1-50 OLD.? AND NEW EDINBURGH. [The City Crosa.
by the Figgate-burn ere he marched to storm
Dunbar.?
There lie citizens who have fought for their
country at Flodden, Pinkie, and a hundred:other
fields; and there lies one whose name is still
mighty in the land, and ?who never feared the
face of man?-John Knox. He expired at his old
manse, near the Nether Bow, on the 24th of No-
~ vember, 1572, in his sixty-seventh year, and his
body was attended to the grave by a great multitude
of people, incIuding the chief of the nobles
and the Regent Morton, whose simple iZqe over
his grave is so well known. It cannot but excite
surprise that no effort was made by the Scottish
people to preserve distinctly the remains of the
great Reformer from desecration, but some of that
spirit of irreverence for the past which he incul-
GRAVE OF JOHN KNOX.
cated thus recoiled upon himself, and posterity
knows not his exact resting-place. If the tradition
mentioned by Chambers, says Wilson, be correct, that
? his burial-place was a few feet from the front of the
old pedestal of King Charles?s statue, the recent
change in the position of the latter must have
placed it directly mer his grave-perhaps as strange
a monument to the great apostle of Presbyterianism
as fancy could devise !? Be all this as it may,
there is close by the statue a small stone let intc
the pavement inscribed simply
? I. K., 1572.?
An ancient oak pulpit, octagonal and panelled
brought from St. Giles?s church, and said to havc
been the same in which he was wont to preach, i!
still preserved in the Royal Institution on tht
Earthen Mound. . .
Close by St. Giles?s church, where radii in thc
causeway mark its site, stood the ancient cros!
of the city, so barbarously swept away by thc
ignorant and tasteless magistracy of 1756. Scott
and other men of taste, never ceased to deplore it!
destruction, and many attempts have been vainl;
nade to collect the fragments and reconstruct it,
[n ? Marmion,? as the poet has it :-
?? Dunedin?s cross, a pillared stone,
Rose on a turret octagon;
But now is razed that monument,
And the voice of Scotland?s law went forth,
Oh, be his tomb as lead to lead
Upon its dull destroyer?s head !-
A minstrel?s malison is said.?
. - -Whence royal edicts rang,
In gloribus trumpet clang.
A battlemented octagon tower, furnished with four
angular turrets, it was sixteen feet in diameter, and
fifteen feet high. From this rose the centre pillar,
xlso octagon, twenty feet in height, surmounted by
a beautiful Gothic capital, terminated by a crowned
unicorn. Caldenvood tells us that prior to King
Tames?s visit to Scotland the old cross was taken
down from the place where it had stood within
the memory of man, and the shaft transported
to the new one, by the aid of certain mariners
from Leith. Rebuilt thus in 1617, nearly on the
site of an older cross, it was of a mixed style of
architecture, and in its reconstruction, with a better
taste than later years have shown, the chief ornaments
of the ancient edifice had been preserved ;
the heads in basso-relievo, which surmounted
seven of the arches, have been referred by our
most eminent antiquaries to the remote period of
the Lower Empire. Four of those heads, which
were long preserved by Mr. Ross at Deanhaugh,
were procured by Sir Walter Scott, and are still
preserved at Abbotsford, together with the great
stone font or basin which flowed with wine on
holidays. The central pillar, long preserved at
Lord Somerville?s house, Drum, near Edinburgh,
now stands near the Napier tomb, within a railing,
on the north side of the choir of St. Giles?s, where
it was >placed_in 1866. A crowned unicorn surmounts
it, bearing a pennon blazoned with a silver
St. Andrew?scross on one side, and on the. other
the city crest-an anchor.
From the side of that venerable shaft royal proclamations,
solemn denunciations of excommunication
and outlawry, involving ruin and death, went
forth for ages, and strange and terrible have been the
scenes, the cqelties, the executions, and absurdities,
it has witnessed. From its battlements, by tradition,
mimic heralds of the unseen world cited the gallant
James and all our Scottish chivalry to appear in
the domains of Pluto immediately before the
march of the army to Flodden, as recorded at
great length in the ?? Chronicles of Pitscottie,?
and rendered more pleasantly, yet literally, into
verse by Scott- ~
