Cassell's Old and New Edinburgh (Extract)

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CHAPTER XXVI.

THE NORTHERN NEW TOWN.

Picardy Place - Lords Eldin and Craig - Sir David Milne - John Abercrombie - Lord Newton - Commissioner Osborne - St. Paul's Church - St. George's Chapel - William Douglas, Artist - Professor Playfair - General Scott of Bellevue - Drummond Place - C.K. Sharpe of Hoddam - Lord Robertson - Abercrombie Place and Heriot Row - Miss Ferrier - House in which H. McKenzie died - Rev. A. Alison - Great King Street - Sir R. Christison - Sir William Hamilton - Sir William Allan - Lord Colonsay, &c.

The northern New Town, of which we now propose to relate the progress and history, is separated from the southern by the undulating and extensive range of Queen Street Gardens, which occupy a portion of the slope that shelves down towards the valley of the Water of Leith.

It is also in a parallelogram extending, from the quarter we have just been describing, westward to

the Queensferry Road, and northward to the line of Fettes Row. It has crescental curves in some of its main lines, with squares, and is constructed in a much grander style of architecture than the original New Town of 1767. Generally, it was begun about 1802, and nearly completed by 1822. In the eastern part of this parallelogram are Picardy Place, York Place, Forth and Albany Streets.

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It would appear that so early as 1730 the Governors of Heriot's Hospital, as superiors of the barony of Broughton, had sold five acres of land at the head of Broughton Loan to the city, for the behoof of refugees or their descendants who had come from France, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A colony of these emigrants, principally silk weavers, had been for some time attempting to cultivate mulberry trees on the slope of Moultree's Hill, but without success, owing to the variable nature of the climate.

The position of the houses forming the village of Picardie, as these poor people named it, after their native province, is distinctly shown in the map of 1787, occupying nearly the site of the north side of the present Picardy Place, which after the Scottish Board of Manufacturers acquired the ground, was built in 1809.

More than twenty years before that period the magistrates seem to have contemplated having a square here, as in 17S3 they advertised, "to be feued, the several acres, for building, lying on the west side of the new road to Leith, immediately adjoining to Picardy Gardens. The ground is laid out in the form of a square. The situation is remarkably pleasant.... According to the plan, the buildings will have plots of background for the purpose of gardens and offices; and the possessors of these will have the privilege of the area within the Square, etc. Further particulars may be had on applying to James Jollie, writer, the proprietor, Royal Bank Close, who will show the plan of the ground." (Edin. Advert., 1783.)

This plan would seem to have been abandoned, and a street, with York Place, in direct communication with Queen Street, substituted.

Among the earliest occupants of a house in Picardy Place was John Clerk, Lord Eldin, who took up his abode in No. 16, when an advocate at the bar. The grandson of Sir John Clerk of Penicuick, and son of John Clerk, author of a celebrated work on naval tactics, Lord Eldin was born in 1757, and in 1785 was called to the bar, and so great were his intellectual qualities - at a time when the Scottish bar was really distinguished for intellect - that, it is said, that at one period he had nearly half of all the court business in his hands; but his elevation to the bench did not occur until 1823, when he was well advanced in life.

In "Peter's Letters" he is described as the Coryphreus of the bar. "He is the plainest, the shrewdest, and the most sarcastic of men; his sceptre owes the whole of its power to its weight - nothing to glitter. It is impossible to imagine a

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physiognomy more expressive of the character of a great lawyer and barrister. The features are in themselves good, at least a painter would call them so, and the upper part of the profile has as fine lines as could be wished. But then, how the habits of the mind have stamped their traces on every part of the face! What sharpness, razor-like sharpness, has indented itself about the wrinkles of his eyelids; the eyes themselves, so quick, so grey, such bafflers of scrutiny, such exquisite scrutinisers, how they change in expression - it seems almost how they change their colour - shifting from contracted, concentrated blackness, through every shade of brown, blue, green, and hazel, back into their own gleaming grey again. How they glisten into a smile of disdain!... He seems to be affected with the most delightful and balmy feelings, by the contemplation of some soft-headed, prosing driveller, racking his poor brain, or bellowing his lungs out, all about something which he, the smiler, sees so thoroughly, so distinctly.''

Lord Eldin, on the bench as when at the bar, pertinaciously adhered to the old Doric Scottish of his boyhood, and in this there was no affectation; but it was the pure old dialect and idiom of the eighteenth century. He was a man of refined tastes, and a great connoisseur in pictures. He was a capital artist; and it is said, that had he given himself entirely to art, he would have been one of the greatest masters Scotland has ever produced. He was plain in appearance, and had a halt in his gait. Passing down the High Street one day, he once heard a girl say to her companion, "That is Johnnie Clerk, the lame lawyer." "No, madam," said he; " I may be a lame man, but not a lame lawyer."

He died a bachelor in his house in Picardy Place, where, old maid-like, he had contracted such an attachment to cats, that his domestic establishment could almost boast of at least half a dozen of them; and when consulted by a client he was generally to be found seated in his study with a favourite Tom elevated on his shoulder or purring about his ears.

His death occurred on the 30th May, 1832, after which his extensive collection of paintings, sketches, and rare prints was brought to sale in 16 Picardy Place, where, on the 16th of March, 1833, a very serious accident ensued.

The fame of his collection had attracted a great crowd of men and women of taste and letters, and when the auctioneer was in the act of disposing of a famous Teniers, which had been a special favourite of Lord Eldin, the floor of the drawing-room gave way. "The scene which was produced may be

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imagined, but can scarcely be described," says the Caledonian Mercury of the 18th March. "From eighty to a hundred persons, ladies as well as gentlemen, were precipitated in one mass into an apartment below, filled with china and articles of vertu. The cries and shrieks, intermingled with exclamations and ejaculations of distress, were heartrending; but what added to the unutterable agony of that awful moment, the density of the cloud of dust, impervious to the rays of light, produced total darkness, diffusing a choking atmosphere, which nearly stifled the terrified multitude, and in this state of suspense they remained several minutes." Among the mass of people who went down with the floor were Lord Moncrieff, Sir James Riddell of Ardnamurchan, and Sir Archibald Campbell of Succoth. Many persons were most severely injured, and Mr. Smith, banker, of Moray Place, on whom the hearth-stone fell, was killed.

York Place, the continuation of this thoroughfare to Queen Street, is nearly all unchanged since it was built, and is broad and stately, with spacious and lofty houses, which were inhabited by Sir Henry Raeburn, Francis Horner, Dr. John Abercrombie, Dr. John Coldstream, Alexander Geddes, A.R.A., and other distinguished men.

No. 10 was the abode of Lord Craig, the successor on the bench of Lord Hailes in 1792, and whose well-known attainments, and especially his connection with the Mirror and Lounger, gave his name an honourable place among local notorieties. He was the cousin-german of the celebrated Mrs. McLehose, the Clarinda of Robert Burns, and to her he bequeathed an annuity, at his death, which occurred in 1813. His house was afterwards occupied by the gallant Admiral Sir David Milne, who, when a lieutenant, took possession of the Pique frigate, after her surrender to the Blanche, in the West Indies; captured La Seine, in 1798, and La Vengeance, of 38 guns, in 1800, and who commanded the Impregnable, in the attack on Algiers, when he was Rear-Admiral, and had 150 of his crew killed and wounded, as Brenton records in his "Naval History." He died a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, and left a son, Sir Alexander Milne, also K.C.B., and Admiral, more than once commander of fleets, and who first went to sea with his father in the flag-ship Leander, in 1817. Sir David died on board of a Granton steamer, when returning home, in 1845, and was buried at Inveresk.

Doctor John Abercrombie, Physician to Her Majesty, lived in No. 19, and died there in 1844, aged 64. He was a distinguished consulting physician, and moral writer, born at Aberdeen, in

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1781; F.R.C.S. in 1823; and was author of "Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers," which has gone through many editions, "The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings," &c. His bust is in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Concerning his death, the following curious story has found its way into print. A Mrs. M., a native of the West Indies, was at Blair Logie at the time of the demise of Dr. Abercrombie, with whom she had been very intimate. He died suddenly, without any previous indisposition, just as he was about to enter his carriage in York Place, at eleven o'clock on a Thursday morning. On the night between Thursday and Friday Mrs. M. dreamt that she saw the whole family of Dr. Abercrombie dressed entirely in white, dancing a solemn funeral dance, upon which she awoke, wondering that she should have dreamt anything so absurd, as it was contrary to their custom to dance on any occasion. Immediately afterwards her maid came to tell her that she had seen Dr. Abercrombie reclining against a wall "with his jaw fallen, and a livid countenance, mournfully shaking his head as he looked at her." She passed the day in great uneasiness, and wrote to inquire for the Doctor, relating what had happened, and expressing her conviction that he was dead, and her letter was seen by several persons in Edinburgh on the day of its arrival.

No. 22 was the house of Lord Newton, known as the wearer of "Covington's gown," in memory of the patriotism and humanity displayed by the latter in defending the Jacobite prisoners on their trial at Carlisle in 1747. His judicial talents and social eccentricities formed the subject of many anecdotes. He participated largely in the bacchanalian propensities so prevalent among the legal men of his time, and was frequently known to put "three lang craigs" (i.e. long-necked bottles of claret) "under his belt" after dinner, and thereafter dictate to his clerk a paper of more than sixty pages. The MS. would then be sent to press, and the proofs be corrected next morning at the bar of the Inner House.

He would often spend the whole night in convivial indulgence at the Crochallan Club, perhaps be driven home to York Place about seven in the morning, sleep for two hours, and be seated on the bench at the usual hour. The French traveller Simond relates his surprise "on stepping one morning into the Parliament House to find in the dignified capacity and exhibiting all the dignified bearing of a judge, the very gentleman with whom he had just spent a night of debauch and parted from only one hour before, when both were excessively intoxicated."

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His lordship was so fond of card-playing that he was wont to say, laughingly, "Cards are my profession - the law my amusement." He died at Powrie, in Forfarshire, on the 19th of October, 1811.

In 1795 Sir Henry Raeburn built the large house No. 32, the upper part of which had been lighted from the roof and fitted up as a gallery for exhibiting pictures, while the lower was divided into convenient painting rooms, but his residence was then at Stockbridge.

Mr. Alexander Osborne, a commissioner of the Board of Customs, resided in No. 40 for many years, and died there. He was of great stature, and was the right-hand man of the Grenadiers of the First Regiment of Royal Edinburgh Volunteers, proverbially a battalion of tall men, and his personal appearance was long familiar in the streets of the city. In bulk he was remarkable as well as in stature, his legs in particular being nearly as large in circumference as the body of an ordinary person. The editor of Kay mentions that shortly after the volunteers had been embodied, Lord Melville presented his gigantic countryman to George III., who on witnessing such a herculean specimen of his loyal defenders in Scotland, was somewhat excited and curious. "Are all the Edinburgh volunteers like you?" he asked. Osborne mistaking the jocular construction of the question, and supposing it referred to their status in society, replied, "They are so, please your Majesty." "Astonishing!'' exclaimed the King, lifting up his hands in wonder.

In his youth he is said to have had a prodigious appetite, being able to consume nine pounds of steak at a meal. His father, who died at Aberdeen, comptroller of the Customs in 1785, is said to have been a man of even more colossal proportions.

Mr. Osborne lived long in Richmond Street prior to removing to York Place, where he died in his 74th year.

During the early years of this century Lady Sinclair of Murkle occupied No. 61, and at the same time No. 47 was the residence of Alexander Nasmyth, landscape painter, father of Peter, who won himself the name of "the English Hobbima," and who, in fact, was the father of the Scottish school of landscape painting. In his youth, the pupil of Allan Ramsay, and afterwards of the best artists in Rome and England, he returned to his native city, Edinburgh, where he had been born in 1758; and to his friendship with Burns the world is indebted for the only authentic portrait which exists of our national poet. His compositions were chaste and

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elegant, and his industry unceasing; thus he numbered among his early employers the chief of the Scottish noblesse. Most of the living landscape painters of Scotland, and many of the dead ones, have sprung from the school of Nasmyth, who, in his extreme age, became an honorary member of the then new Scottish Academy.

The firmness of his intellect, and the freshness of his fancy continued uninterrupted to the end of his labours; his last work was the touching little picture called "Going Home;" and he died soon after at Edinburgh in the eighty-third year of his age, in 1840. He married a daughter of Sir James Foulis, Bart., of Colinton and that ilk, by whom he had a large family, all more or less inheriting the genius of their father, particularly his son Peter, who pre-deceased him at London in 1831, aged forty-five years.

On the north side of York Place is St. Paul's Episcopal church, built in that style of Gothic which prevailed in the time of Henry VI. of England, and of which the best specimen may be seen in King's College, Cambridge. The building consists of a nave with four octagon towers at the angles, with north and south aisles. The pulpit is at the east end, and immediately before the communion-table. The organ is at the west end, and above the main entrance, which faces York Lane - a remnant of Broughton Loan. In the north west angle of the edifice is the vestry. The length of the church is about 123 feet by 73 feet, external measurement. The nave is 109 feet 9 inches in length by 26 feet broad, and 46 feet in height; and the aisles are 79 feet long by 29 feet in height. The ceiling of the nave is a flat Gothic arch, covered with ornamental tracery, as are also the ceilings of the aisles. The great eastern window is beautifully filled in with stained glass by Egginton of Birmingham. This handsome church - in its time the best example of Gothic erected in Edinburgh since the Reformation - was built from a design by Archibald Elliot, and does considerable credit to the taste and genius of that eminent architect. It was begun in February, 1816, and finished in June, 1818, for the use of the congregation which had previously occupied the great church in the Cowgate, and who contributed £12,000 for its erection. The well-known Archibald Alison, author of "Essays on Taste," and father of the historian of Europe, long officiated here. He was the son of a magistrate of the city of Edinburgh, where he was born in 1757, but graduated at Oxford; and on the invitation of Sir Wiliiam Forbes and others, in 1800, became senior incumbent of the Cowgate chapel. After the removal of the congregation to

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[MAP of the new town 1804]

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York Place he officiated there, until a severe illness in 1831 compelled him to relinquish all public duties. In "Peter's Letters" we are told that he possessed all the qualifications of a popular orator.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the first year of its formation, and was the intimate friend of many of its most distinguished members, as he was of most of the men of genius and learning of his time in Scotland. His "Essays on Taste" appeared first in 1790, since when it has passed through several editions, and has been translated into French. His theory of taste has met the approval of men of the highest genius in poetry, criticism, and art. He died, universally respected, on the 17th of May, 1839.

St. George's Episcopal chapel, built in 1794, stands on the south side of York Place. It was designed by Robert Adam, and is of no known style of architecture, and is every way hideous in conception and in detail. This dingy edifice cost £3,000.

North of the two streets we have described, and erected coeval with them, are Forth and Albany Streets.

In No. 10 of the former street lived for years, and died on the 27th of August, 1837, in his seventy-first year, George Watson, first president and founder of the Royal Scottish Academy, of whom an account has already been given in connection with that institution, as one of the most eminent artists of his time. In the same house also lived and died his third son, Smellie George Watson, R.S.A., a distinguished portrait painter, named from the family of his mother, who was Rebecca, eldest daughter of William Smellie, the learned and ingenious painter and natural philosopher.

In the little and obscure thoroughfare named Hart Street lived long one who enjoyed considerable reputation in his day, though well-nigh forgotten now: William Douglas, an eminent miniature painter, and the lineal descendant of the ancient line of Glenbervie. "He received a useful education," says his biographer, "and was well acquainted with the dead and living languages. From his infancy he displayed a taste for the fine arts. While yet a mere child he would leave his playfellows to their sports, to watch the effects of light and shade, and, creeping along the furrows of the fields, study the perspective of the ridges. This enabled him to excel as a landscape painter, and gave great beauty to his miniatures.''

As a miniature painter he was liberally patronised by the upper ranks in Scotland and England, and his works are to be found in some of the finest

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collections of both countries. In particular he was employed by the family of Buccleuch, and in 1817 was appointed Miniature Painter for Scotland to the Princess Charlotte, and Prince Leopold afterwards King of the Belgians.

Prior to his removal to Hart Street he lived in No. 17 St. James's Square, a common stair. He possessed genius, fancy, taste, and delicacy, with a true enthusiasm for his art; and his social worth and private virtues were acknowledged by all who had the pleasure of knowing him. He had a vast fund of anecdote, and in his domestic relations was an affectionate husband, good father, and faithful friend. His constant engagements precluded his contributing to the exhibitions in Edinburgh, but his works frequently graced the walls of the Royal Academy at Somerset House. In a note attached to David Malloch's "Immortality of the Soul," he says:- "The author would take this opportunity of stating that if he has been at all successful in depicting any of the bolder features of Nature, this he in a great measure owes to the conversation of his respected friend, William Douglas, Esq., Edinburgh, who was no less a true poet than an eminent artist."

He died at his house in Hart Street on the 20th of January, 1832, leaving a daughter. Miss Ramsay Douglas, also an artist, and the inheritor of his peculiar grace and delicacy of touch.

York Place being called from the king's second son by his English title, Albany Street, by a natural sequence, was named from the title of the second son of the king of Scotland. Albany Row it was called in the feuing advertisements in 1800, and for some twenty years after. In No. 2, which is now broken up and subdivided, lived John Playfair, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University, a man of whom it has been said that he was cast in nature's happiest mould, acute, clear, comprehensive, and having all the higher qualities of intellect combined and regulated by the most perfect good taste, being not less perfect in his moral than in his intellectual nature. He was a man every way distinguished, respected, and beloved.

When only eighteen years old he became a candidate in 1766 for the chair of mathematics in the Marischal College, Aberdeen, where, after a lengthened and very strict examination, only two out of six rival competitors were judged to have excelled him - these were, Dr. Traill, who was appointed to the chair, and Dr. Hamilton, who subsequently succeeded to it. He was the son of the Rev. James Playfair, minister of Liff and Benvie, and upon the representation of Lord

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Gray was ordained his successor to that charge in 1773, but he resigned it ten years afterwards. In 1785 he was appointed joint Professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh with the celebrated Adam Ferguson, LL.D., and discharged the duties of that chair till the death of his friend Professor Robinson, in 1805, when he was appointed his successor. Among his works are " Elements of Geometry" published in 1796; "Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth'' in 1804; "Outlines of Natural Philosophy;" besides many papers to the scientific department of the Edinburgh Review and to various other periodicals.

He died at No. 2, Albany Street, in his seventieth year, on the 20th of July, 1819. An unfinished "Memoir of John Clerk of Eldin," the inventor of naval tactics, left by him in manuscript, was published after his death in the ninth volume of the "Edinburgh Transactions." An interesting account of the character and merits of this illustrious mathematician, from the pen of Lord Jeffrey, was inserted in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" and in the memoir prefixed to his works by his nephew, and a noble monument to his memory is erected on the Calton Hill.

Northwards of the old village of Broughton, in the beginning of the present century, the land was partly covered with trees; a road led from it to Canonmills by Bellevue to Newhaven, while another road, by the water of Leith, led westward. In the centre of what are now the Drummond Place Gardens stood a country house belonging to the Lord Provost Drummond, and long inhabited by him; he feued seven acres from the Governors of Heriot's Hospital. The approach to this house was by an avenue, now covered by West London Street, and which entered from the north road to Canonmills.

On the site of that house General Scott of Balcomie subsequently built the large square three-storeyed mansion of Bellevue, afterwards converted into the Excise Office, and removed when the Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee Railway Company constructed the now disused tunnel from Princes Street to the foot of Scotland Street.

In 1802 the lands of Bellevue were advertised to be sold "by roup within the Justiciary Court Room," for feuing purposes, but years elapsed before anything was done in the way of building. In 1823 the papers announce that "preparations are making for levelling Bellevue Gardens and filling up the sand-pits in that neighbourhood, with a view to finishing Bellevue Crescent, which will connect the New Town with

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Canonmills on one side, as it is already connected with Stockbridge on the other.''

By that year Drummond Place was nearly completed, and the south half of Bellevue Crescent was finished and occupied; St. Mary's parish church was founded and finished in 1824, from designs by Mr. Thomas Brown, at the cost of £13,000 for 1,800 hearers. It has a spire of considerable elegance, 168 feet in height.

General Scott, the proprietor of Bellevue, was one of the most noted gamblers of his time. It is related of him that being one night at Stapleton's, when a messenger brought him tidings that Mrs. Scott had been delivered of a daughter, he turned laughingly to the company, and said, "You see, gentlemen, I must be under the necessity of doubling my stakes, in order to make a fortune for this little girl." He accordingly played rather deeper than usual, in consequence of which, after a few hours' play, he found himself a loser by £8,000. This gave occasion for some of the company to rally him on his "daughter's fortune," but the general had an equanimity of temper that nothing could ruffle, and a judgment in play superior to most gamesters. He replied that he had still a perfect dependence on the luck of the night, and to make his words good he played steadily on, and about seven in the morning, besides clearing his £8,000, he brought home £15,000. His eldest daughter, Henrietta, became Duchess of Portland.

Drummond Place was named after the eminent George Drummond, son of the Laird of Newton, a branch of the Perth family, who was no less than six times Lord Provost of the city, and who died in 1776, in the eightieth year of his age.

The two most remarkable denizens of this quarter were Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe of Hoddam (previously of 93, Princes Street) and Lord Robertson.

Among the attractions of Edinburgh during the bygone half of the present century, and accessible only to a privileged few, were the residence and society of the former gentleman. Born of an ancient Scottish family, and connected in many ways with the historical associations of his country, by his reputation as a literary man no less than by his high Cavalier and Jacobite tenets, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe was long looked up to as one of the chief authorities on all questions connected with Scottish antiquities.

No. 93, Princes Street, the house of Mrs. Sharpe of Hoddam, was the home of her son till the time of her death, and there he was visited by Scott, Thomas Thomson, and those of the next generation,

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such as David Laing, Robert Chambers, and Cosmo Innes. In his "Diary" Scott writes of him as "a very remarkable man. He has infinite wit and a great turn for antiquarian lore. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll imaginable - a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign masters who painted 'Temptations of St. Anthony' and such grotesque subjects. My idea is that Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace WaIpole."

The resemblance in their abodes was more strictly true. The house of Sharpe, No. 28 Drummond Place, was one of the sights of Edinburgh to the select few who found admittance there, with its antique furniture, tapestries, paintings, and carvings - its exquisite enamels, weapons, armour, bronzes, bijouterie, ivories, old china, old books, and cabinets - the mighty collection of a long life, and the sale of which, at his death, occupied six long days at the auction rooms in South Hanover Street.

Robert Chambers describes a visit he paid him in Princes Street. "His servant conducted me to the first floor, and showed me into what is called amongst us the back drawing-room, which I found carpeted with green cloth and full of old family

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portraits, some on the walls, but many more on the floor. A small room leading out of this one was the place where Mr. Sharpe gave audiences. Its diminutive space was stuffed full of old curiosities, cases with family bijouterie, &c. One petty object was strongly indicative of character, a calling card of Lady Charlotte Campbell, the once adored beauty, stuck into the frame of a picture. He must have kept it, at that time, about thirty years."

This lady, one of the celebrated Edinburgh beauties, was the second daughter of John, Duke of Argyle, who died in 1806, and the visit referred to took place about 1824.

To Mr. Sharpe Sir Walter owed many of the most graphic incidents which gave such inimitable life to the productions of his pen; and a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine justly remarked that "his collection of antiquities is among the richest which any private gentleman has ever accumulated in the north. In Scottish literature he will be always remembered as the editor of 'Law's Memorials' and of 'Kirkton's History of the Kirk of Scotland.' His taste in music was no less cultivated than peculiar, and the curious variety of singular and obsolete musical instruments which enriched his collection, showed how well the

[PHOTO - THE E.XCISE OFFICE, UKL'MMOND PLACE. I^Froin a Drainins ly Shepherd, /•ublislud iniZzg.) ]

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[194 Insert 2 - GEORGE ST]

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antiquarian taste consorted with the musical skill and critical sagacity of the editor of the 'Minuets and Songs, by Thomas, sixth Earl of Kellie.'"

At his death, in 1851, a desire was felt by many of his friends that his collection of antiquities should, like that of his friend Scott, be preserved as a memorial of him, but from circumstances over which his family had no control this was found to be impossible, so the vast assemblage of rare and curious objects which crowded every room in No. 28 was dispersed. The very catalogue of them, filling upwards of fifty pages, was in some of its features strongly indicative of the character of the man.

Among them we find - "A small box made from a leg of the table at which King James VIII. sat on his first landing here;" "fragment of Queen Mary's bed-curtains;" "hair of that true saint and martyr Charles I., taken from his coffin at Windsor, and given to me by the Hon. Peter Drummond Burrel at Edinburgh, December, 1813;" "piece of the shroud of King Robert the Bruce;" "piece of a plaid worn by Prince Charles in Scotland;" " silk sash worn by the prince;" "pair of gloves belonging to Mary Queen of Scots;" "cap worn by her when escaping from Lochleven;" &c. He had a vast collection of coins, some of which were said to be discovered in consequence of a dream. "The child of a Mr. Christison, in whose house his father was lodging in 1781, dreamt that a treasure was hid in the cellar. Her father had no faith in the dream, but Mr. Sharpe had the place dug up, and a copper pot full of coins was found."

One of the chief features of his drawing-room in Drummond Place was a quaint monstrosity in bronze, now preserved in the British Museum. It was a ewer fashioned in the shape of a tailless lion, surmounted by an indescribable animal, half hound and half fish, found in a vault of his paternal castle of Hoddam, in Dumfries-shire. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe was laid amid his forefathers in the family burial-place in Annandale. "May the earth lie light on him," writes one of his friends, "and no plebeian dust invade the last resting-place of a thorough gentleman of the antique type, now wholly gone with other good things of the olden time!"

Patrick Robertson, known as Lord Robertson by his judicial title, was long locally famous as "Peter," one of the most brilliant wits and humorists about Parliament House, and a great friend of "Christopher North." They were called to the bar in the same year, 1815. Robertson was born in 1793. In 1842 he was Dean of Faculty, and

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was raised to the bench in the following year. He was famous for his mock heroic speeches on "the general question," and his face, full of grotesque humour, and his rotund figure, of Johnson-like amplitude and cut, were long familiar to all habitués of the law courts. Of his speeches Lockhart gives a description in his account of a Burns dinner in 1818: - "The last of these presidents (Mr. Patrick Robertson), a young counsellor of very rising reputation and most pleasant manner, made his approach to the chair amid such a thunder of acclamation as seems to issue from the cheeks of the Bacchantes when Silenus gets astride his ass, in the famous picture of Rubens. Once in the chair, there was no fear of his quitting it while any remained to pay homage to his autiiority. He made speeches, one chief merit of which consisted (unlike epic poems) in their having neither beginning, middle, nor end. He sang songs in which music was not. He proposed toasts in which meaning was not. But over everything that he said there was flung such a radiance of sheer mother wit, that there was no difficulty in seeing that the want of meaning was no involuntary want. By the perpetual dazzle of his wit, by the cordial flow of his good-humour, but, above all, by the cheering influence of his broad, happy face, seen through its halo of purest steam (for even the chair had by this time got enough of the juice of the grape), he contrived to diffuse over us all, for a long time, one genial atmosphere of unmingled mirth."

The wit and humour of Robertson were proverbial, and hundreds of anecdotes used to be current of his peculiar and invincible power of closing all controversy, by the broadest form of reductio ad absurdum. At a dinner party a learned and pedantic Oxonian was becoming very tiresome with his Greek erudition, which he insisted on pouring forth on a variety of topics more or less recondite. At length, at a stage of the discussion on some historical point, Lord Robertson turned round, and, fixing his large grey eyes upon the Englishman, said, with a solemn and judicial air, "I rather think, sir, Dionysius of Halicarnassus is against you there." " I beg your pardon," said the other, quickly; "Dionysius did not flourish for ninety years after that period!" "Oh!" rejoined Robertson, with an expression of face that must be imagined, "I made a mistake - I meant Thaddeus of Warsaw." After that the discussion flowed no longer in the Greek channel."

He was author of a large quarto volume of singularly

* Wilson'.s "Memoirs," vol iii.

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weak poems, which were noticed by Lockhart in the Quarterly Review; and to the paper he appended in one copy, which was sent to the senator, the following distich, by way of epitaph: -

"Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, \Vho broke the laws of God and man and metre."'

The joke chiefly lay in Robertson being led to suppose that the lines were in the entire edition, much to his annoyance and indignation; but Lockhart penned elsewhere the following good wishes concerning him: -

"Oh! Petrus, Pedro, Peter, which you will, Long, long thy radiant destiny fulfil. Bright be thy wit, and bright the golden ore Paid down in fees for thy deep legal lore; Bright be that claret, brisk be thy champagne. Thy whisky-punch, a vast exhaustless main. With thee disporting on its joyous shore, Of that glad spirit quaffing ever more; Keen be thy stomach, potent thy digestion. And long thy lectures on 'the general question;' While young and old swell out the general strain, We ne'er shall look upon his like again.''

Lockhart wrote many rhyming epitaphs upon him, and is reported to have written, "Peter Robertson is 'a man,' to use his own favourite quotation, 'cast in Nature's amplest mould.' He is admitted to be the greatest corporation lawyer at the Scotch bar, and he is a vast poet as well as a great lawyer."

Lord Robertson, who lived in No. 32 Drummond Place, died in 1855, in his sixty-second year.

No. 38 was for years the abode of Adam Black, more than once referred to elsewhere as publisher, M.P., and Lord Provost of the city, who died on the 24th January, 1874.

Forming a species of terrace facing the Queen Street Gardens from the north, are Abercrombie Place and Heriot Row - the first named from the hero of the Egyptian campaign, and the latter from the founder of the famous hospital on ground belonging to which it is erected. The western portion of the Row, after it was built, was long disfigured by the obstinacy of Lord Wemyss, who declined to remove a high stone wall which enclosed on the north and east the garden that lay before his house in Queen Street.

Sir John Connel, Advocate and Procurator for the Church, author of a "Treatise on Parochial Law and Tithes," and who figures among Kay's Portraits as one of the "Twelve Advocates," James Pillans, LL.D., Professor of Humanity in the University 1820-63, and Sir James Riddel, Bart., of Ardnamurchan and Sunart, lived respectively

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[*** checked up to here by reading ***]

in Nos. 16, 22, and 30, Abercrombie Place; while on the west side of Nelson Street, which opens off it to the north, resided, after 1829, Miss Susan Edmondston Ferrier, authoress of " Mar- riage," " Inheritance," and " Destiny," one who may with truth be called the last of the literary galaxy which adorned Edinburgh when Scott wrote, Jeffrey criticised, and the wit of Wilson flowed into the Abodes. She was the friend and confidant of Scott. She survived him more than twenty years, as she died in 1854.

In the house numbered as 6 Heriot Row, Henrj' Mackenzie, the author of the " Man of Feeling," spent the last years of his long life, sur- viving all the intimates of his youth, including Robertson, Hume, Fergusson, and Adam Smith ; and there he died on the 14th of January, in the year 1831, after having been confined to his room for a considerable period by the general decay attending old age. He was then in his eighty- sixth year.

No. 44 in the same Row is remarkable as having been for some years the residence of the Rev. Archibald Alison, to whom we have already referred ; in the same house with him lived his sons. Professor Alison, and Archibald the future historian of Europe and first baronet of the name. The latter was born in the year 1792, at the parsonage house of Kenley, in Shropshire. The Rev. Archibald Alison (who was a cadet of the Alisons, of New Hall, in Angus) before becoming incum- bent of the Cowgate Chapel, in 1800, had been a prebendary of Sarum, rector of Roddington, and vicar of High Ercal ; and his wife was Dorothea Gregory, grand-daughter of the fourteenth Lord Forbes of that ilk, a lady whose family for two centuries has been eminent in mathematics and the exact sciences.

His sermons were published by Constable in 1817, twenty-seven years subsequent to his work on " Taste," and, according to the Literary Afagazine for that year and other critical periodi- cals, since the first publication of Blair's discourses there were no sermons so popular in Scotland as those of Mr. Alison. He enforced virtue and piet}' upon the sanction of the Gospels, without entering into those peculiar grounds and conditions of salvation which constitute the sectarian theories of religion, regarding his hearers or readers as having already arrived at that state of knowledge and understanding when, " having the principles of the doctrine of Christ, they should go on unto- perfection."

Great King Street, a broad and stately thorougl> fare that extends from Drummond Place to the

[195a]

Royal Circus, was built in 1820, and in the fol- lowing year it was proposed to erect at the west end of it an equestrian statue to the memory of (leorge III., for which subscription lists had been opened, but the project was never carried out.

In Great King Street have resided, respuctivel)^ in Nos. 3, 16, and 72, three men who are of mark and fame - Sir Robert Christison, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir William Allan.

When the future baronet occupied No. 3, he •was Doctor Christison, and Professor of medical jurisprudence. Born in June, 1797, and son of the l.Ue Alexander Christison, Professor of Humanity in the University of Edinburgh, he became a student there in 181 1, and passed with brilliance through ihe literary and medical curriculum, and after graduating in 181 9, he proceeded to London and Paris, where, under the celebrate'] M. Orfila, he applied himself to the study of toxicology, the department of medical science in which he became so deservedly famous.

Soon after his return home to Scotland he com- menced practice in his native capital, and in 1822 was appointed Professor of Medical Jurisprudence ill tlie University, and was promoted in 1832 to the chair of materia medica. He contributed various articles to medical journals on professional •subjects, and wrote several books, among others an exhaustive " Treatise on Poisons," still recog- nised as a standard work on that subject, and of more than European reputation.

.•\t the famous trial of Palmer, in 1S56, Dr. I'hristison went to London, and gave such valuable •evidence that Lord Campbell complimented him on the occasion, and the ability he disfjlayed was imiversally recognised and applauded. He was twice President of the Royal College of Physicians, l'"-dinburgh - the first time being in 1846 - and was appointed Ordinary Physician to the Queen for Scotland. He received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford in 1866, was created a baronet in 1871, and was made I.L.ll of Edinburgh University in 1872. He resigned liis chair in 1S77, and died in 1S82.

In No. 16 lived and died Sir William Hamilton, Bart., of Preston and Fingalton, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgli from 1836 to 1856, and Fellow of the Scottisli Society of Antiquaries. He liad previously resided in Manor Place. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1815, at the same time with Duncan McNeill, the future Sir Archibald .-Mison, John Wilson, and others, and in 1S16 assumed the baronetcy as iTenty-fourth male representative of Sir John Fitz- Cilbert de Hamilton, who was the second son of iiir Gilbert, who came into Scotland in the time of

[195b]

Alexander III., and from whom the whole family of Hamilton are descended. The baronetcy is in remainder to heirs male general, but was not as- sumed from the death of the second baronet in 1701 till 1806. It was a creation of 1673. With his brother Thomas he became one of the earliest contributors to the columns of Bhickicood's Magcizbu:

Besides " Cyril Thornton," one of the best mili- tary novels in the language, Thomas Hamilton was author of " Annals of the Peninsular Cam- paign " and of " Men and Manners in America." ^ In"Peter's Letters" heis describedas "afine-looking young officer, whom the peace has left at liberty to anmse himself in a more pleasant way than he was accustomed to, so long as Lord Wellington kept the field. He has a noble, grand, Spaniard- looking head, and a tall graceful person, which he swings about in a style of knowingness that might pass muster even in the eye of old Potts. The expression of his features is so very sombre that I should never have guessed him to be a pki)ful writer (indeed, how could I have guessed such a person to be a writer at all ?). Yet such is the case. Unless I am totally misinformed, he is tire author of a thousand beautiful jciix d'esprii both in prose and verse, which I shall point out to you more particularly when we meet." He had served in the 29th Regiment of Foot during the long war with France, and died in liis fifty- third year, in 1842.

In April, 1820, when the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh fell vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas ISrowne, the successor of Dugald Stewart, Sir AVilliam Hamil- ton became a candidate together with John Wilson. Others were mentioned as possible com- petitors, among them Sir James Macintosh and Mr. Malthus, but it soon became apparent that the struggle - one which had few parallels even in the past history of that University- lay between the two first-named. " Sir William was a Whig ; Wilson was a Tory of the most unpardonable description," says Mrs. Gordon in her ''Memoir," and the Whig side was strenuously supported in the columns of the Scotsman- '' ax^A privately,"* she adds, " in every circle where the name of Bhick- wood was a name of abomination and of fear." But eventually, in the year of Dr. Browne's death, Wilson was appointed to the vacant chair, and among the first to come to hear, and apjilaud to the echo, his eariiest lectures, was Sir \VilHam Hamilton.

In 1.S29 the latter married his cousin, Miss Marshall, daugluer of Mr. Hubert .Marshall, and

[196a]

in July, 1836, was appointed to the chair of logic ami nietaj)hysics, in succession to Professor David Ritchie. In the interval between his appointment and the commencement of the college session, in the November of the same year, he was as- siduously occupied in preparing to discharge the duties of the chair, which (according to the practice of the University) consist in the delivery of a course of lectures on the subjects assigned to it.

On his appointment at first. Sir William Hamilton would seem to have experienced considerable difficulty in deciding on the character of the course of lectures on Philosophy, which, while doing justice to the subject, would at the same time meet the requirements of his auditors, usually comparatively young students in the second year of their University curriculum. His first course of lectures fell to be written during the currency of the session 1836-7. He was in the habit of delivering three in each week ; and each lecture was usually written on the day, or more probably on the evening and night, before its delivery. His " Course of Metaphysics" was the result of this nightly toil.

His lectures on Logic were not composed until the following session, 1837-8. A commonplace book which he left among his papers, exhibits in a very remarkable degree Sir William's power of appreciating and making use of every available hint scattered through the obscurer regions of thought, through which his extensive reading conducted him, says the editor of his collected worKs, and no part of his writings more completely verifies the remark of his American critic, Mr. Tyler : - " There seems to be not even a random thought of any value which has been dropped along any, even obscure, 'path of mental activity, in any age or country, that his diligence has not recovered, his sagacity appreciated, and his judgment husbanded in the stores of his know- ledge."

The lectures of Sir William Hamilton, apart from their very great intrinsic merit, possess a high academical and historic interest. From 1S36 to ICS56 - twenty consecutive years- his courses of Logic and Metaphysics were the means by which this great, good, and amiable man sought to imbue with his philosophical opinions the young men who assembled in considerable numbers from his native country, from England, and elsewhere ; " and while by these prelections," says his editor in 1870, "the author supplemented, developed, and moulded the National Philosophy - leaving thereon the ineffaceable impress of his genius and learning

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- he at the same time and by the same means exercised over the intellects and feelings of his pupils an influence which for depth, intensity, and elevation, was certainly never surpassed by that of any philosophical instructor. Among his pupils are not a few who, having lived for a season under the constraining power of his intellect, and been led to reflect on those great questions regarding the character, origin, and bounds of human knowledge which his teaching stirred and quickened, bear the memory of their beloved and revered instructor inseparably blended with what is highest in their present intellectual life, as well as in their practical aims and aspirations."

At the time of his death, in 1856, he resided, as has been stated, in No. i6 Great King Street, and he was succeeded by his eldest son, William, an officer of the Royal Artillery. Since his death a memoir of him has appeared from the pen of Professor Veitch, of the University of Glasgow.

In No. 72 of the same street lived and died another great Scotsman, Sir William Allan, R.A., whose fame and reputation as an artist extended over many years, and whose works are still his monument. We have already referred to his latter years in our account of the Royal Academy and the atelier of his earlier days in the Parliament Close, where, after his wanderings in foreign lands, and in the first years of the century, he was wont to figure " by way of robe-dc-chamhre, in a dark Circassian vest, the breast of which was loaded with innumerable quilted lurking-places, originally, no doubt, intended for weapons of warfare, but now occupied with the harmless shafts of hair pencils, vvhile he held in his hand the smooth cherr)'-wood stalk of a Turkish tobacco-pipe, apparently converted very happily into a palette guard. A swarthy complexion and profusion of black hair, tufted in a wild but not ungraceful manner, together with a pair of large sparkling eyes looking out from under strong shaggy brows full of vivacious and ardent expressiveness, were scarcely less speaking witnesses of the life of romantic and roaming adventure I was told this fine artist had led.'" In spite of his bad health, which (to quote "Peter's Letters") " was indeed but too evident, his manners seemed to be full of a light and playful sportiveness, which is by no means common among the people of our nation, and still less among the people of Scotland ; and this again was every now and then exchanged for a depth of enthusiastic earnestness still more evidently derived from a sojourn among men wliose blood flows through their veins with a heat and rapidity to which the North is a stranger."

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His pictures, the " Sale of Circassian Captives to a Turkish Bashaw," purchased by the Earl of Wemyss and March, and the " Jewish Family in Poland making merry before a Wedding," were among the first of his works that laid the founda- tion of his future fame. His " Murder of Arch- bishop Sharp," and other works are too well-known to be referred to here ; but the " Battle of Bannockburn," the unfinished work of his old

able lawyer and brilliant pleader. After being junior counsel for the Crown, he was Sherift' of Perth for ten years after 1824, and twice Solicitor- General for Scotland before 1842. From 1842 to 1846 he was Lord Advocate. He was chosen Dean of Faculty in November, 1843, and annually thereafter, till raised to the bench as a Lord of Session and Justiciary in 185 1, by the terri- torial title of Lord Colonsay. In the following

THE RIGHT HON. CHARLES HOI'H, COMMANDING THE EDINBURGH VOLUNTEERS. (.-)/?«- A'

age, has never been engraved, nor is it likely to be so. F'ull of years and honour, he died on the 23rd of February, 1850, aged sixty-nine, attended and soothed to the last by the tenderness and affection of an orphan niece.

The house opposite, No. 73, was for some fifty years the residence of Duncan McNeill, advocate, and latterly a peer under the title of Baron Colonsay. The son of John McNeill of Colonsay (one of the Hebrides, at the extremity of Islay), by the eldest daughter of Duncan McNeill of Dunmore, Argylesliire, he was born in the bleak and lonely isle of Colonsay in 1793, and after being educated at the Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, he was called to the Scottish Bar in 1816, and very soon distinguished himself as a sound and

year he was appointed Lord Justice-General and President of the Court, and was created a peer of Britain on retiring in 1867. He was a Deputy- Lieutenant of Edinburgh in 1854, and ofArgyle- shire in 1848, and was a member of the Lower House from 1843 to 185 1. He died in February, 1874, when the title became extinct.

In the same street, in Nos. 24 and 25 respec- tively, lived two other legal men of local note : Lord Kinloch, a senator, whose name was William Penny, called to the bar in 1824 and to the bench in 1858 ; and W. B. D. D. Turn- bull, advocate, and latterly of Lincoln's Inn, barrister-at-law. He was called to the Bar in 1832, together with Henry Glassford Bell and Thomas Mackenzie, afterwards Solicitor General

198

OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH.

[Northuniber!and Street.

A noted antiquary, he was Correspondant du Comite Imperial des Travaiix Histori/iies, et dcs Sodi'tes Siiraiifs de France, e^r. He was well known in Edinburgh for his somewhat coarse wit, .and as a collector of rare books, whose library in Great King Street was reported to be the most \aluable private one in the city, where he was called - but more especially among legal men - "Alphabet Turnbull," from the number of his

initials. He removed to London about 1853, and became seriously embroiled with the authorities concerning certain historical documents in the .State Paper Office, when he had his chambers in 3 Stone Buildings, Lincoln's Inn Fields.

He died at London on the 22nd of April, 1863, in his fifty-second year ; and a story went abroad that a box of MS. papers was mjsteriously buried with him.

CHAPTER XXVIL NORTHERN NEW TOWN (combuUd) .

Admiral Fairfax - Bishop Terrot - Brigadier Hope- Sir T. M. Urisbane - Lord Meadowbank- Ewbank the R.S.A, - Death of Professor Wilson - Moray Place and iis District - Lord President Hope - The Last Abode of Jeffrey - Baron Hume and Lord Moncrieff- Forres Street - Thomas Chalmers, D.D. - St. Colme Street- Captain Basil Hall - -Vinslie Place - Dugald Stewart - Dean Ramsay- Great Stuart Street - Professor .\ytoun - Miss Graham of Dunlroon - Lord Jer\'bwoode.

Ix the narrow and somewhat sombre thoroughfare named Northumberland Street have dwelt some people who were of note in their time.

In 18 10 Lady Emily Dundas, and Admiral Sir "William George Fairfa.x, resided in Nos. 46 and 53 respectively. The admiral had distinguished himself at the battle of Camperdown as flag-captain •of the I'eneral'le, under Admiral Duncan; and in consideration of his acknowledged bravery and merit on that occasion - being sent home with the admiral's despatches - he was made knight-ban- neret, with an augmentation to his coat-of-arms in chief, a representation of H.M.S. Venerable en- gaging the Dutch admiral's ship Vry/ieid ; and to do justice to the memory of " departed worth," at his death his son was made a baronet of Great Britain in 1836. He had a daughter named Mary, who became the wife of Samuel Greig, captain and commissioner in the imperial Russian navy.

No. 19 in the same street was for some years the residence of the Right Rev. Charles Hughes Terrot, D.D., elected in 1857 Primus of the Scot- :tish Episcopal Church, and whose quaint little 'figure, with shovel-hat and knee-breeches, was long flimiliar in the streets of Edinburgh. He was born at Cuddalore in the East Indies in 1790. Eor -some reasons, though he had not distinguished Ihiinself in the Cambridge Tripos list of University 'honours, his own College (Trinity College) paid liim the highest compliment in their power, by electing him a Fellow on the first occasion after he had taken his degree of B..\. in mathematical honours, and subsequently proceeded to M.A. and D D. He did not remain long at college, as he soon married and went to Scotland, where

he continued all his life attached to the Scottish Episcopal Church, as successively incumbent of Haddington, of St. Peter's, and finally St. Paul's, York Place, Edinburgh. In 1841 he was made bishop of Edinburgh, on the death of Bishop ^^'alker. He was author of se\'eral works on theology. During the latter years of his life, from extreme age and infirmity, he had been entirely laid aside from his pastoral and episcopal labours ; but during the period of his health and vigour few men were more esteemed in his pastoral relations as their minister, or by his brethren of the Episcopal Church for his acuteness and clever judgment in their discussions in church affairs.

The leading features of Dr. Terrot's intellectual character were accuracy and precision rather than very extensive learning or great research. It was very striking sometimes after a subject had been discussed in a desultory and commonplace manner, to hear him coming down upon the question with a clear and cutting remark which put the whole matter in a new and distinct point of view.

He was long a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to which he communi- cated some very able and acute papers, especially on logical and mathematical subjects. So also in his moral and social relations, he was remarkable for his manly, fair, and honourable bearing. He had what might essentially be called a pure and honest mind. He was devotedly attached to his own Church, and few knew better how to argue in favour of its polity and forms of service, never varying much in externals ; but few men were more ready to concede to others the liberality pf judgment which he

Dundas Street.]

LORD MEADOWBANK.

199

claimed for himself. Hence it was that few men were more esteemed and respected by others than Dr. Terrot of the Episcopal Church. He died at 9 Carlton Street, Stockbridge, in April, 1872, in his eighty-second year.

No. 57 Northumberland Street was the resi- dence of the gallant Sir John Hope (afterwards Lord Niddry and Earl of Hopetoun), while serving as Brigadier-General, after Corunna, on the staff in Scotland, from 1810 till he rejoined the Peninsular army and took command of the left wing at the battle of Nivelles.

The northern New Town is intersected by four steep thoroughfares that run north and south, being continuations of the corresponding streets south of Queen Street, and all, save in one instance, afibrd- ing far-stretching views of the villas, woods, and fields that lie between them and the shore of the Forth, with the undulations of the Fifeshire hills beyond.

Dundas and Pitt Streets form the most stately of these thoroughfares. From them the view south- wards is bounded by the distant spire of the As- sembly Hall, and the double towers of the Free Church College, which present a singularly noble and striking aspect when beheld from the foot of the long descent of upwards of 1,300 yards.

Li Dundas Street, in 18 11, there were resident in Nos. 9, 26, and 3 1, respectively. Miss Macfarlane of that ilk, Munro of Culrain, and Thomas Bris- bane of Brisbane and that ilk, the father of the eminent Lieut.-General Sir Thomas Macdougall Brisbane, Bart., latterly colonel of the 34th Regi- ment, and who distinguished himself greatly with the Duke of York's army in Holland, in the West Indies under Abercrombie, and in several general actions in the Peninsula, and who died after being G.C.B., G.C.H., LE.D., and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

North-westward of this, built on each side of the way which curved down towards Stockbridge, and where of old stood a farm with its steading, is the broad, spacious, and stately Royal Circus, with its gardens, the houses of which were finished and inhabited about the end of 1823. The late Lord Meadowbank, son of Allan Maconochie (also Lord IMeadowbank), and the successor on the bench of Lord Reston in 1819, had his residence here in No. 13. As Lord Advocate in prior years liis duties were of a most harassing and arduous description. Li 1S17, during what was named " the Radical era," when the greatest political excitement, amounting in some instances to open insurrection, prevailed throughout the country, he had to defend himself in the House of

Commons against a charge preferred by Lord' Archibald Hamilton, and Henry (afterwards Lord) Brougham, of " oppression in the exercise of his- duties," an accusation made in the course of a warm discussion on the further suspension of the " Habeas Corpus Act," and having reference to the case of a prisoner named Mackinlay, who, it was alleged, had been thrice put upon his defence.

No. 1 1 Howe Street, or a part thereof, was for some years the abode of an unfortunate English genius, John Ewbank, R.S.A., who was famous in his time as a marine and landscape painter. He was the son of Michael Ewbank of Gateshead, innkeeper, and was born at Darlington on the 4th May, 1799, and he removed to Gateshead in the year 1804. After b;ing bound apprentice to- Mr. Thomas Coulson, of Newcastle, he became a journeyman house-painter. He was the fellow- apprentice of Thomas Fenwick, the landscape painter. He accompanied his master to Pklinburgh in 1816, and was encouraged by him to take lessons of Mr. Alexander Nasmyth, who resided in 47, York Place, after which he devoted his time to the higher department of painting. He lived long in No. 5 Comely Bank, where many of his finest pictures were painted ; and it is in his declension that we find him at 11 Howe Street, in the years 1830 and 1831. He might have attained fame, and acquired opulence, as he painted well and quickly pictures that sold rapidly, but he fell into irregular habits, and sank into utter obscurit)', and a some- what untimely grave. Several of the views in this work have been engraved from drawings by John Ewbank.

In Gloucester Place, which adjoins the Circus on the west, we come upon the house No. 6, where genial Professor Wilson lived from 1826 till his death. In a letter written in the preceding year to Mr. Finlay of Easter Hill, one of his friends, he says : -

" I am building a house in Gloucester Place, a small street leading from the circus into Lord Moray's grounds. This I am doing because I am poor, and money yielding no interest. If Jane (Mrs. Wilson) is better next winter I intend to carry my plan into effect of taking into my house two or three young gendemen. Mention this in any quarter. Remember me kindly to your excellent wife."

Thither he removed with his family from 29 Anne Street, but the project of having boarders was never put in execution, and the house became the centre of that cluster of home-bred authors whom he drew around him, and chiefly as con- tributors to B/acku'ood-" The I'^ttrick Shepherd,"

200

OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH.

[Gloucester Place,

Gait, and " Delta," with the brilliant but short- lived nautical novelist, Michael Scott, who penned " Tom Cringle's Log," and the " Cruise of the Midge," and other writers of greater note - Lockhart, Samuel Warren, De Quincey, Mrs. Hemans, Caroline Bowles, Jerrold, Dr. Maguire, and others, even while the " Waverley " radiance blazed elsewhere.

In the prime of his life, at the age of thirty-four, he had obtained the important chair of Moral Philosophy, in the greatest university of his native country, and that post is associated with his best fame. In Gloucester Place his career was a pleasant and prosperous one, marked chiefly by the rich articles which flowed from his ptn monthly (though there he lost his amiable wife, a loss which he felt keenly, and which cast a gloom over all his actions at the time), the college lectures, and the award at each session end, to his rival essayists, the retreat ni summer to sylvan EUeray and its circle of poets, or a visit to the Burns festival in Ayrshire.

The death of Mrs. Wilson affected him deeply, nigh to depriving him of reason, and when he resumed his duties ne.xt session it was with a solemn and crushed spirit ; but when he saw the sympathy of his students, who worshipped him, he fairly broke down, and leaning his lion-like head upon his desk, exclaimed in a low voice, never forgotten by those who heard it, " Oh, gen- tlemen, forgive me ! But since we last met I have been in the valley of the shadow of death ! "

He was elected first President of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution at its formation, and in 1852 he resigned the college chair, after an honorary pension from Government had been con- ferred upon him by Lord John Russill.

Many are the personal anecdotes still remem- bered of the Professor in his Edinburgh circle, or elsewhere, from jocose colloquy with Lord Robert- son, to the incident of the unfortunate printer, who lost some editorial " copy " in his hat on the way to Blackwood's, and returning to Gloucester Place to narrate the mishap, was so crushed by \Vilson's silent look as to take forthwith to his bed, so that his terrified wife, able to draw no explanation from him, went to the printing-oflice to ask what had been done to her husband. " I'll shake my tawny mane at you," was another expression which he often used ; and, indeed, his magnificent head of hair looked like enough a lion's.

After a long and severe illness John Wilson died at No. 6 Gloucester Place, on the 3rd of April, 1854, exactly as St. Stephen's clock struck mid- night. F"ailure of memory had been one of the precursors of his dissolution, which was more im-

mediately preceded by a stroke of paralysis. He had barely gained the allotted term of threescore and ten. He was buried in the beautiful Dean Cemetery, on the 7th of April, and seldom has such a procession passed in the bright sunshine of a spring afternoon as that which went up Doune Terrace, by Moray Place and Randolph Crescent, to that sequestered spot, where lie a goodly company of Scottish men whose names will never die. On this day old students were there, who had come from distant places to pay their last tribute " to the old Professor." The coflin was borne shoulder high, and followed by the Scottish Academy, the directors of the Philosophical Institution, the high constables, magistrates, members of the College of Justice, and all the officials of the University.

In his love of dumb animals his house at Gloucester Place was a rendezvous for dogs of all kinds. Of his own pets, " their name was legion," says his daughter. " I remember Bronte, Rover, Fury, Paris, Charlie, Fido, Tip, and Grog." Some of them and a hecatomb of others, besides gallant game-cocks, lie in the green behind No. 6, Glou- cester Place, at the present hour.

But a few doors distant from the house of the Professor was the last Edinburgh abode, after he had risen to wealth and fame, and prior to his re- tirement to St. Andrews, of Robert Chambers- i, Doune Terrace - the distinguished and well-known historical writer, and junior partner in the great publishing firm of W. and R. Chambers.

The local papers for October, 1823, announce that " the plan of the elegant octagon in Lord Moray's ground is beginning to develop itself, and at the west end of Queen Street, on the north side, several noble houses (.\lbyn Place), are newly finished as to masonry." The ground to the westward from the end of the Queen's Street Gardens to the old Queensferry Road, and the crest of the high rocks that overhang the deep ravine, where the Leith runs brawling towards the sea, a great tabular tract, now occupied by Moray Place, Great Stuart Street, Ainslie Place, and Randolph Crescent, was all, until 1823, open country, or verdant and beau- tifully wooded park, in the centre of which stood the Earl of Moray's seat of Drumsheugh. The scenery there was charming then ; in 1783 it was the abode of Francis, Earl of Moray, who died in icio in his house of Drumsheugh. Here also died in 1791, Lord Doune, eldest son of the Earl of Moray, and M.P. for Bedwin, Wilts.

The edificed places now upon it were erected in 1822-3 'i"d following years, according to plans and designs by Gillespie Graham ; and though stately, have been - perhaps justly - regarded by some

Moray Place.]

MORAY PLACE.

201

., HERIOr ROW; 2, KUYAL CIKCUS; 3, INDIA PLACE; 4, AINSLIE PLACE; 5, MlJKAY PLACE.

74

20J

OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH.

[Moray J'lacc.

critic -ias, " beautifully monotonous, and magnificently dull;'' and by others as the beau-ideal of a fashion- able west-end quarter ; but whatever may be their intrinsic elegance, they have the serious and in- curable fault of turning their frontages inwards, and shutting out completely, save from their irregular rows of back windows, the magnificent prospect over the valley of the Water of Leith and away to the Forth.

Moray Place, which reaches to within seventy yards of the north-west quarter of Queen Street, is a pentagon on a diameter of 325 yards, with an ornate and central enclosed pleasure ground. It displays a series of symmetrical, confronting facades, adorned at regular intervals with massive, quarter- sunk Doric columns, crowned by a bold entablature.

No 28, on the west side, divided afterwards, was reserved as the residence of Francis tenth Earl of Moray, who married Lucy, second daughter of General John Scott, of Balcomie and Bellevue.

For years the Right Hon. Charles Hope, of Granton, Lord President of the Court of Session, and his son, John Hope, Solicitor-General for Scotland in 1822, and afterwards Lord Justice Clerk in 1841, lived in Moray Place, No. 12. i

The former, long a distinguished senator and i citizen, was born in 1763. His father, an eminent London merchant, and cadet of the house of Hopetoun, had been M.P. for West Lothian. Charles Hope was educated at the High School, where he attained distinction as dux of the highest class, and from the University he passed to the bar in 1784, and two years afterwards was Judge- Advocate of Scotland. In 1791 he was Steward of the Orkney and Shetland Isles, and in the first year of the century was Lord Advocate, and as such drew out and aided the magistrates in obtaining a Poor's Bill for the city, on which occa- sion he was presented with a piece of plate valued at a hundred guineas.

When the warlike spirit of the country became roused at that time by the menacing aspect of France, none was more active among the volunteer force than Charles Hope. He enrolled ] as a private in the First Edinburgh Regiment, and ' was eventually appointed Lieut. -Colonel, and from 1 I Box, with the exception of one year when the ' the corps was disbanded at the Peace of Amiens, I he continued to command till its final dissolu- tion in 1 814. Kay gives us an equestrian portrait of him in 1812, clad in the now-apparently grotesque uniform of the corps, a swallow-tailed [ red coat, faced with blue and turned up with white ; brass wings, and a beaver-covered helmet- hat with a side hackle, jack boots, and while I

breeches, with a leopard-skin saddle-cloth and crooked sabre. The corps presented him with a superb sword in 1807. He personally set an example of unwearied exertion ; his speeches on several occasions, and his correspondence with the commander-in-cliief, breathed a Scottish patriotism not less pure tlian hearty in the common cause. "We did not take up arms to please any ?ilinister or set of Ministers,'' he declared on one occasion, " but to defend our native land from foreign and domestic enemies."

After being M.P. for Dinnfries, on the elevation of Mr. Dundas to the peerage in 1802, he was unanimously chosen a member for the city of Edinburgh, and during the few years he continued in Parliament, acted as few Lords Advocate have ever done, and notwithstanding the pressure of imperial matters and the threatening aspect of the times, brought forward several measures of importance to Scotland ; but his parliamentary career was- rendered somewhat memorable by an accusation of abuse of power as Lord Advocate, brought against him by Mr, Whitbread, resulting in a vast amount of correspondence and debating in 1803. The circumstances are curious, as stated by the latter : -

" Mr. Morrison, a farmer in Banff"shire, had a servant of the name of Garrow, who entered a volunteer corps, and attended drills contrary to his master's pleasure ; and on the 13th of October last, upon the occasion of an inspection of the company by the Marquis of HunUy, he absented himself entirely from his master's work, in conse- quence of which he discharged him. The servant transmitted a memorial to the Lord Advocate, stating his case, and begging to know wiiat compensation he could by law claim from his late master for the injury he had suffered. His lordship gave it as his opinion that the memorialist had no claim for wages after the time he was dismissed, thereby acknowledging that he had done nothing contrary to law ; but he had not given a bare legal opinion, he had prefaced it by representing Mr. Morrison's act as unprincipled and oppressive, and that without proof or inquiry. Not satisfied with this, he next day addressed a letter to the Sheriff-substitute of Banffshire, attribu- ting Mr. Morrison's conduct to diiaffedion and disloyalty"

The letter referred to described Morrison's conduct as " atrocious," and such as could only have arisen from a spirit of treason, adding, " it is my order to you as Slieriff-substitute of the county, that on the first Frenchman landing in Scotland, you do immediately apprehend and secure

Moray Place, j

LORD JEFFREY.

203

Morrison as a suspected person, and you will not liberate him without a communication with me; iind you may inform him of these, my orders. And further, I sliall do all I can to prevent him from receiving any compensation from any part of his ])roperty which may either be destroyed by the enemy or the King's troops to prevent it lulling into their hands."

In the debate that ensued, Fox and Pitt took animated parts, and Charles Hope ably defended himself, saying that had Mr. Wliitbread made such ai accusation against him in Edinburgh, " there would be 100,000 tongues ready to repel the charge, and probably several arms raised against liim who made it." He described the defence- less state of the country, and the anomalous duties thrown upon the Lord Advocate since .he Union, after which the Privy Council, Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State, were illegally abolished, adding that Morrison was influenced by the Chairman of the " Society of Friends of Uni- versal Liberty,'' in Portsoy, one of whose favourite measures was to obstruct and discourage the for- mation of volunteer corps to repel the expected invasion.

Pitt spoke eloquently in his defence, contend- ing that " great allowances were to be made for an active and ardent mind placed in the situation of Advocate-General." He voted for the order of the dav, and against the original motion. When the House divided, 82 were for the latter, and 159 against it; majority, 77.

On the death of Sir David Rae of Eskgrove, in 1804, he was appointed Lord Justice Clerk, and on taking his seat addressed the Bench in a concise and elofjuent speech, which was long one of the traditions of the Court. During seven years that he administered justice in the Criminal Cturt, his oflice was conducted with ability, dignity, and solemnity.

On the death of the Lord President Blair, in 181 r, Charles Hope was promoted in his place, and when taking his seat, made a warm and pa- thetic panegyric on his gifted predecessor, and the ability widi whicli he filled his station for a ]5eriod of thirty years is still remembered in the Col- lege of Justice. He presided, in 1820, at the special commission for the trial of the high treason cases in Glasgow and the West ; and sixteen years after- wards, on the death of James Duke of Montrose, K.G., by virtue of an act of parliament, he was ap- pointed Lord Justice-Cleneral of Scotland, and as such, having to preside in the Justiciary Court, he went back there after an absence of twenty-five years. At the proclamation of Queen Victoria lie

wore the robes of Lord Justice-General. He died and was succeeded in office, in 1S41, by the Right Hon. David Boyle of Shewalton ; and his son John, who in that year had been appointed Lord Justice Clerk, after being Dean of I'acult)-, also died at Edinburgh in 1S58.

No. 24 Moray Place was the last and long the town residence of Lord Jeffrey, to whom we have had often to refer in his early life elsewhere. Here it was, that those evening reunions (Tuesdays and Fridays) which brightened the evening of his life, took place. " Nothing whatever now exists in Edinburgh that can convey to a younger generation any impression of the charms of that circle. If there happened to be any stranger in Edinburgh worth seeing you were sure to meet him there.''

The personal appearance of the first recognised editor of the Edinburgh Review was not remarkable. His complexion was very swarthy ; his features were good and intellectual in cast and expression ; his forehead high and lips firmly set. He was very diminutive in stature - a circumstance that called forth innumerable jokes from his friend Sydney Smith, wlio once said, " Look at my little friend Jeftrey ; he hasn't body enough to cover his mind decently with ; his intellect is indecently exposed." On another occasion, Jeftrey having arrived unex- pecdy at Foston when Smith was from home, amused himself by joining the children, who were riding a donkey. After a time, greatly to the de- light of the youngsters, he mounted the animal, and Smith returning at the time, sang the following impromptu : -

*' Witty as Horalius Flaccus, Great a Jacobin as Gracchus, Sliort, but mt as fat as Bacchus, RiJinsj on a little Jack.ass ! "

PI is fondness for children was remarkable. He was never so happy as when in their societ}-, and was a most devoted husband and f.aher.

He was Dean of Faculty, and prior to his eleva- tion to the Bench, when he came to 24 Moray Place, had some time previously resided in 92 George Street. Deemed generally only as a crusty and uncompromising critic, he possessed great good- ness of heart and domestic amiability. In Iiis latter years, when past the psalmist-appointed terra of life, he grew more tlian ever tender-hearted and amiable, praised nursery songs, patronised medio- crities, and wrote letters that were childish in their gentleness of expression. "It seemetl to be the natural strain of his character let loose from some stern responsibility, which made him sharp and critical through all his former life."

In their day his critical writings had a brilliant

204

OLD AM) NEW EDINSURGH.

(Moray Place.

reputation, but he was too much a votary of the regular old rhetorical style of poetry to be capable of appreciating the Lake school, or any others among his own contemporaries ; and thus he was apt to make mistakes, draw wrong deductions as to a writer's future, and indulge in free-and-easy condemnation.

He was passionately attached to his native city, Edinburgli, and was always miserable when away from it. It was all the same through life - he never could reconcile himself to new places.new people, or strange habits ; and thus it was that his letters, in age, from O.xford, from London, and America, teem Avith complaints, and longing for home. His in dustry was inde- fatigable, and his general informa- tion of the widest range, perfectly accurate, and al- ways at command. He died in 1850, in his seventy- seventh year, and was borne from Moray Place to his last home in the cemetery at the Dean.

In No. 34 lived the Hon. Baron

David Hume, of the Scottish Exchequer in 1779 and 1780, nephew of the historian, and an eminent writer on the criminal jurisprudence of the country, one of the correspondents of the Mirror Club, and who for many years sat with Sir \\'alter Scott, at the Clerks' table in the first Division of the Court of Session. No. 47 was long the abode of Sir James Wellwood Moncreift", Bart., of 'J'ullibole in Kinross shire, who was called to the Scottish bar in 1799, and was raised to the bench in 1829. under the title of Lord MoncreifT, and died in 1851.

His contemporary Baron Hume, filled various important situations with great ability, having been

successively Sheriff of Berwickshire and of West Lothian, Professor of Scots Law in the University of Edinburgh, and Baron of Exchequer till the abolition of the Court in 1830. His great work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has been deemed the text-book of that department of jurisprudence, and is constantly referred to as an authority, by bench and bar. It was published in 2 vols, quarto in 1799. He died at Edinburgh on the 30th August,

1838, and left in the hands of the secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh a valu- able collection of MSS. and letters belonging to, or relating to his celebrated uncle, the historian of England.

In Forres Street - a short and steep one opening south from Moray Place - No. 3 was the residence of the great Thomas Chalmers, D.D., the leader of the Free Church movement, a large- hearted, patriotic, and devout man, and of whom it has been said, that he was pre- eminently in the unity of an un- divided life, at once a man of God, a man of science, and a man of the world. He was born on the 17th of March, 1780. As a preacher, it is asserted, that there were few whose eloquence was capable of producing an effect I so strong and irresistible as his, without his ever having recourse to any of the arts of common pulpit enthusiasm.

His language was bold and magnificent; his imagination fertile and distinct, gave richness to his style, while his arguments were supplied with a vast and rapid diversity of illustration, and all who ever heard him, still recall Thomas Chalmers with serious and deep-felt veneration.

He is thus described in his earlier years, and

L^ Mill jl.H Kl.V. \AJur l.'ie I'ortyait by Collin Siii::::

I-'orrcs Street. 1

THOMAS CHALMERS.

20S

long before he took the great part he did in the storm of the Disruption : -

" At first sight his face is a coarse one - but a mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every part of it, that such as have eyes cannot be long without discovering. It is very pale, and the large half-closed eyelids have a certain drooping melancholy about them, which interested me very much, I understood not why. The lips, too, are singularly pensive in their mode of falling down at the sides, although there is no want of richness and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The up|)er lip from the nose downwards, is separated by a very deep line, which gives a sort of leonine firmness of expression to all the lower part of the face. The cheeks are sejuare and strong, in tex- ture like pieces of marble, with the cheek bones very broad and pro- minent. The eyes them- selves are light in colour, and have a strange, dreamy heaviness, that conveys any idea than that of dulness, but which contrasts in a wonderful manner with the dazzling watery glare they exhibit when expanded in their sockets and illuminated into all their flame and ^k. ckalmers in 1821 fervour in some moment

of high entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of I the forehead is perhaps the most singular jiart of the whole visage; and indeed it presents a mixture so very singular, that I should have required some little time to comprehend the meaning of it. . . . In the forehead of Dr. Chalmers there is an arch of imagination, carrying out the summit boldly and roundly, in a style to which the heads of very few poets present anything comparable - while over this again there is a grand apex of veneration and love, such as might have graced tlie bust of Plato himself, and sucli as in living men I had never beheld equalled in any but the majestic head of Canova. The whole is edged with a few crisp locks, which stand boldly forth and afford a fine relief to the death-like paleness of those massive temples."

He died on the 31st May, 1847, since when his Memoirs have been given to the world by Dr. William Hanna, with his life and labours in

Glasgow, his residence in St. Andrews, and his final removal to Edinburgh, his visits to England, and the lively journal he kept of what he saw and did while in that country.

St. Colme Street, the adjacent continuation of Albyn Place, is so named from one of the titles of the Moray family, a member of which was com- mendator of Inchcolm in the middle of the i6th century.

Here No. 8 was the residence of Captain Basil Hall, R.N., the popular writer on several subjects. He was the second son of Sir James Hall of Dun- glass, Bart., and Lady Helena Douglas, daughter of Dunbar, tliird Earl of Selkirk.

He was made captain in 1817, but in the pre- ceding year, when in command of the Lyra, he visited the islands on the coast of Corea, which in honour of his father, his friend Captain (afterwards Sir Murray) Maxwell, named Sir James Hall's Croup; and in 1818 he published his voyage to Corea and the Great Loo- choo Island in the Sea of Japan. In 1S24 he published at Edinburgh his experience on the coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, during the three preceding years. His travels in North America followed ; but the work by which he is best known - his pleasant " Frag- ments of Voyages and Travels, including Anec dotes of Naval Life," in three volr.mes, he published at Edinburgh in 1831, during his residence in St. Colme Street where some of his children were born. " Patchwork," a work in three volumes, he published in England in 1841. He married Mar- garet, daughter of Sir John Hunter, Con.sul-general in Spain, and died at Portsmouth in 1844, leaving behind him the reputation of having been a brave and intelligent officer, a good and benevolent man, and a faithful friend.

Ainslie Place is an expansion of Great Stuart Street, midway between Moray Place and Ran- dolph Crescent. It forms an elegant, spacious, and symmetrical double crescent, with an ornamental garden in the centre, and is notable for containing the houses in which Dugald Stewart and Dean Ramsay lived and died, namely, Nos. 5 and 23.

[From the Portrait by Andrciv Geiidcs.)

OLD AND NKW EDINBURGH.

[Ail. -lie PUice.

To the philosopher we have already referred in our account of Lothian Hut, in the Horse Wynd. In 1792 he published the first volume of the "Philosophy of the Human Mind," and in the following year he read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh his account of the life and writings of Adam Smith ; and his other works are too well- known to need enumeration here. On the death of his wife, in 17S7, he married Helen D'Arcy Cranstoun, daughter of the Hon. George Crans- toun, who, it is said, was his equal in intellect, if superior in blood. She was the sister of the Countess Purgstall (the subject of Basil Hall's " Schloss Hainfeldt") and of Lord Corehouse, the friend of Sir Walter Scott.

Though the least beautiful of a family in which beauty is hereditary, she had (according to the Quarterly Rei'iew, No. 133) the best essence of beauty, expression, a bright eye beaming with in- telligence, a manner the most distinguished, yet soft, feminine, and singularly winning. On her ill- favoured Professor she doted with a love-match devotion ; to his studies and night lucubrations she sacrificed her health and rest ; she was his amanuensis and corrector at a time when he was singularly fortunate in his pujjils, who never forgot the charm of her presence, the instruction they won, and the society they enjoyed, in the house of Dugald Stewart. Among these were the Lords Dudley, Lansdowne, Palmerston, Kinnaird, and .Vshburton. In all his after-life he maintained a good fellowship with them, and, in 1806, obtained the sinecure office of Gazelle writer for Scotland, with ;^6oo per annum.

Her talent, wit, and beauty made the wife of the Professor one of the most attractive women in the city. " No wonder, therefore," says the Quarterly, " that her saloons were the resort of all that was the best of Edinburgh, the house to which strangers most eagerly sought introduction. In her Lord Dudley found indeed a friend, she was to him in the place of a mother. His respect for her was unbounded, and continued to the close ; often have we seen him, when she was stricken in years, seated near her for whole evenings, clasping her hand in both of his. Into her faithful ear he poured his hopes and liis fears, and unbosomed his inner soul ; and with her he maintained a constant correspondence to the last."

Her marriage with the Professor came aliout in a singular manner. When Miss Cranstoun, she had written a poem, which was accidentally shown by her cousin, the Earl of Lothian, to Dugald Stewart, then his private tutor, and unknown to flime ; and he was so enraptured with it, and so warm in his

commendations, that the authoress and her critic fell in love by a species of second-sight, before their first interview, and in due time were made one.

Dugald Stewart died at his house in Ainslie Place, on Wednesday, the nth June, 182S, after a short but painful illness, when in the seventy-fifth year of his age, having been born in the old College of Edinburgh in 1753, when his father was pro- fessor of mathematics. His long life had been devoted to literature and science. He had acquired a vast amount of inlbrmation, profound ;is it was e.\act, and possessed the faculty of memory in a singular degree. As a public teacher he was fluent, animated, and impressi\e, with great dignity and grace in his manner.

He was buried in the Canongate thurch3-ard. The funeral procession proceeded as a private one from Ainslie Place at tliree in the afternoon ; but on reaching the head of the North Bridge it was joined by the Senatus Academicus in their gowns (preceded by the mace bearer) two and two, the junior members in front, the Rev. Principal Baird in the rear, together with the Lord Provost, magis- trates and council, with their officers and regalia.

He left a widow and two children, a son and daughter, the former of whom, Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Stewart, published an able pamphlet on Indian affairs. His widow, who holds a high place among writers of Scottish song, survived him ten years, d)'iiig in July, 1S38.

The \'ery Rev. Edward Bannerman Ramsay, LL.D. and F.R.S.E., a genial writer on several subjects, but chiefly known for his " Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character," was long the occu- pant of No. 23. He was the fourth son of Sir Alexander Ramsay, Bart., of Balmaine, in Kincar- dineshire, and was a graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge. His degree of LL.D. was given him by the University of Edinburgh, on the installation of Mr. Gladstone as Lord Rector in 1S59. He held English orders, and for seven years had been a curate in .Somersetshire. His last and most successful contribution to literature was derived l"rom his long knowledge of Scottish character. He was for many years Dean of the Episcopal Church in Scotland, and as a Churcimian he always advo- cated moderate opinions, both in ritual and doc- trine. He died on the 27th December, 1872, in the seventy-ninth year of his age.

In the summer of 1879 a memorial to his memory was erected at the west end of Princes Street, eastward of St. Joan's Church, wherein he so long officiated. It is a cross of Shap granite, twenty-six feet in height, having a width of eight feet six inches from end to end of tlie arms. .Xt the height

Great Stuart Street.]

PROFESSOR AYTOUN.

207

of sixteen feet there spring curves which bend round into the arms, while between those arms and the upright shaft are carried four arcs, having a diameter of six feet.

On each of its main faces the cross is divided into panels, in which are inserted bronze bas- reliefs, worked out. like the whole design, from drawings by R. Anderson, A.R.S.A. Those occu- pying the head and arms of the cross represent the various stages of our Lord's Passion, the Resurrec- tion and the Ascension ; in another series of six, placed thus on either side of the shaft, are set forth the acts of charity, while tlie large panels in the base are filled in with sculptured ornament of the fine twelfth century type, taken from Jedburgh abbey.

Three senators of the College of Justice have had their abodes in Ainslie Place - Lord Barcaple. raised to the bench in 1862, Lord Cowan, a judge of 1851, and George Cranstoun, Lord Corehouse, the brother of Mrs. Dugald Stewart, who resided in No. 12. This admirable judge was the son of the Hon. George Cranstoun of Longwarton, and Miss Brisbane of that ilk. He was originally in- tended for the army, but passed as advocate in 1793, and was Dean of Faculty in 1823, and succeeded to the bench on the death of Lord Hermand, three years after. He was the author of the famous Court of Session jeii if esprit, known as " The Diamond Beetle Case," an amusing and not overdrawn caricature of the judicial style, man- ners, and language, of the judges of a bygone time.

He took his judicial title from the old ruined castle of Corehouse, near the Clyde, where he had built a mansion in the English style. He was an excellent Greek s( holar, and as such was a great favourite with old Lord Monboddo, who used to declare that " Cranstoun was the only scholar in all Scotland," the scholars in his opinion being all on the south side of the Tweed.

He was long famed for being the beau-ideal of a judge ; placid and calm, he listened to even the longest debates with patience, and was an able lawyer, especially in feudal questions, and his opinions were always received with the most profound respect.

Great Stuart Street leads from Ainslie Place into Randolph Crescent, which faces the Queensfcrry Road, and has in its gardens some of the fine old trees which in former times adorned the Earl of Moray's park.

In No. 16 of the former street lived and died, alter his removal from No. i, Inverleith Terrace, the genial and patriotic author of the "Lays of the

Scottish Cavaliers," a Scottish humourist of a very high class. William Edmondstoune Aytoun, Pro- fessor of Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh, was born in 1813, of a fine old Fifeshire family, and in the course of his education at one of the seminaries of his native capital, he became dis- tinguished among his contemporaries for his powers of Latin and English composition, and won a prize for a poem on "Judith." 1\\ his eighteenth year he published a volume entitled " Poland and other Poems," which attracted little attention ; but after he was called to the bar, in 1840, he became one of the standing wits of the Law Courts, yet, save as a counsel in criminal cases, he did not acquire forensic celebrity as an advocate.

Five years afterwards he was presented to the chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the Uni- versity, and became a leading contributor to Blackwood s Magazine, in which his famous "Lays," that have run tlirough so many editions, first appeared. Besides these, he was the author of many brilliant pieces in the " Book of Ballads," by Bon Gaultier, a name under which he and Sir Theodore Martin, then a solicitor in Edinburgh, contributed to various periodicals.

In April, 1849, he married Jane Emily ^^'ilson, the youngest daughter of "Christopher North," in whose class he had been as a student in his early years, a delicate and pretty little woman, who pre- deceased him. In the summer of 1853 he delivered a series of lectures on " Poetry and Dramatic Literature," in Willis's Rooms, to such large and fashionable audiences as London alone can pro- duce ; and to his pen is ascribed the mock-heroic tragedy of "Firmilian," designed to ridicule, as it did, the rising poets of "The Spasmodic School.'' With all his brilliance as a humourist, Aytoun was unsuccessful as a novelist, and his e]iic poem " Bothwell,'" written in 16 Great Stuart Street, did not bring him any accession of fame.

In his latter years, few writers on the Conserva- tive side rendered more effective service to their party than Professor Aytoun, whom, in 1852, Lord Derby rewarded with the offices of Slierift' and Vice-Admiral of Orkney.

Among the many interesting people who fre- quented the house of the author of " The Lays" few were more striking than an old lady of strong Jacobite sentiments, e\en in this prosaic age, Miss Clementina Stirling Graham, of Duntruiic, well worthy of notice here, remarkable for her historical connections as for her great age, as she died in her ninety-fifth year, at Dimtrune, in 1877. Born in the Seagate of Dundee, in 1782, she was the daughter of Stirling of Pittendreich, Forfar-

2o8

OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH.

[Greal Stuart Street,

shire, and of Amelia, daughter of Alexander Gra- ham, of Duntrune, who died in 1804, and was thus the hist lineal representative of Claverhouse.

In addition to her accomplishments, she pos- sessed wit and invention in a high degree, and was ahva3S lively, kind, and hospitable. She had a keen perception of the humorous, and was well known in Edinburgh society in the palmy days of Jeffrex". Gifted with great powers of mimicry, her personifications at

good humour. Her conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is shrewd and sensible, but noways brilliant. She dined with us, went off as to the play, and returned in the charac- ter of an old Scottish lady. Her dress and be- haviour were admirable, and her conversation unique. I was in the secret of course, and did my best to keep up the ball, but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account she gave of her

son, the antiquary.

private parties were so unique, that even those who knew her best were deceived. One of the most amusing of these took place in 1S21, at the house of Jetiirey.

He asked her to give a personation of an old lady, to which she con- sented, but, in order to have a little amusement at his expense, she called upon him in the character of a " Lady Pitlyal," to ask his pro- fessional opinion upon an imaginary law plea, which she alleged her agent was misconducting.

On this occasion she drove up to his house in the carriage of Lord Gillies, accompa- nied by a young liuly as her daughter, and so 1 person I ever saw." complete was the personification, that the acute Jeffrey did not discover till next day that he had been duped ! This episode created so much amuse- ment in Edinburgh that it found its way into I the pages of Blackwood. Sir Walter Scott, who ' vas a spectator of Miss Graham's power of per- sonation, wrote thus regarding it : -

" March 7. Went to my Lord Gillies to dinner, and witnessed a singular e.xhibition of personifica- tion. Miss Stirling Graham, a lady of the family from which Claverhouse was descended, looks like thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with good expression, in point of good sense and

WILLIAM EDMONSTOINE AYTOUN. {^Ftont a Fltotogr.tpk by Messrs. Ross and Thomson.)

who found an old ling in a slate quarry, was ex- tremely ludicrous, and she puzzled 'he professor of agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around her old mansion house. No person to \\ hom the secret was not entrusted iuid the least guess t' an impostor, except the shrewd \ oung lady pre- sent, who observed the hand narrowly, ,nd saw that it v.as plumper than the age of the lady -cemed to warrant. This l.idy and Miss F.ell, of Cold- stream, have this gift of personation to a much greater degree than any Miss Graham published in 1829 the "Bee Preserver," translated from the work of M. de Gelieu, for which she received the medal of the Highland Society. She possessed a large circle of friends, and never had an enemy.

Her friend William Edmondstoune .\ytoun died on the 4th August, 1865, sincerely regretted by all who knew him, and now lies under a white marble monument in the beautiful cemetery at the Dean. Charles Baillie, Lord Jerviswoode, who may well be deemed by association one of the last of the historical Lords of Session, for years was the occu- pant of No. 14, Randolph Crescent, and his name is one which awakens many sad and gentle

Greit Stuart Street.)

LORD JERVISWOODE.

209

memories. He was the second son of George Baillie of Jerviswoode, and a descendant of that memorable BaiUie of Jerviswoode, who, according to Hume, was a man of merit and learning, a cadet of the Lamington family, and called " The Scottish Sidney," but was executed as a traitor on the scafibld at Edinburgh, in 1683, having identified himself with the interests of Monmouth and Argyle. Lord Jerviswoode was possessed of more than average intellectual gifts, and still more with charms of person and manners that were not con- fined to the female side of his house. One sister, the Marchioness of Breadalbane, and another. Lady Polwarth, were both celebrated for their beauty, wit, and accomplishments. On the death of their cousin, in the year 1859, his eldest brother became tenth Earl of Haddington, and then Charles, by royal warrant, was raised to the rank of an earl's brother.

Prior to this he had a long and brilliant course in law, and in spotless honour is said to have been " second to none." He was called to the Bar in 1830, and after being Advocate Depute, Sheriff of Stirling, and Solicitor-General, was Lord Advocate in 1858, and M.P. for West Lothian in the follow- ing year, and a Lord of Session. In 1862 he became a Lord of Justiciary. He took a great interest in the fine arts, and was a trustee of the Scottish Board of Manufactures ; but finding his health failing, he quitted the bench in July, 1874.

He died in his seventy-fifth year, on the 23rd of July, 1879, at his residence, Dryburgh House, in Ro.\burghshire, near the ruins of the beautiful abbey in which Scott and his race lie interred. For the last five years of his life little had been heard of him in the busy world, while his delicate health and shy nature denied him the power of taking part in public matters.