In that ancient street, long deemed the grand
entrance to Edinburgh, we shall see once more the
long lines of gilded sedans, attended by linkmen
and armed servants, escorting belles and beaux,
powdered and patched, proceeding in state to the
.old Assembly Room ; and also the monarchs who
have entered the city by that remarkable route,
ascending it in succession, surrounded by all their
bravery: James VI, and his bride, Anne of Den-
market like a human surge, and strung him up to
a dyer?s pole.
In the old city there is not a street wherein
blood has not been shed again and again, in war
and local tumult, for it is the Edinburgh of those
days when the sword was never in its scabbard;
when to settle a quarrel d la mode d?Ea?hbourg
was a European proverb; when the death-bed
advice of Rruce was carried out, and truces were
with gilded partisans ; Oliver Cromwell, with his
grim Ironsides ; Charles II., before Dunbar was
fought and lost ; and, lastly, James VII. of Scotland,
when Duke of Albany and High Commissioner
to the-Parliament.
Down that steep street went a horde of unfortunates
in early times to the place of doom; thus,
it had acquired a peculiar character, till the hand
of improvement changed it; and in later years
down it came a victim of another kind, the frantic
and shrieking Porteous, borne by that infuriated
mob, which spread over all the spacious Grassand
later times-a feeling that is embodied in the
well-known Jacobite song, in which one of these
mothers is made to say :-
?? I once had sons, I now hae nane,
I bore them, toiling sairlie ;
But I would bear them a? again,
To lose them a? for Charlie ! ?
W e are told that when David Home of Wedderbum,
father of the historian of the Douglases,
died, in 1574, of consumption, in his fiftieth year,
he was the first of his race who had died a
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coaching inn
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