Parliament Close.] ?? THE BEACON.? I81
pied by John Kay, the well-known engraver and
caricaturist, whose ?Portraits? of old Edinburgh
characters certainly form, with their biographies,
perhaps the most unique collection in Europe.
During his whole career he occupied the same small
print-shop ; the solitary window was filled with his
own etchings, which amounted to nearly go0 in
pumber. He had originally been a barber, but
after 1785 devoted himself solely to the art of
etching and miniature painting. He died in 1830,
at No. 227, High Street, in his eighty-fourth year.
-
menced business in the Parliament Close, where,
in 1783, he started a new monthly miscellany,
named 2% Edinburgh Magazine, illustratec3 with
engravings, the principal papers in which were
articles on Scottish antiquities, the production ot
his own pen. He was also the projector of the
Edivbu~g8 iYeraZd, which, however, was soon discontinued.
Relinquishing his establishment in
the Close about 1792, he devoted himself to a
literary life in London j but, after a somewhat
chequered career, returned to Edinburgh, where
about the year 1636. At their base was an ancient
public well. The Edinburgh WeekZy Juurnal for
1821 mentions that a man fell over ?the stairs which
lead from the Kirkheugh to the Parliament stairs;?
and the sameJoumaC for 1828 states that ?workmen
are engaged in taking down the large double
tenement in the Cowgate, at the back of the Parliament
House, called Henderson?s Stairs, part of
which, it will be remembered, fell last summer, and
which had been condemned sixty years ago,? in
1768.
In 1781 James Sibbald, an eminent bookseller
and literary antiquarian, the son of a Roxburgh
farmer, who came to Edinburgh with LIOO in his
pocket, after being employed in the shop of Elliot
the publisher, purchased the old circulating library
that had belonged to Allan Ramsay, and cornliament
Close, or
Square as it was
then becoming more
generally named, was
the scene of an unseemly
literary fracas,
arising from political
hatred and circumstances,
by which one
life was ultimately
lost, and which might
have imperilled even
that of Sir Walter
Scott. A weekly
paper, called the
Beacon, was established
in Edinburgh,
the avowed object of
which was the support
of the then Government,
but which
devoted its colun~ns
the leading Whig nobles and gentlemen of
Scotland. This system of personal abuse gave
rise to several actions at law, and on the 15th
of August a rencontre took place between
James Stuart of Dunearn, who conceived his
honour and character impugned in an article which
he traced to Duncan Stevenson, the printer of the
paper, in the Parliament Square. Stuart, with a
horsewhip, lashed the latter, who was not slow in
retaliating with a stout cane. ?The parties were
speedily separated,? says the Scots Magazine for
1816, ?and Mr. Stevenson, in the course of the
day, demanded from Mr. Stuart the satisfaction
customary in such cases. This was refused by
Mr, Stuart, on the ground that, ?as the servile
instrument of a partnership of slander,? he was unworthy
of receiving the satisfaction of a gentleman.
