the N ~ S , attracted by the dampness of the soil,
where for ages the artificial loch lay. A few feet
eastward of the tower there was found in the bank,
in 1820, a large coffin of thick fir containing three
skeletons, a male and two females, supposed to be
those of a man named Sinclair and his two sisters,
who were all drowned?in the loch in 1628 for a
horrible crime.
Eastward of this tower of the 15th century are the
remains of a long, low archway, walled with rubble,
but arched with well-hewn stones, popularly known
as ?the lion?s den,? and which has evidently formed
a portion of that secret escape or covered way
from the Castle (which no Scottish fortress was ever
without), the tradition concerning which is of general
and very ancient belief; and this idea has been still
further strengthened by the remains of a similar
subterranean passage being found below Brown?s
Close, on the Castle Hill. At the highest part of
the latter stood the ancient barrier gate of 1450,
separating the fortress from the city. This gate
was temporarily replaced on the occasion of the
visit of George IV, in 1822, and by an iron
chuaux de fdse-to isolate the 82nd Regiment and
garrison generally-during the prevalence of Asiatic
cholera, ten years subsequently.
There stood on the north side of the Castle
Hill an ancient church, some vestiges of which were
visible in Maitland?s time, in 1753, and which he
supposed to have been dedicated to St, Andrew the
patron of Scotland, and which he had seen referred
to in a deed of gift of twenty merks yearly, Scottish
money, to the Trinity altar therein, by Alexander
Curor, Vicar of Livingstone, 20th December, 1488.
In June, 1754, when some workmen were levelling
this portion of the Castle Hill, they discovered a
subterranean chamber, fourteen feet square,
wherein lay a crowned image of the Virgin, hewn
of very white stone, two brass altar candlesticks,
some trinkets, and a few ancient Scottish and French
coins. By several remains of burnt matter and two
large cannon balls being also found there, this
edifice was supposed to have been demolished
durbg some of the sieges undergone by the Castle
since the invention of artillery. Andin December,
1849, when the Castle Hill was being excavated
for the new reservoir, several finely-carved stones
were found in what was understood to be the
foundation of this chapel or of Christ?s Church,
which was commenced there in 1637, and had
actually proceeded so far that Gordon of Rothiemay
shows it in his map with a high-pointed spire,
but it was abandoned, and its materials used in
the erection of the present church at the Tron.
Under all this were found those pre-historic human
remains referred to in our first chapter. This was
the site of the ancient water-house. It was not
until ~ 6 2 1 that the citizens discovered the necessity
for a regular supply of water beyond that which
the public wells with their watef-carriers afforded.
It cannot be supposed that the stagnant fluid of the
north and south lochs could be fit for general use,
yet, in 1583 and 1598, it was proposed to supply
the city from the latter. Eleven years after the
date above mentioned, Peter Brusche, a German
engineer, contracted to supply the city with water
from the lands of Comiston, in a leaden pipe of three
inches? bore, for a gratuity of 650. By the year
1704 the increase of population rendered an additional
supply from Liberton and the Pkntland Hills
necessary. As years passed on the old water-house
proved quite inadequate to the wants of the city.
It was removed in 1849, and in its place now stands
the great reservoir, by which old and new Edinburgh
are alike supplied with water unexampled in
purity, and drawn chiefly from an artificial lake
in the Pentlands, nearly seven miles distant. On
the outside it is only one storey in height, with a
tower of 40 feet high; but within it has an area I 10
feet long, go broad, and 30 deep, containing two
millions of gallons ofwater, which can be distributed
through the entire city at the rate of 5,000 gallons
per minute,
Apart from the city, embosomed among treesand
though lower down than this reservoir, yet
perched high in air-upon the northern bank of the
Esplanade, stands the little octagonal villa of Allan
Ramsay, from the windows of which the poet would
enjoy an extensive view of all the fields, farms, and
tiny hamlets that lay beyond the loch below, with
the vast panorama beyond-the Firth of Forth,
with the hills of Fife and Stirling. ?The sober
and industrious life of this exception to the race
of poets having resulted in a small competency,
he built this oddly-shaped house in his latter days,
designing to enjoy in it the Horatian quiet he had
so often eulogised in his verse. The story goes:
says Chambers in his ?? Traditions,? ? that, showing
it soon after to the clever Patrick Lord Elibank,
with much fussy interest in its externals and accommodation,
he remarked that the vyags were already
at work on the subject-they likened it to a goosepie
(owing to the roundness of the shape). ? Indeed,
Allan,? said his lordship, ?now I see you in it I think
the wags are not far wrong.? ?
Ramsay, the author of the most perfect pastoral
poem in the whole scope of British literature, and
a song writer of great merit, was secretly a
Jacobite, though a regular attendant in St. Giles?s
Church. Opposed to the morose manners of his
time, he delighted in music and the theatre, and
it was his own advanced taste and spirit that led
.him, in 1725, to open a circulating library for the
diffusion of fiction among the citizens of the time.
Three , years subsequently, in the narrow-minded
spirit of the dark age ? of Edinburgh, the magistrates
were moved to action, by the fear this new
kind of reading might have on the minds of youth,
and actually tried, but without effect, to put his
library down. Among the leaders of these selfconstituted
guardians of morality was Erskine Lord
Grange, whose life was a scandal to the age. In I 736
Allan Ramsay?s passion for the drama prompted him
to erect a theatre in Catrubber?s Close; but in the
ensuing year the act for licensing the stage was
passed, and the magistrates ordered the house to
. be shut up. By this spetulation he lost a good deal
of money, but it is remarked by his biographers
that this was perhaps the only unfortunate project
in which he ever engaged. His constant cheerfulness
and great conversatibnal powers made him
a favourite with all classes; and being fond of
children he encouraged his three daughters to
bring troops of young girls about his house, and
in their sports he mingled with a vivacity singular
in one of his years, and for them he was wont to
make dolls and cradles with his own hands. In
that house on the Castle bank he spent the last
twelve years of a blameless life. He did not give
up his shop-long the resort of all the wits of
Edinburgh, the Hamiltons of Bangour, and Gilbertfield,
Gay, and others-till 1755. He died in
1757, in his seventy-second year, and was buried
in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where a tomb marks
his grave. ?An elderly female told a friend of
mine,? says Chambers, that she remembered, as
a girl, living as an apprentice with a milliner in
the Grassmarket, being sent to Ramsay Garden,
to assist in making dead-clothes for the poet. She
could recall, however, no particulars of the same,
but the roses blooming in the deathchamber.?
The house of the poet passed to his son, Allan,
an eminent portrait painter, a man of high culture,
and a favourite in those circles wherein Johnson
and Boswell moved. He inherited considerable
literary taste from his father, and was the founder
of the ?? Select Society? of Edinburgh, in 1754, of
which all the learned men there were members.
By the interest of Lord Bute he was introduced
. to George III., when Prince of Wales, whose
portrait he painted. He enlarged the house his
father built, and also raised the additional large
edifices to the eastward, now known as Ramsay
Gardens. The biographers of the painter always
,assert that he madearomantic marriage. In his
youth, when teaching drawing to the daughters of
Sir Alexander Lindesay, of Evelick, one of them fell
in love with him, and as the consent of the parents
was impossible then, they were secretly united in
wedlock. He died at Dover in 1784, after which
the property went to his son, General John Ramsay
(latterly of the Chasseurs Bntanniques), who, at his
death in 1845, left the property to Murrdy of Henderland,
and so ended the line of the author of
?? The Gentle Shepherd.?
Having thus described the locality of the Esplanade,
we shall now relate a few of the temble
episodes-apart from war and tumult-of which it
has been the scene.
In the reign of James V. the Master of Forbes
was executed here for treason. He and his father
had been warded in the Castle on that charge in
1536. By George Ear1,of Huntly, who bore a
bitter animosity to the house of Forbes, the former
had been accused of a design to take the life of
the king, by shooting him with a hand-gun in
Aberdeen, and also of being the chief instigator
of the mutiny among the Scottish forces at Jedburgh,
when on the march for England. Protesting
his innocence, the Master boldly offered to
maintain it in single combat against the earl, who
gave a bond for 30,000 merks to make good his
charge before the 3rst of July, 1537. But it was
not until the 11th of the same month in the following
year that the Master was brought to trial,
before Argyle, the Lord Justice General, and
Huntly failed not to make good his vaunt.
Though the charges were barely proved, and the
witnesses were far from exceptionable, the luckless
Master of Forbes was sentenced by the Commissioners
of Justiciary and fifteen other men of
high rank to be hanged, drawn, beheaded, and dismembered
as a traitor, on the Castle Hill, which
was accordingly done, and his quarters were placed
above the city gates. The judges are supposed to
have been bribed by Huntly, and many of the jury,
though of noble birth, were his hereditary enemies.
His father, after a long confinement, and undergoing
a tedious investigation, was released from
the Castle.
But a more terrible execution was soon to follow
-that of Lady Jane Douglas, the young and beautiful
widow of John Lord Glammis, who, with her
second husband, Archibald Campbell of Skipness,
her son the little Lord Glammis, and John Lyon
an aged priest, were all committed prisoners to the
Castle, on an absurd charge of seeking to compass
the death of the king by poison and sorcery.
cc Jane Douglas,? says a writer in ?Miscellanea
Scotica,? ?( was the most renowned beauty in Britain
