natural death-all the rest having lost their lives
in defence of their country.
If we turn to Holyrood, what visions and memories
must arise of Knoq standing grim and stem
before his queen, in his black Geneva cloak, with
his hands planted on the horn handle of his long
walking-cane, daringly rebuking her love of music
and dancing-unbending, unyieldmg, and unmelted,
by her exalted rank, her beauty, or her bitter
tears j and of that terrible night in the Tower of
James V., when sickly Ruthven, looking pale as
a spectre under the open visor of his helmet, drew
back with gauntleted hand the ancient arras as
the assassins stole up the secret stair,-and then
Rizzio, clinging wildly to the queen?s skirt, and
dying beneath her eyes of many a mortal wound,
with Darnley?s dagger planted in his body; of
Charles Edward, in the prime of his youth and
comeliness, already seeing the crown of the Stuarts
upon his exiled father?s head, surrounded by exultant
Jacobite ladies, with white cockades on their
bosoms, and dancing in the long gallery of the
kings to the sound of the same pipes that blew
the onset at Falkirk and Culloden !
A very few years later, and Boswell, ?and Dr.
Johnson in his brown suit with steel buttons,
might have been seen coming arm-in-arm from
the White Horse Hostel in Boyd?s Close-the
burly lexicographer, as his obsequious follower
tells us, grumbling and stumbling in the dark, as
they proceeded on their way to the abode of the
latter in James?s Court; but his visit to Scotland
compelled the pedant, who trembled at the Cock
Lane ghost and yet laughed at the idea of an
earthquake in Lisbon, to have, as Macaulay says,
a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies, which
skems on that occasion to have crossed his mind
for the first time.?
In yonder house, in Dunbar?s Close, the Ironsides
of Cromwell had their guard-house ; and on
the adjacent bartizan, that commanded a view of
all the fields and farms to the north, in the autumn
evenings of 1650~ the Protector often sat with
Mathew Tiomlinson, Monk, and Ireton, each
smoking their yards of clay and drinking Scottish
. ale, or claret, and expounding, it might be, texts of
Scripture, while their batteries at the Lang-gate
? and Heriot?s Hospital threw shot and shell at the
Castle, then feebly defended by the treacherous
Dundas, from whom the Protector?s gold won what,
he himself admitted, steel and shot might never
have done, the fortress never before being so strong
as it was then, with all its stores and garrison. And
in, that wynd, to which, in perishing, he gave his
name, we shall see the sturdy craftsman Halkerston
fighting to the death, with his two-handed sword,
against the English invaders. Turn which way we
hay in Edinburgh, that stirring past attends us,
and every old stone is a record of the days, the
years, and the people, who have passed away.
In a cellar not far distant the Treaty of Union
was partly signed, in haste and fear and trembling,
while the street without rang with the yells and
opprobrious cries of the infuriated mob ; and after
that event, by the general desertion of the nobility,
came what has been emphatically called the Dark
Age of Edinburgh-that dull and heartless period
when grass was seen to grow around the market-,
cross, when a strange and unnatural stillness-the
stillness of village life-seemed to settle over every
one and everything, when the author of ? Douglas ?
was put under ban for daring to write that tragedy,
and when men made their last will and testament
before setting out by the stage for London, and
when such advertisements appeared as that which
we find in the EdinbuTh Coirranf for 7th March,
1761 -?A young lady who is about to set out fqr
London in a postchaise will be glad of a companion.
Enquire at the publisher of this paper ; ?
-when Edinburgh was so secluded and had such
little intercourse with London, that on one occasion
the mail brought but a single letter (for the British
Linen Company), and the dullness of local life
received a fillip only when Admiral de Fourbin
was off the coast of Fife, or the presence of Thurot
the corsair, or of Paul Jones, brought back some
of the old Scottish spirit of the past.
The stately oaks of the Burghmuir, under which
Guy of Namuis Flemish lances fled in ruin and
defeat before the Scots of Douglas and Dalhousie,
have long since passed away, and handsome
modem villas cover all the land to the base of
the bordering hills; but the old battle stone, in
which our kings planted their standards, and which
marked the Campus Martius of the Scottish hosts,
still lingers there on the south; and the once
lonely Figgatemuir on the east, where the monks
of Holyrood grazed their flocks and herds, and
where Wallace mustered his warriors prior to the
storming of Dunbar, is now a pleasant little watering
place, which somewhat vainly boasts itself
?? the Scottish Brighton.?
The remarkable appearance and construction of
old Edinburgh-towering skyward, storey upon
storey, with all its black and bulky chimneys, crowstepped
gables, and outside stairs-arise from the
circumstance of its having been twice walled, and
the necessity for residing within these barriers, for
protection in times of foreign or domestic war.
Thus, what Victor Hug0 says of the Paris of Philip
?
