOLYROOD[^[3]]

It is a Saturday evening in Holyrood,—the evening of Saturday, the 26th of March 1603. All is dull and sleepy within the Palace, the King and Queen having retired after supper, and the lights in the apartments now going out one by one. Suddenly, hark! what noise is that without? There is first a battering at the gate, and then the sound of a horse’s hoofs in the courtyard, and of a bustling of the palace servants round some late arriver. It is the English Sir Robert Cary, brother of Lord Hunsdon. He had left London between nine and ten o’clock in the forenoon of the 24th; he had ridden as never man rode before, spur and gallop, spur and gallop, all the way, through that day and the next and the next, the two intervening nights hardly excepted; and here he is at Holyrood on the evening of the third day,—an incredible ride! His horse, the last he has been on, is taken from him all a-foam; and he himself, his head bloody with a wound received by a fall and a kick from the horse in the last portion of his journey, makes his way staggeringly, under escort, into the aroused King’s presence. Throwing himself on his knees before his half-dressed Majesty, he can but pant out, in his fatigue and excitement, these words in explanation of the cause of his being there so unceremoniously: “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”

It was the most superb moment of King James’s life. He was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,—or, at all events, ever since February 1586–7, when the captivity of his mother came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,—his constant thought had been of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount, there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him on the part of large sections of the English community; and that especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,—though she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,—she had always resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister since the death of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.

Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her age, about three o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March 1602 (so in the English reckoning, but in the Scottish it was 1603), after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor, or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis. Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it without special warrant.

One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth’s councillors by being related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen’s employment had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours. While in this post, he had incurred the Queen’s disfavour by marrying,—a fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however, to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness, and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been admitted easily enough into the dying Queen’s presence. “When I came to Court,” he tells us, “I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said ‘No, Robin, I am not well,’ and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.” This interview was on the night of Saturday, the 19th of March; and it was within the next day or two that, learning from his sister that the Queen had become worse and worse, and that there was no hope of her recovery, and remembering his friendly intercourse with the Scottish King on former occasions, he despatched a letter to James announcing the condition of affairs at Richmond, and resolved moreover that, when the Queen was actually dead, he would be himself the first man to carry the great news to Edinburgh. Once again he was in the death-chamber. It was on the day before the Queen’s death,—that Wednesday, the 23d of March, on which, lying speechless in bed, she gave the sign which Cecil and the other councillors construed as they desired. Among those who stood by her bedside on the evening of that day, while Archbishop Whitgift prayed with her several times in succession, was Sir Robert Cary. It was late, he tells us, when the group broke up, and the Queen was left to die, with only her waiting-women around her. Sir Robert had then gone to his lodgings in the town, and had given instructions that he should be called at the proper moment. Accordingly, about three o’clock on the following morning, when he knew for certain that the Queen was dead, he was at the palace gate. The porter had just received his orders not to admit any one that was not privileged; and even the bribe with which Sir Robert had already primed that official would not have been enough, had not one of the councillors, who chanced to be at the gate at the time, taken the responsibility of passing him in. He made his way through the chamber in which the weeping ladies were to that in which the councillors were assembled and were drafting their documents. His brother, Lord Hunsdon, and his sister, Lady Scroope, being already in his confidence, and his purpose having been guessed by Cecil and the rest, he found that they were very angry with him, and were making arrangements of their own for the necessary despatches to Edinburgh. In fact, they laid hold of him, told him he must remain where he was till their pleasure should be known, and, to show that they were in earnest, sent peremptory fresh orders to the porter that no one was to be allowed to pass the gates except the servants that were to be sent presently to get ready the coaches and horses for the conveyance of the councillors themselves to Westminster. For an hour or so, Sir Robert walked about in the palace chagrined and disconcerted. He had got in with difficulty; but his exit seemed impossible. Bethinking himself at last, he went to the private chamber of his brother, Lord Hunsdon. His lordship, overpowered with the fatigues of the preceding days, was asleep, but was soon roused, and willing to assist. The two went together to the porter’s gate, where the Council’s servants were just making their egress to bring the horses and coaches. The porter could not prevent a great officer like Lord Hunsdon from going out with them; but he stopped Sir Robert. It needed some exertion and some angry words from Lord Hunsdon to cow the man; but this was accomplished, and Sir Robert, to his great relief, found himself outside the gate in the raw air of the dim March morning.

Not even yet were his difficulties over. Speeding from Richmond as fast as he could, he was in Westminster by himself, and in a friend’s house there, some time before the Lords of Council arrived in their coaches. Learning, however, after they had arrived, that they were holding a meeting in Whitehall Gardens to make final arrangements for the proclamations of the new sovereign both in Westminster and in the City, he thought it might be as well to try again whether they would employ him for the service on which he had set his heart. He sent them word, therefore, that he was in town, and was waiting their pleasure. It was now past nine o’clock, and the proclamations were to be at ten. The answer of the Council was a request to Sir Robert to come to them immediately; and, as it was conveyed with a kind of intimation that he would find them perfectly agreeable now to his proposal, he hastened to attend them. He was actually between the outer and the inner gate of Whitehall for this purpose, when a word sent out to him by a friendly councillor made him aware that the Council were deceiving him, and that, if he appeared among them, he would be laid fast. Then he hesitated no longer. Giving the Council the slip, and not staying for the proclamations or for anything else, he took horse at once, somewhere near Charing Cross, and was off for his tremendous ride northwards. He himself tells us the successive stages of his ride. He was at Doncaster that night, a distance of 155 miles from London; next night he reached a house of his own at Witherington in Northumberland, about 130 miles from Doncaster; leaving Witherington on Saturday morning, he accomplished some 50 miles more before noon that day, bringing him to Norham, close to the Tweed; after which there were still about 65 miles of that Scottish portion of his ride which lay between Norham and Edinburgh. He had hoped to be at Holyrood House before supper-time; but his dizziness and loss of blood from the fall from his horse in this last portion of his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two.

After his first abrupt salutation of King James in Holyrood that Saturday night, there was naturally a longish colloquy between them. In the course of this colloquy the King’s first excitement of joy was damped for a moment by the reflection that the messenger had come of his own motive merely, and without letters from the English Privy Council. The production of a sapphire ring by Sir Robert removed, he tells us, all doubts. The ring, it appears, had been thrown to him out of one of the windows of Richmond Palace, just before he left, by his sister Lady Scroope; and one account makes it out that it had been a gift by King James himself to Queen Elizabeth, and that Lady Scroope took it off the withered finger of the Queen after her death, to serve as a token that could not be mistaken. Sir Robert’s own account does not quite imply this, but may be so interpreted. All the members of the Hunsdon family, one gathers, were known to King James as having been for some time active in his interest. It was late before the colloquy ended, and Sir Robert was dismissed by the King for his much-needed rest of some days, in or near Holyrood, in charge of the Master of the Household, and under care of a surgeon.

Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very track of Sir Robert’s ride (he had himself ordered them in Northumberland), the community of Edinburgh could still have remained ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English Privy Council; and they did not arrive,—the laggards!—till the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and knights of the English Council; and it opened thus—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret, daughter of the high and renowned prince, Henry the Seventh, King of England, France, and Ireland, his great-great-grandfather,—the said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward the Fourth, by which happy conjunction both the Houses of York and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom, formerly rent and torn by long dissension of bloody and civil wars,—the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the Eighth, of famous memory, King of England as aforesaid: We therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm, being here assembled, united and assisted with those of her late Majesty’s Privy Council, and with great numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality in the kingdom, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a multitude of other good subjects and commons of this realm, thirsting now after nothing so much as to make it known to all persons who it is that, by law, by lineal succession, and undoubted right, is now become the only Sovereign Lord and King of these imperial crowns, to the intent that, by virtue of his power, wisdom, and godly courage, all things may be provided for which may prevent or resist either foreign attempts or popular disorder, tending to the breach of the present peace or to the prejudice of his Majesty’s future quiet, do now hereby, with one full voice, and consent of tongue and heart, publicly proclaim that the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, Queen of England, of famous memory, become also our only lawful and rightful liege lord, James the First, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.” The other document was a missive letter to King James, signed by nearly the same persons, and expressing their profound allegiance to him individually, and their desire to see him in England as speedily as possible. It contained, however, this paragraph:—“Further, we have thought meet and necessary to advertise your Highness that Sir Robert Cary is this morning departed from hence towards your Majesty, not only without the consent of any of us who were present at Richmond at the time of our late Sovereign’s decease, but also contrary to such commandment as we had power to lay upon him, and to all decency, good manners, and respects which he owed to so many persons of our degree; whereby it may be that your Highness, hearing by a bare report of the death of our late Queen, and not of our care and diligence in establishing of your Majesty’s right here in such manner as is above specified, may either receive report or conceive doubts of other matter than (God be thanked) there is cause you should: which we would have clearly prevented if he had borne so much respect to us as to have stayed for our common relation of our proceedings and not thought it better to anticipate the same; for we would have been loth that any person of quality should have gone from hence who should not, with report of her death, have been able to relate the just effects of our assured loyalties.” Both documents were read that day in the Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh; and their purport was published for the general information.

What commotion in Edinburgh through the next few days! The King’s leave-taking had to be hurried; and it was on Sunday the 3d of April that, rising from his place in St. Giles’s Church after the sermon, he made what had to pass as his farewell speech to all his Scottish subjects. It was a speech intended to console them for their grievous loss. “There is no more difference,” he said, “betwixt London and Edinburgh, yea, not so much, as betwixt Inverness or Aberdeen and Edinburgh; for all our marches are dry, and there be no ferries betwixt them”; and, after dilating somewhat further on the undeniable fact of the geographical continuity of his new kingdom with his old, he mentioned one of its probable consequences. “Ye mister [need] not doubt,” he said in conclusion, “but, as I have a body as able as any king in Europe, whereby I am able to travel, so I sall visie you every three year at the least, or ofter as I sall have occasion.” On Tuesday, 5th April, all being ready for his departure, there was the long procession, amid thunders of cannon from the Castle, which conducted him out of Edinburgh towards Berwick, there to begin the very leisurely tour through the northern and midland counties of England by which he came to London early in May. Many Scottish lords and gentlemen were in his retinue, but none of the royal family. The Queen, Prince Henry, and the Princess Elizabeth were to follow soon; and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., then a rickety child in his third year, and unfit to travel, was to remain in Scotland for about a year longer, under the charge of Lord and Lady Fyvie, afterwards known as Earl and Countess of Dunfermline.

From and after the 5th of April 1603 Holyrood, though not quite left to the rats, was no longer the home of royalty. King James’s parting promise that he would revisit his native kingdom at least once every three years passed out of his mind; and not till 1617, fourteen years after the ecstatic delight of his removal to the banks of the Thames, did he find it worth while to recross the Tweed. Holyrood, with the other royal palaces of Scotland, was then refurbished for his temporary accommodation; but with that exception, and the further exception of two subsequent visits of Charles I. to Edinburgh, there was to be no sight of a sovereign face for many a day in the towered edifice under Arthur Seat. For Scotland as a whole, indeed, the five-and-thirty years which intervened between 1603 and 1638 may be described as that period of her history during which, though still retaining a nominal apparatus of independent autonomy, in the shape of a resident Scottish Privy Council and an occasional meeting of a Scottish Parliament, she was governed essentially and in the main from London through the post. “This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it,” said King James in a speech of rebuke to his somewhat troublesome English Parliament on the 31st of March 1607: “here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write, and it is done; and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now,—which my ancestors could not do by the sword.” The words were perfectly true; and they remained true for his son and successor, Charles I., till that point in his reign when the soul of Scotland flashed out again in her “National Covenant,” electrifying the dormant Puritanism of England, and initiating the great Seventeenth Century Revolution in all the British Islands.

It is so long ago now, and so much has happened between, that one almost forgets to ask what became of Sir Robert Cary. Should there be any interest in that subject, however, here are the facts in brief:—Though appointed by King James, before he left Edinburgh, to be one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, and promised further promotion, he did not at first benefit so much as he had expected from his signal piece of service to that King. After accompanying the King to England, he lost even his place in the bedchamber, and, probably from the grudge which Secretary Cecil and the other English councillors still owed to him, was kept otherwise in the background for some time. Gradually, however, he recovered favour. His first considerable rise was when Lord and Lady Dunfermline brought the sickly Prince Charles into England. Sir Robert Cary’s wife was then selected as the fittest person to succeed Lady Dunfermline in the charge of the delicate boy; and the honour to Sir Robert and his wife was the less envied them because it was generally expected that the boy would die in their hands. But he grew up under their careful tending, with evident improvement of his health year after year from his fifth year to his eleventh; and this ensured their future fortunes. Queen Anne always stood their friend, and influenced the King in their favour; Prince Henry, while he lived, treated them with respect; and after Prince Henry’s death in 1612, when Prince Charles became heir-apparent in his room, who but Sir Robert Cary could be the chief man about the heir-apparent and the chamberlain of his household? There were ups and downs still; but Sir Robert and his wife had gifts and pensions, saw their sons and daughters suitably married, and found themselves in the English peerage at last. In 1621 Sir Robert became Baron Leppington. This was his last honour from King James; but in March 1626, at the coronation of Charles I., he was created Earl of Monmouth. He was then about sixty-six years of age; and he lived in that dignity till 1639, when he died at the age of about eighty. His Memoirs, written by himself, were first published from the manuscript in 1759.

PROPOSED MEMORIAL TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.[^[4]]

It is two centuries and a half since Drummond of Hawthornden died; but he is still one of the most interesting figures in Scottish history. “A genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced” was the character given of him in 1656 by Milton’s nephew and pupil, Edward Phillips, in the preface to a collective edition of Drummond’s poems brought out in London that year under Phillips’s editorial care. Very possibly the words are Milton’s own; for Phillips derived his notions of poetry from Milton, and there is other evidence of Milton’s familiarity with the poetry of Drummond. At all events the words are singularly exact for their purpose. They imply, it is true, an imperfect recollection, if not a total ignorance, of the previous wealth of Scottish poetry, represented in such predecessors of Drummond as Barbour, James I., Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay; but, even had Phillips’s recollection of these been clearer and stronger than it was, his selection of the words “polite” and “verdant” as descriptive of those characteristics of Drummond’s genius which were surest to strike Englishmen would not have been so much amiss, while for the range of Scottish time actually within Phillips’s retrospect at the moment the wording of the eulogy was perfect.

The famous series of the older Scottish poets had come to an end on the death of Lindsay just before the Reformation; and from that time it seemed as if the Literary Muses had all but vanished from Scotland, dispossessed and superseded by quite another order of Muses, if that name can be stretched so as anyhow to include them,—the rougher and angrier Muses of vexed national questions, and especially of the Kirk Controversy. Call them Muses or what else you will, they were very momentous powers, and he is but a feeble Scot who will speak of them with contumely, or will ignore the great effects for Scotland and for all Britain that came out of their turmoil. Not the less it is depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till 1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary annals of Scotland! Through that century and a half England prodigiously surpassed her former self, first astonishing the world by the outburst of her Elizabethan splendours, and then continuing the astonishment by the rich and varied literary activity of three succeeding ages, the latest of which was that of the Queen Anne wits. Scotland, on the other hand, had sunk incredibly below the promise of her former self. The Scottish pre-Reformation poets had been comparable, or more than comparable, with the very best of their English coevals, Chaucer alone deducted; but, when the literary historian, leaving the crowded series of lustrous names, from those of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at one end, to those of Dryden and Pope at the other, which represent the literature of South Britain between 1580 and 1725, seeks in North Britain for equivalents, what does he find? No equivalents in the highest degree; but, at the utmost, if he mixes any strictness of conscience with his kindliness, only such an exception here and there to the general sterility that, if it is of the racy vernacular sort, it can be noted apart with pleasure on that account, or, if it is cognate with anything in the English series, it can be moved along that series till the proper interstice is found into which it can be fitted.

One indubitable exception, the exception in chief, was Drummond of Hawthornden. Born amid a people almost wholly absorbed in their Kirk controversy, it had somehow happened that here was one Scot whose ideal of life differed from the common. Of a meditative and philosophical temperament from his boyhood, a lover of books, art, and music, and with his tastes in such matters educated by foreign travel and by a familiarity with the recent English Elizabethan literature which must have been then excessively rare in North Britain, he had no sooner become Laird of Hawthornden by his father’s death in 1610 than, abjuring all other occupations, he schemed out for himself that life of studious leisure which suited him best, and for which there could not, in all Scotland, have been a more beautiful home than the leafy dell of his lairdship and habitation:—

“Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,

Where from the vulgar I estranged live.”

Here, accordingly, it was that, between 1610, when he was in his twenty-fifth year, and 1625, when he was in his fortieth, he wrote at intervals, and uniformly in that southern English which he foresaw was thenceforward to be the general literary tongue of the British Islands, most of the poems by which he is now remembered. The quantity altogether was not large, and the pieces were all short individually; but the quality was genuine. No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound, pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. This was at once recognised among his own countrymen; but the poems, or the rumour of them, went beyond Scotland. Before the close of the reign of the Scottish King James in England, Drummond was certainly the one man living in Scotland who was thought of by the London men of letters round the Court of that King as belonging, by right of real merit, to the poetic brotherhood of the reign. A London Scot or two, it is true, having the advantages of proximity and of Court connection, did divide with Drummond the applauses of the London circle of critics for Scottish merit in English verse-making; but, if the vote had been seriously taken, it was to Drummond that the competent judges would have sent the laurel. Hence, indeed, some of the most memorable incidents in Drummond’s biography. Hence it was that the Elizabethan veteran Michael Drayton entered into such loving correspondence with him, addressing him “my dear, noble Drummond”; hence it was that, when any eminent Londoner chanced to make a tour in Scotland, he was sure to seek an introduction to Drummond; and hence that immortal visit of the great Ben Jonson himself, when he was Drummond’s guest in Hawthornden for a whole week in the winter of 1618–9, entertained Drummond with all the gossip of London for thirty years back, stunned him with loud talk about everything, and drank an immensity of his wine. Phillips’s encomium of 1656, when Drummond had been seven years dead, only expressed, one can see, an opinion already formed while Drummond was still alive, and in the prime of his manhood.

The encomium included, or ought to have included, more than Drummond’s performances in verse. His fine and verdant genius is no less discernible in his prose writings. His little essay entitled “A Cypress Grove” is a piece of prose so superlatively excellent that one wonders how it should be so little known,—why, in fact, it should not have had a prominent place in all professed collections of the flowers of English seventeenth-century prose. For high-toned philosophic thoughtfulness, ingenuity of artistic phantasy, musical beauty of style, and perfection of literary taste and finish, there is nothing superior, of the same length, if anything quite equal, in all Sir Thomas Browne, or in all Jeremy Taylor. That essay was published in 1623, as an adjunct to one of his volumes of poems; and, though there is a good deal of other and later prose from Drummond, it is mainly of a character less readable now, and less acceptable in some quarters where it may still receive attention. For the quæstiones vexatæ did at last coil themselves round Drummond, and in his later years, in his own despite, he had to become a polemical politician. King James had been succeeded by King Charles; on the 23d of July 1637 Jenny Geddes hurled her stool in St. Giles’s; and Scotland then passed into that trebly troubled period of her always troubled history which, commencing with her own defiance to Charles and Laud in her National Scottish Covenant, and proceeding thence to her alliance with the English Parliamentarians in the Solemn League and Covenant, includes Montrose’s brief year of Royalist outblaze and anti-Covenanting triumph, and all the rest of the chequered sequel till the English Republicans brought Charles to the block. No Scot through that long agony was permitted to be neutral; if any one had tried, he would have been torn from his retirement, and obliged to declare himself. Drummond did declare himself, and it was on what was then, and still is, among his countrymen, the unpopular side. In a series of prose tracts, circulated surreptitiously, some of them of the nature of satirical squibs, he advocated views of Scottish politics which were very much those of Montrose and the Hamiltons. Even where this may be remembered, in a general way, to his discredit now, there is much, however, in the tracts themselves to arrest the unfavourable judgment and turn it into respect. Their literary ability and clever wit may count for little with those who resent their purport; but there are passages of high-minded and eloquent earnestness that must startle any reader in such a context. While inculcating upon his countrymen an effete and impracticable political philosophy of passive obedience, and while indicating a preference on Drummond’s own part for something of that florid Anglican ecclesiasticism against which his countrymen were fighting, he flings out to the right and to the left remonstrances much needed on both sides, and especially a doctrine of religious toleration far beyond the apprehension of either, or of the time generally. Laud he virtually shoves aside as an interloper; and, on the whole, the substance of the tracts, in one of the two directions to which they were addressed, is like a message to Charles that he had been unfortunately wrong in his Scottish policy from the first, inasmuch as Scotland always had been Scotland, was Scotland still, and could not be drilled by any mortal force against her own will into anything else. Here, in fact, Drummond reveals his very heart. A disciple though he was of the English Elizabethans in literature, deploring the low condition of Scottish literature in comparison, and practising in his own writings the accepted book-English of the south, he was yet thoroughly a Scot by his strongest personal and private affections. No Scot of his generation more fond of the antiquities and legends of his country, or more learned in that kind of lore; his chief pastime all through his life was in researches into Scottish records and family genealogies back to Malcolm Canmore and beyond; and his special recreation amid the troublesome party-pamphleteering of his later years was the composition of his History of the Five Jameses. This was not published till some years after his death, and, though of some interest as a specimen of the silvering effect of his ornate English upon very savage matters, is the poorest of all his writings in respect of real worth. But what of that other relic of Drummond, if it be really his, which did not come to light till thirty years after his decease, and then in the surprising form of a piece of broad Fifeshire farce in dog-Latin hexameters, entitled Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam,—i.e. “The Midden-Fecht between Tarvet and Newbarns”? If that really is Drummond’s (which is possible, or even probable, though not absolutely certain), it is one excellent feather more in his cap. It would be proof positive that the stately and pensive Laird of Hawthornden was a typical Scot also, no less than Dunbar and Lindsay before him, or Burns after him, in the Scottish faculty of uproarious fun, and could give and take, when he chose, with any Newhaven fishwife, or any Gilmerton carter, in their own roughest vocabulary.

The tradition of Drummond has come down pretty vividly from his own time to the present. This, however, is perhaps less due to continued acquaintance with his writings than to certain aiding circumstances. Few names of literary celebrity, as Charles Lamb used to remark, are so delightful to pronounce as “Drummond of Hawthornden”; and in England, so far as Drummond has been kept in mind at all, it seems to have been chiefly by this conserving efficacy of his gracefully-sounding name. In Scotland, and especially in the vicinity of Edinburgh, the aids in recollecting him have been of a stronger kind:—

“Who knows not Melville’s beechy grove,

And Roslin’s rocky glen,

Dalkeith, which all the virtues love,

And classic Hawthornden?”

When Scott wrote these lines, ninety-one years ago, the reputation of the valley of the Esk for scenic beauty and picturesqueness, and the fashion of holiday peregrinations to it, on that account and on account of the attractions of its historical associations, by the citizens of Edinburgh or by tourists visiting Edinburgh, had already been fully formed. The reputation and the fashion have been kept up ever since, and Drummond’s memory has had the benefit. Whatever the other attractions of the valley of the Esk and its neighbourhood, the twin pre-eminence among them has belonged to Roslin and Hawthornden; and hence it has happened that hundreds and thousands who had never read a line of Drummond’s, and knew but vaguely in what century he lived, have looked admiringly at the cliff-socketed and quaintly gabled and turreted edifice, partly built by himself and partly of more ruinous antiquity, where he had his dwelling, have walked round it in the grounds where he once walked, have descended as he used to descend into the leafy dell of the river beneath, and so have taken into their minds some image of the man by the memory of whom the place has been consecrated.

Hawthornden is in the parish of Lasswade; and it is in the churchyard of Lasswade, two miles from the Hawthornden mansion, that one sees the bit of old masonry, called the Drummond Aisle, and once a portion of the church itself, within which is Drummond’s grave. Did he foresee that this would be his resting-place, or was he only writing metaphorically, when he penned the lines, now perhaps the most frequently quoted piece of his verse, giving instructions for his epitaph? His most intimate friend and correspondent through his life was Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, eventually Earl of Stirling and Secretary of State for Scotland,—one of those London Scots above mentioned who divided for a while with Drummond in London literary circles the palm of the primacy in Scoto-British poetry. There was no jealousy between them on that account; on the contrary, Alexander, as a man of high Court influence, regarded himself as standing in a relation of patronage to Drummond, while Drummond, acknowledging this relation, and proud of it, looked up to Alexander and admired him hugely. Their friendship, nevertheless, was as close and affectionate as ever bound two men together, and in their letters to each other they always, to signify this, called themselves, in the fashion of the pastoralists, Alexis and Damon. Well, it was in the year 1621, or thereabouts, that Drummond, then only about thirty-five years of age, but hardly recovered from a severe illness which had brought him to the doors of death and left him in a mood of melancholy depression, sent a sonnet to Alexander, containing these lines:—

“Amidst thy sacred cares and courtly toils,

Alexis, when thou shalt hear wandering fame

Tell death hath triumphed o’er my mortal spoils,

And that on earth I am but a sad name,

If thou e’er held me dear, by all our love,

By all that bliss, those joys, Heaven here us gave,

I conjure thee, and by the Maids of Jove,

To carve this short remembrance on my grave:—

‘Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace

The murmuring Esk: may roses shade the place!’”

In the memorial to Drummond now proposed by the influential committee of which Lord Melville is chairman it is intended that this instruction shall be obeyed as faithfully as possible. The bushing of roses round the grave was but a wish, and a bushing of roses round the Drummond Aisle in Lasswade Churchyard is unfortunately not practicable in that situation. But there may be some decoration of the little aisle containing the grave; and on the wall, whether in the interior or outside, there may be a medallion of Drummond or other commemorative sculpture, with room for his own words of epitaph. That, most properly, is to be the first object, the primary object, of the committee that has been formed for the promotion of the memorial. Should the amount of the subscriptions, however, permit something more, the precise form of the addition may be matter for consideration. Should there be a bust or other piece of monumental sculpture besides that which is to decorate the sepulchre at Lasswade, surely Edinburgh is the place for that supplement, and, within Edinburgh, perhaps St. Giles’s Cathedral. For was not Drummond one of the earliest alumni of Edinburgh University; was not his donation of books to the University, which is still kept apart in the University Library under the name of The Drummond Collection, a special testimony of his regard and affection for the University in its infancy, and for the whole city; 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?

Although the increase among us of late of the practice of such commemorative tributes to eminent personages of the past has provoked cynical criticism in some quarters, it is really one of the creditable signs of our time. The more numerous the objects of interest to any nation in its own history, or in history generally, in times preceding the bustle of the present, the richer the mind of that nation, and the higher its capabilities. Even the range of time to which it will go back for worthy objects of interest must count for something in the reckoning. The recent is only the departing present, and has so left its residues in the present, whether of admirations or of animosities, that participation in testimonies of regard for public men remembered as having recently moved amidst us signifies little more with many than sensitiveness to the common duties of present social life, or sometimes even of present political partisanship. To be susceptible of the commemorative instinct with respect to objects and persons removed from ourselves by a generation or two, or a century or two, is a rarer thing, and implies a larger and finer endowment of historical knowledge and feeling.

ALLAN RAMSAY[^[5]]

In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.

Born in 1686, of humble parentage, in the village of Leadhills, in the wild inland parish of Crawfordmuir in Lanarkshire, and educated in the ordinary fashion at the parish school there, Ramsay was brought to Edinburgh in 1701, when he was in his fifteenth year, and was apprenticed to a periwig-maker. The statement sometimes made that he began life as a barber is therefore incorrect. The crafts of the barber and the wig-maker were then distinct. Wig and periwig are one and the same thing, and both are derived, it seems, though one would hardly suppose so, from the Latin pilus, hair. Thus,—Latin, pilus, hair; old Italian, pilucca, a mass of hair or head of hair; this, still in old Italian, corrupted into perucca; whence the French perruque; that word adopted into English, but generally twirled into periwig to make it native; from which word periwig if you lop off the peri, the sole remnant of the original pilus, you have the mere twirl or termination wig, standing as a substantive word and answering the whole purpose. Now a wig-maker, periwig-maker, or perruquier, was no mean tradesman in those old times, extending from the middle of the seventeenth century to near the end of the eighteenth, when it was the strange custom, in all civilised European countries, for people to wear artificial heads of hair, not as mere substitutes for the natural growths in cases of necessity (which had been a usage everywhere from time immemorial), but as fashionable adornments of bulging volume and fantastic device. An essay might be written on the fact that there was such a wig-wearing age in Europe, nearly the same in range of time in every country of that continent; in which essay it might be plausibly argued that there was an inherent congruity between the strange wig-wearing habit and the intellectual and spiritual characteristics, and consequently the literary capabilities and products, of the age distinguished by the habit. One can hardly conceive Addison or Dr. Johnson, for example, without a wig, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, with one.

Be that as it may,—and there are curious intricacies in the speculation,—Allan Ramsay not only belonged to the wig-wearing age in Scotland, but was brought up to the business of wig-making and wig-dressing for the Edinburgh lieges. It was no bad employment in a population of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, including resident noblemen and lairds, and a good many professional men and merchants, all of whom wore wigs, and liked them to be handsome. Accordingly, when, in or about the year 1708, or just after the Union, young Ramsay, having concluded his apprenticeship, started in business for himself, in some shop in the High Street, or one of its offshoots, his prospects were fair enough. Skipping four years, and coming to the year 1712, when he was twenty-five years of age, we find him just married to the daughter of a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and in very comfortable circumstances otherwise. It was then that he was beginning to be known in the cosy society of old Edinburgh as not only an expert wig-maker but also something besides.

“Whenever fame, with voice of thunder,

Sets up a chield a warld’s wonder,

Either for slashing folk to dead,

Or having wind-mills in his head,

Or poet, or an airy beau,

Or ony twa-legged rary-show,

They wha have never seen’t are busy

To speer what-like a carlie is he.”

The words are Ramsay’s own, by way of preface in one of his poems to an account of his personal appearance and general character. The description, though not written till 1719, will do very well for 1712:—

“Imprimis, then, for tallness, I

Am five feet and four inches high;

A black-a-viced, snod, dapper, fallow,

Nor lean nor overlaid with tallow;

With phiz of a Morocco cut,

Resembling a late man of wit,

Auld-gabbit Spec., wha was sae cunning

To be a dummie ten years running.

Then, for the fabric of my mind,

’Tis mair to mirth than grief inclined:

I rather choose to laugh at folly

Than show dislike by melancholy,

Well judging a sour heavy face

Is not the truest mark of grace.”

Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as

“A little man that lo’es my ease,”

and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,

“An evening and guffaw.”

This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.

Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible books. Recollecting what books were then accessible to one in his circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe, Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it, and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware, however, of another literature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through Watson’s Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, Ruddiman’s edition of Gavin Douglas’s Translation of Virgil, and Sage’s edition of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:—

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,

Hae raised up great poetic stocks

Of Rapes, of Buckets, Sarks, and Locks,

While we neglect

To shaw their betters. This provokes

Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:

Our country then a tale could tell;

Europe had nane mair snack and snell

At verse or prose;

Our Kings were poets too themsell,

Bauld and jocose.”

In this double direction of Ramsay’s literary likings,—his respectful obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish vernacular,—we have the key to his own literary life.

Between 1712 and 1718, or between Ramsay’s twenty-sixth and his thirty-third year, just when the reign of Queen Anne was passing into that of George I., the Edinburgh public became more and more alive to the fact that they had a poet among them in the guise of a wig-maker. A number of little pieces of verse, with Ramsay’s name attached, came out in succession in the form of humbly printed leaflets, some of them with the sanction of “The Easy Club,” as having been originally written for that convivial fraternity, but others independently, when that club had ceased to exist. On examining these earliest pieces of Ramsay, one finds that, while some of them are satires or moralisings in a rather crude English, in imitation of the London poetry then in vogue, the best are occasional poems in the colloquial Scotch of Ramsay’s own day, suggested by local incidents, characters, and humours. In these he was evidently connecting himself as well as he could with the broken chain of those older vernacular poets to whom he looked back with so much interest. We can even detect those predecessors of his in this broken chain whom he took more immediately for his models. They were the two later Semples of Beltrees,—Robert Semple (1595–1659), the author of “The Piper of Kilbarchan,” and his son Francis Semple (died about 1685), author of “Fye, let us a’ to the bridal,” “Maggie Lauder,” and other Scottish songs. Not that these were poets of anything like the dimensions of the older Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Lindsay, but that they had exhibited the literary capabilities of the Scottish tongue in that more recent and less archaic stage from which one might make a fresh start. That he had still a hankering, however, after the greater and older Scots was shown by the boldest, and in point of length most considerable, of his attempts at authorship during the time now under notice. This was the publication, in 1717, of a new edition of the old Scotch poem, in complex rhyming stanzas, called Christ’s Kirk on the Green, attributed by some to King James V., and by others, with utter improbability, to the poet-king James I. To the original of this old poem of Scottish humour, the language of which is so difficult that it had puzzled previous editors, there was added a continuation by himself, in the form of a second canto, carrying on the story; and, the demand having been such that another edition was called for in the following year, he then added a third canto. Ramsay was no philologist, and his edition of the old poem was of no value for scholars; but his appreciation of the poetic merit of the old piece must have been beyond the common, and his two cantos of continuation were something of a feat. “Nothing so rich,” says a modern critic, “had appeared since the strains of Dunbar or Lindsay”; and of the opening of the third canto the same critic says that it is “an inimitable sketch of rustic life,—coarse, but as true as any by Teniers.” The judgment is perhaps too favourable; but this venture of Ramsay’s in the archaic Scotch deservedly increased the reputation he had won by his easier and shorter pieces in the ordinary colloquial Scotch of his own day, and by some of their English companions.

Before the year 1718, when Christ’s Kirk on the Green appeared with its completed continuation, Ramsay had begun to combine the business of bookselling with that of wig-making. For this purpose he had transferred himself and his family to a house in the High Street, just opposite Niddry’s Wynd, for which he had adopted the sign of “The Mercury”; and it was from this house that the completed edition of the old poem was published. The house still stands, now numbered 153 in the street, glass-fronted to a great extent in the two storeys above the basement, and with the old stone stair of entrance to these storeys, but bereft of an upper storey and attics which once belonged to it and gave it a more imposing look. To understand, however, the dignity of the house and its situation in Allan Ramsay’s days, one has to remember that the Edinburgh of those days consisted all but entirely of that one long descending ridge or backbone of edifices from the Castle to Holyrood of which the High Street proper was the main portion. One must remember further that the High Street was not then the continued clear oblong from the Lawnmarket to the Netherbow which we now see, but that up a portion of the middle of it, along the face of St. Giles’s Church, there ran an obstructive block of buildings,—consisting of the Old Tolbooth or “Heart of Midlothian” at the upper end, and a tall pile of dwelling-houses and shops, called the Luckenbooths, at the lower end,—the effect of which was to choke the traffic at that part, and divide it between a narrow tortuous foot-passage along the buttresses of the church on the one side and a somewhat wider causey for vehicles on the other. Now, as Ramsay’s new house was a good way below this obstruction, and in that open space of the High Street where there was plenty of room to breathe, it was in an excellent position for bookselling or any similar business. There was actually a temptation for a citizen lingering in this spot to ascend Allan Ramsay’s stone stair to have a look at the books on sale, especially if he could have his wig dressed at the same time. That this was possible we have Ramsay’s own word. It is generally represented in memoirs of him that he had given up wig-making when he entered his new shop of the Mercury opposite to Niddry’s Wynd, and there took to bookselling; but these lines, appended to the description of his personal appearance and character in the poem already quoted, settle the question—

“Say, wad ye ken my gate of fending,

My income, management, and spending?

Born to nae landship,—mair’s the pity,—

Yet denizen of this fair city,

I make what honest shift I can,

And in my ain house am good-man;

Which stands in Ed’nburgh’s street the sun-side.

I theek the out and line the inside

Of mony a douce and witty pash,

And baith ways gather in the cash.”

Ramsay remained in this house in the High Street about eight years. They were busy and prosperous years. During the first three of them, or from 1718 to 1721, he continued to send forth miscellaneous little pieces, some in English but most in Scotch, in sheets or half-sheets, to be bought separately. There were songs, satirical sketches and squibs, elegies, metrical epistles to friends or to public persons, odes on Edinburgh events or on such national occurrences as the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, and a few essays in a more general and serious vein, chiefly in the English heroic couplet, such as The Morning Interview, Tartana or the Plaid, and Content. The sheets or half-sheets were bought eagerly. It was at this time, indeed, according to the tradition, that the good-wives of Edinburgh were in the habit of sending out their children, with a penny or twopence, to buy “Allan Ramsay’s last piece,” whatever it might be. His popularity, however, did not rest on such humble demonstrations of liking. He was now one of the most respected of the citizens of Edinburgh, spoken of universally among them as their poet, and on terms of personal intimacy with the most distinguished of them. He had become a notability even beyond the bounds of Edinburgh,—through the south of Scotland, if not yet in all Scotland. His name had even been carried to London, with the effect of some vague notion of him among the English wits there as a poet in the colloquial Scotch possessing all the north part of the island by himself. This recognition of him in the south seems to have begun about the year 1720, and to have been occasioned by a little Scottish pastoral elegy, entitled Richy and Sandy, which he had written on the death of Addison in the previous year. The “Richy” of this piece is Sir Richard Steele, and the “Sandy” is Mr. Alexander Pope; and they are represented as two fellow-shepherds of the famous deceased bewailing his loss in a colloquy. Steele and Pope could hardly avoid hearing of such a thing; and, indeed, pirated copies reached London, and there was a reprint of the elegy there from Lintot’s press, with the Scotch dreadfully mangled. It seems to have been with a view to prevent such piracy and misprinting of his productions in future, as well as to confirm his reputation by putting all his writings before the public in permanent form, that Ramsay, in the course of 1720, sent out subscription papers for a collected edition of his works. The appeal was most successful; and in July 1721 the collected edition did appear, in a handsome quarto volume, of about 400 pages, with the title Poems by Allan Ramsay, “printed by Mr. Thomas Ruddiman for the Author.” The “Alphabetical List of Subscribers” prefixed to the volume contains nearly 500 names, most of them Scotch, but with a sprinkling of English. Among the Scottish names are those of nearly all the Scottish nobility of the day, in the persons of seven dukes, five marquises, twenty-one earls, one viscount, and twenty-three lords, while the columns are crowded with the names of the best-known baronets, knights, lairds, judges, lawyers, merchants, and civic functionaries in and round about Edinburgh and in other parts of Scotland. Among the few names from England one reads with special interest, besides that of the literary Scoto-Londoner “John Arbuthnot, M.D.,” these three,—“Mr. Alexander Pope,” “Sir Richard Steele” (for two copies), and “Mr. Richard Savage.” The volume was dedicated to the Ladies of Scotland in a few gallant and flowery sentences; and there was a preface, addressed specially to the critics, full of shrewd sense, and showing Ramsay’s command of an easy and light style of English prose.

Another distinction of the volume was a portrait of the author, excellently engraved after a painting by an Edinburgh artist-friend. It represents a youngish man, with a bright, knowing, clever face, a smallish and sensitive nose, and fine and lively eyes. One observes that there is no wig, or semblance of a wig, in the portrait, but only the natural hair, closely cropped to the shape of the head, and surmounted by a neat Scotch bonnet, cocked a little to one side. As it is impossible to suppose that a man who lived by making wigs did not wear one himself, the inference must be that, in a portrait which was to represent him in his poetical capacity, the wig was rejected by artistic instinct. In later portraits of Ramsay it is the same, save that the small Scotch bonnet is superseded in these by a kind of cloth turban of several folds. In proof that this deviation in the portraits from the usual habit of real life was suggested by artistic instinct, one may note that there is the same deviation in the portraits of most of the other real British poets of the wig-wearing age. Pope, Prior, Gay, and Thomson all appear in their portraits with something like Allan Ramsay’s turban or night-cap for their head-dress; and it descended to the poet Cowper.

Very likely, however, about the date at which we are now arrived, Allan Ramsay, though he still continued to wear a wig when off poetic duty, had ceased to make wigs for others. The collected edition of his poems had brought him 400 guineas at once, worth then about 1000 guineas now; and his bookselling,—including now a steady sale of that volume in a cheaper edition for the general public, and also the sale of the new pieces of an occasional kind which he continued to issue in separate form as fast as before,—was becoming a sufficient trade in itself. By the year 1724, at all events, when he had added a considerable number of such stray occasional pieces to those bound up in the collected volume, he seems to have been known in the little business world of Edinburgh no longer as “wig-maker,” but simply as “bookseller,” or sometimes more generally as “merchant.” Two enterprises of that year, both in the way of editorship rather than authorship, must have occupied a good deal of his time. These were The Tea Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, and The Evergreen: A Collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. The first, originally in two volumes, but subsequently extended to four, was a collection of what might be called contemporary songs of all varieties, with the inclusion of floating popular favourites from the seventeenth century, deemed suitable, according to the somewhat lax standard of taste in those days, for musical eveningparties in families, or for companies of gentlemen by themselves. The purpose of the other, as the title indicates, was more scholarly. It was to recall the attention of his countrymen to that older Scottish poetry which he still thought too little regarded by furnishing selected specimens of Henryson, Dunbar, Kennedy, Scott, Montgomery, the Wedderburns, Sir Richard Maitland, and others certainly or presumably of earlier centuries than the seventeenth. The intention was creditable, and the book did good service, though the editing of the old Scotch was inaccurate and meagre. In reality, Ramsay’s exertions for the two publications were not merely editorial. The Tea Table Miscellany, when completed, besides containing about thirty songs contributed by “some ingenious young gentlemen” of Ramsay’s acquaintance,—among whom we can identify now Hamilton of Bangour, young David Malloch, a William Crawford, and a William Walkinshaw,—contained about sixty songs of Ramsay’s own composition. Similarly, among several mock-antiques by modern hands inserted into The Evergreen, were two by Ramsay himself, entitled The Vision and The Eagle and Robin Redbreast.

The time had come for Ramsay’s finest and most characteristic performance. More than once, in his miscellanies hitherto, he had tried the pastoral form in Scotch, whether from a natural tendency to that form or induced by recent attempts in the English pastoral by Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay. Besides his pastoral elegy on the death of Addison, and another on the death of Prior, he had written a pastoral dialogue of real Scottish life in 162 lines, entitled Patie and Roger, introduced by this description:—

“Beneath the south side of a craigy bield,

Where a clear spring did halesome water yield,

Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay,

Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May:

Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang,

While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.”

This piece, and two smaller pastoral pieces in the same vein, called Patie and Peggy and Jenny and Meggie, had been so much liked that Ramsay had been urged by his friends to do something more extensive in the shape of a pastoral story or drama. He had been meditating such a thing through the year 1724, while busy with his two editorial compilations; and in June 1725 the result was given to the public in The Gentle Shepherd: A Scots Pastoral Comedy. Here the three pastoral sketches already written were inwoven into a simply-constructed drama of rustic Scottish life as it might be imagined among the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at that time, still within the recollection of very old people then alive, when the Protectorates of Cromwell and his son had come to an end and Monk had restored King Charles. The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other; nothing so good of any kind that could be voted as even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict. It is a long while ago, and there are many spots in Edinburgh which compete with one another in the interest of their literary associations; but one can stand now with particular pleasure for a few minutes any afternoon opposite that decayed house in the High Street, visible as one is crossing from the South Bridge to the North Bridge, where Allan Ramsay once had his shop, and whence the first copies of The Gentle Shepherd were handed out, some day in June 1725, to eager Edinburgh purchasers.

The tenancy of this house by Ramsay lasted but a year longer. He had resolved to add to his general business of bookselling and publishing that of a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in Edinburgh. For this purpose he had taken new premises, still in the High Street, but in a position even more central and conspicuous than that of “The Mercury” opposite Niddry’s Wynd. They were, in fact, in the easternmost house of the Luckenbooths, or lower part of that obstructive stack of buildings, already mentioned, which once ran up the High Street alongside of St. Giles’s Church, dividing the traffic into two narrow and overcrowded channels. It is many years since the Luckenbooths and the whole obstruction of which they formed a part were swept away; but from old prints we can see that the last house of the Luckenbooths to the east was a tall tenement of five storeys, with its main face looking straight down the lower slope of the High Street towards the Canongate. The strange thing was that, though thus in the very heart of the bustle of the town as congregated round the Cross, the house commanded from its higher windows a view beyond the town altogether, away to Aberlady Bay and the farther reaches of sea and land in that direction. It was into this house that Ramsay removed in 1726, when he was exactly forty years of age. The part occupied by him was the flat immediately above the basement floor, but perhaps with that floor in addition. The sign he adopted for the new premises was one exhibiting the heads or effigies of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.

Having introduced Ramsay into this, the last of his Edinburgh shops, we have reached the point where our present interest in him all but ends. In 1728, when he had been two years in the new premises, he published a second volume of his collected poems, under the title of Poems by Allan Ramsay, Volume II., in a handsome quarto matching the previous volume of 1721, and containing all the pieces he had written since the appearance of that volume; and in 1730 he published A Collection of Thirty Fables. These were his last substantive publications, and with them his literary career may be said to have come to a close. Begun in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of that of George II., when it suddenly ceased. Twice or thrice afterwards at long intervals he did scribble a copy of verses; but, in the main, from his forty-fifth year onwards, he rested on his laurels. Thenceforward he contented himself with his bookselling, the management of his circulating library, and the superintendence of the numerous editions of his Collected Poems, his Gentle Shepherd, and his Tea Table Miscellany that were required by the public demand, and the proceeds of which formed a good part of his income. It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that, when Allan Ramsay’s time of literary production ended, the story of his life in Edinburgh also came to a close, or ceased to be important. For eight-and-twenty years longer, or almost till George II. gave place to George III., Ramsay continued to be a living celebrity in the Scottish capital, known by figure and physiognomy to all his fellow-citizens, and Ramsay’s bookshop at the end of the Luckenbooths, just above the Cross, continued to be one of the chief resorts of the well-to-do residents, and of chance visitors of distinction. Now and then, indeed, through the twenty-eight years, there are glimpses of him still in special connections with the literary, as well as with the social, history of Edinburgh. When the English poet Gay, a summer or two before his death in 1732, came to Edinburgh on a visit, in the company of his noble patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, and resided with them in their mansion of Queensberry House in the Canongate,—now the gloomiest and ugliest-looking house in that quarter of the old town, but then reckoned of palatial grandeur,—whither did he tend daily, in his saunterings up the Canongate, but to Allan Ramsay’s shop? One hears of him as standing there with Allan at the window to have the city notabilities and oddities pointed out to him in the piazza below, or as taking lessons from Allan in the Scottish words and idioms of the Gentle Shepherd, that he might explain them better to Mr. Pope when he went back to London.

Some years later, when Ramsay had reached the age of fifty, and he and his wife were enjoying the comforts of his ample success, and rejoicing in the hopes and prospects of their children,—three daughters, “no ae wally-draggle among them, all fine girls,” as Ramsay informs us, and one son, a young man of three-and-twenty, completing his education in Italy for the profession of a painter,—there came upon the family what threatened to be a ruinous disaster. Never formally an anti-Presbyterian, and indeed regularly to be seen on Sundays in his pew in St. Giles’s High Kirk, but always and systematically opposed to the unnecessary social rigours of the old Presbyterian system, and of late under a good deal of censure from clerical and other strict critics on account of the dangerous nature of much of the literature put in circulation from his library, Ramsay had ventured at last on a new commercial enterprise, which could not but be offensive on similar grounds to many worthy people, though it seems to have been acceptable enough to the Edinburgh community generally. Edinburgh having been hitherto deficient in theatrical accommodation, and but fitfully supplied with dramatic entertainments, he had, in 1736, started a new theatre in Carrubber’s Close, near to his former High Street shop. He was looking for great profits from the proprietorship of this theatre and his partnership in its management. Hardly had he begun operations, however, when there came the extraordinary statute of 10 George II. (1737), regulating theatres for the future all over Great Britain. As by this statute there could be no performance of stage-plays out of London and Westminster, save when the King chanced to be residing in some other town, Ramsay’s speculation collapsed, and all the money he had invested in it was lost. It was a heavy blow; and he was moved by it to some verses of complaint to his friend Lord President Forbes and the other judges of the Court of Session. While telling the story of his own hardship in the case, he suggests that an indignity had been done by the new Act to the capital of Scotland:—

“Shall London have its houses twa

And we doomed to have nane ava’?

Is our metropolis, ance the place

Where langsyne dwelt the royal race

Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down

To a level with ilk clachan town,

While thus she suffers the subversion

Of her maist rational diversion?”

However severe the loss to Ramsay at the time, it was soon tided over. Within six years he is found again quite at ease in his worldly fortunes. His son, for some years back from Italy, was in rapidly rising repute as a portrait-painter, alternating between London and Edinburgh in the practice of his profession, and a man of mark in Edinburgh society on his own account; and, whether by a junction of the son’s means with the father’s, or by the father’s means alone, it was now that there reared itself in Edinburgh the edifice which at the present day most distinctly preserves for the inhabitants the memory of the Ramsay family in their Edinburgh connections. The probability is that, since Allan had entered on his business premises at the end of the Luckenbooths, his dwelling-house had been somewhere else in the town or suburbs; but in 1743 he built himself a new dwelling-house on the very choicest site that the venerable old town afforded. It was that quaint octagon-shaped villa, with an attached slope of green and pleasure-ground, on the north side of the Castle Hill, which, as well from its form as from its situation, attracts the eye as one walks along Princes Street, and which still retains the name of Ramsay Lodge. The wags of the day, making fun of its quaint shape, likened the construction to a goose-pie; and something of that fancied resemblance may be traced even now in its extended and improved proportions. But envy may have had a good deal to do with the comparison. It is still a neat and comfortable dwelling internally, while it commands from its elevation an extent of scenery unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The view from it ranges from the sea-mouth of the Firth of Forth on the east to the first glimpses of the Stirlingshire Highlands on the west, and again due north across the levels of the New Town, and the flashing waters of the Firth below them, to the bounding outline of the Fifeshire hills. When, in 1743, before there was as yet any New Town at all, Allan Ramsay took up his abode in this villa, he must have been considered a fortunate and happy man. His entry into it was saddened, indeed, by the death of his wife, which occurred just about that time; but for fourteen years of widowerhood, with two of his daughters for his companions, he lived in it serenely and hospitably. During the first nine years of those fourteen he still went daily to his shop in the Luckenbooths, attending to his various occupations, and especially to his circulating library, which is said to have contained by this time about 30,000 volumes; but for the last five or six years he had entirely relinquished business. There are authentic accounts of his habits and demeanour in his last days, and they concur in representing him as one of the most charming old gentlemen possible, vivacious and sprightly in conversation, full of benevolence and good humour, and especially fond of children and kindly in his ways for their amusement. He died on the 7th of January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age, and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.

Ramsay had outlived nearly all the literary celebrities who had been his contemporaries during his own career of active authorship, ended nearly thirty years before. Swift and Pope were gone, after Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and others of the London band, who had died earlier. Of several Scotsmen, his juniors, who had stepped into the career of literature after he had shown the way, and had attained to more or less of poetic eminence under his own observation, three,—Robert Blair, James Thomson, and Hamilton of Bangour,—had predeceased him. Their finished lives, with all the great radiance of Thomson’s, are wholly included in the life of Allan Ramsay. David Malloch, who had been an Edinburgh protégé of Ramsay’s, but had gone to London and Anglicised himself into “Mallet,” was about the oldest of his literary survivors into another generation; but in that generation, as Scotsmen of various ages, from sixty downwards to one-and-twenty, living, within Scotland or out of it, at the date of Ramsay’s death, we count Lord Kames, Armstrong, Reid, Hume, Lord Monboddo, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Smollett, Wilkie, Blacklock, Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Falconer, Meikle, and Beattie. Such of these as were residents in Edinburgh had known Allan Ramsay personally; others of them had felt his influence indirectly; and all must have noted his death as an event of some consequence.

The time is long past for any exaggeration of Allan Ramsay’s merits. But, call him only a slipshod little Horace of Auld Reekie, who wrote odes, epistles, satires, and other miscellanies in Scotch through twenty years of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was also, by a happy chance, the author of a unique and delightful Scottish pastoral, it remains true that he was the most considerable personality in Scottish literary history in order of time after Drummond of Hawthornden, or, if we think only of the vernacular, after Sir David Lindsay, and that he did more than any other man to stir afresh a popular enthusiasm for literature in Scotland after the Union with England. All in all, therefore, it is with no small interest that, in one’s walks along the most classic thoroughfare of the present Edinburgh, one gazes at the white stone statue of Allan Ramsay, from the chisel of Sir John Steell, which stands in the Gardens just below the famous “goose-pie villa.” It looks as if the poet had just stepped down thence in his evening habiliments to see things thereabouts in their strangely changed condition. By the tact of the sculptor, he wears, one observes, not a wig, but the true poetic night-cap or turban.

LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE[^[6]]

In 1719 there was published in Edinburgh, in a tract of twelve folio pages, a small poem, 27 stanzas or 216 lines long, entitled Hardyknute, a Fragment. It was printed in old spelling, to look like a piece of old Scottish poetry that had somehow been recovered; and it seems to have been accepted as such by those into whose hands the copy had come, and who were concerned in having it published. Among these were Duncan Forbes of Culloden, afterwards Lord President of the Court of Session, and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk; but there is something like proof that it had come into their hands indirectly from Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, baronet, who died as late as 1766 at a great age, in the rank of lieutenant-general, and who, some time before 1719, had sent a manuscript copy of it to Lord Binning, with a fantastic story to the effect that the original, in a much defaced vellum, had been found, a few weeks before, in a vault at Dunfermline.

The little thing, having become popular in its first published form, was reproduced in 1724 by Allan Ramsay in his Evergreen, which professed to be “a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600”; but it there appeared with corrections and some additional stanzas. In 1740 it had the honour of a new appearance in London, under anonymous editorship, and with the title “Hardyknute, a Fragment; being the first Canto of an Epick Poem: with general remarks and notes.” The anonymous editor, still treating it as a genuine old poem, of not later than the sixteenth century, praises it very highly. “There is a grandeur, a majesty of sentiment,” he says, “diffused through the whole: a true sublime, which nothing can surpass.” It was but natural that a piece of which this could be said should be included by Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, published in 1765. It appeared, accordingly, in the first edition of that famous book, still as an old poem and in antique spelling; and it was reprinted in the subsequent editions issued by Percy himself in 1767, 1775, and 1794, though then with some added explanations and queries.

It was through Percy’s collection that the poem first became generally known and popular. Even there, though in very rich company, it was singled out by competent critics for special admiration. But, indeed, good judges, who had known it in its earlier forms, had already made it a favourite. The poet Gray admired it much; and Thomas Warton spoke of it as “a noble poem,” and introduced an enthusiastic reference to it into one of his odes. Above all, it is celebrated now as having fired the boyish genius of Sir Walter Scott. “I was taught Hardyknute by heart before I could read the ballad myself,” he tells us, informing us further that the book out of which he was taught the ballad was Allan Ramsay’s Evergreen of 1724, and adding, “It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.” In another place he tells us more particularly that it was taught him out of the book by one of his aunts during that visit to his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire on which he had been sent when only in his third year for country air and exercise on account of his delicate health and lameness, and which he remembered always as the source of his earliest impressions and the time of his first consciousness of existence. He was accustomed to go about the farmhouse shouting out the verses of the ballad incessantly, so that the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the minister of the parish, in his calls for a sober chat with the elder inmates, would complain of the interruption and say, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.” Hardyknute, we may then say, was the first thing in literature that took hold of the soul and imagination of Scott; and who knows how far it may have helped to determine the cast and direction of his own genius through all the future? Afterwards, through his life in Edinburgh, Ashestiel, and Abbotsford, he was never tired of repeating snatches of the strong old thing he had learnt at Sandyknowe; and the very year before his death (1831) we find him, when abroad at Malta in the vain hope of recruiting his shattered frame, lamenting greatly, in a conversation about ballad-poetry, that he had not been able to persuade his friend Mr. John Hookham Frere to think so highly of the merits of Hardyknute as he did himself.

What is the piece of verse so celebrated? It must be familiar to many; but we may look at it again. We shall take it in its later or more complete form, as consisting of 42 stanzas or 336 lines; in which form, though it is still only a fragment, the conception or story is somewhat more complex, more filled out, than in the first published form of 1719. The fragment opens thus:—

“Stately stept he east the wa’,

And stately stept he west;

Full seventy years he now had seen,

With scarce seven years of rest.

He lived when Britons’ breach of faith

Wrocht Scotland mickle wae;

And aye his sword tauld, to their cost,

He was their deadly fae.

High on a hill his castle stood,

With halls and towers a-hicht,

And guidly chambers fair to see,

Whare he lodged mony a knicht.

His dame, sae peerless ance and fair,

For chaste and beauty deemed,

Nae marrow had in a’ the land,

Save Eleanour the Queen.

Full thirteen sons to him she bare,

All men of valour stout;

In bluidy fecht with sword in hand

Nine lost their lives bot doubt:

Four yet remain; lang may they live

To stand by liege and land!

High was their fame, high was their micht,

And high was their command.

Great love they bare to Fairly fair,

Their sister saft and dear:

Her girdle shawed her middle jimp,

And gowden glist her hair.

What waefu’ wae her beauty bred,

Waefu’ to young and auld;

Waefu’, I trow, to kith and kin,

As story ever tauld!”

Here we see the old hero Hardyknute in peace in the midst of his family, his fighting days supposed to be over, and his high castle on the hill, where he and his lady dwell, with their four surviving sons and their one daughter, Fairly Fair, one of the lordly boasts of a smiling country. But suddenly there is an invasion. The King of Norse, puffed up with power and might, lands in fair Scotland; and the King of Scotland, hearing the tidings as he sits with his chiefs, “drinking the blude-red wine,” sends out summonses in haste for all his warriors to join him. Hardyknute receives a special message.

“Then red, red grew his dark-brown cheeks;

Sae did his dark-brown brow;

His looks grew keen, as they were wont

In dangers great to do.”

Old as he is, he will set out at once, taking his three eldest sons with him, Robin, Thomas, and Malcolm, and telling his lady in his farewell to her:—

“My youngest son sall here remain

To guaird these stately towers,

And shoot the silver bolt that keeps

Sae fast your painted bowers.”

And so we take leave of the high castle on the hill, with the lady, her youngest son, and Fairly fair, in it, and follow the old lord and his other three sons over the moors and through the glens as they ride to the rendezvous. On their way they encounter a wounded knight, lying on the ground and making a heavy moan:—

“‘Here maun I lie, here maun I die,

By treachery’s false guiles;