I 62 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
and when in the company of the ablest men in this country, his whole desigu was to show
them how little he thought of them.”’
It is told of Johnson, that being on one occasion in a company where Hume was
present, a mutual friend offered to introduce him to the philosopher, when the intolerant
moralist roared out, “No, sir!” It is not therefore without reason that Mr Burton
questions if Johnson would have been able to “sleep 0’ nights,” had he learned that
he had been entrapped into the arch-infidel’s very mansion ! ’
In Hume’s day the North Loch lay directly below the windows of his house, with gardens
extending to its margin, aud a fine open country beyond, diversified with woodland
and moor, where now the modern streets of the Scottish capital cover a space vastly exceeding
its whole ancient boundaries for many centuries. Hume appears to have derived
great pleasure from the magnificent prospect which his elevated residence secured to him ;
yet although he writes to Dr Robertson in 1759, ((1h ave the strangest reluctance to
change places,” he was, nevertheless, one of the earliest to emigrate beyond the North Loch.
In 1770 he commenced building his new house, which was the -first erected in South St
David Street, and in which he died. The old dwelling, however, was not immediately
abandoned to the plebeian population ; Boswell, as we have seen, succeeded him, and he
was followed in its occupancy by the Lady Wallace, Dowager, relict of Sir Thomas Wallace
of Cragie.’ The floor below Hume’s house was the property of Andrew Macdowal,
Esq., advocate, author of the “ Institutional Law of Scotland,” a ponderous mass of legal
learning in three folio volumes. On his elevation to the bench in 1755, under the title of
Lord Bankton, his lordship,-in order to adapt the flat in the Lawnmarket to his increased
dignity and rank,-purchased the one below it, on a level with the court, and united
the two by an elegant internal stair of carved mahogany, which has since been displaced
by a more homely substitute, on the conversion of the old judge’s dwelling into a printing
office.
Immediately to the east of the lofty range of buildings fronting James’s Court, houses
of an early date, and of considerable variety of character, again occur. The fist of these,
represented at‘the head of the chapter, is a tall and narrow stone land, of a marked character,
and highly adorned, according to the style prevailing at the close of the sixteenth
century. The house belonged of old to Sir Robert Bannatyne, chaplain, and after passing
through several hands, was purchased in 1631 by Thomas Gladstone, merchant burgess, who
appears to have built the present stone front. On a shield below the crow-steps of the west
1 Topham’s Letters, London, 1776, p. 139.
a We kpve adhered ia thia to the biographer of Hume, who assigns the same house to both. It is certain that Hume
had a ten& of the name of Boswell ; and as the house below waa a large residence, consisting of two flats, the probability
of Boswell occupying the single flat seems confirmed by the fact that he “regretted sincerely that he had not also a room
for Mr Scott,” afterwards Lord Stowell, who had accompanied the doctor from Newcastle to the White Horse Inn,
Edinburgb. “ Boswell,” he writea, “ has very handsome and
spacious rooms, lever with the ground at one side of the house, and on the other four stories high,”+ remark only
explicable, on this idea, by supposing him to refer to the peculiar character of the building, as deacribed above. ’ 80 late aa 1771, his brother, Joseph Hume, Esq. of Ninewells, occupied a fashionable residence in the Mth flat of
an old house that stood at the junction of the Lawnmarket with Melbourne Place. The following notice of the residence
of Lady Ninewells, the grandmother, a8 we presume, of Hume, occum in a series of accounts of B judicial sale of property
in Parliament Close, in the year 1680 :-“ The house presently possest be the Lady Ninewells, being the fourth
storie above the entrie from the long transa of the tenement upon the east aide of the kirk-heugh, consisting of four fire
rowmea, with ane sellar, at a yearly rent of ane hundred fourtie and four pounds Scotts.”
Dr fohnaon’s evidence, however, contradicts this.
THE LA WNMARKET. 163
gable are the initials T. G. and B. G., while on a corresponding shield to the east a
curious device occurs, not unlike an ornamental key, with the 6it in the form of a crescent.
Many such fancy devices occur on the older buildings in Edinburgh, the only probable
explanation of which appears to be that they are merchants’ marks. This house is alluded
to in the divisions of the city for the sixteen companies formed in 1634, in obedience to
an injunction of Charles I,, where the second division, on the north side of the Castle Hill,
terminates at ‘‘ Thomas Gladstone’s Land.”’
Previous to the opening’of Bank Street, Lady Stair’s Close, the fird below this old
building, waa the chief thoroughfare for foot passengers taking advantage of the halfformed
earthen mound, to reach the New Town. It derives ita name from Elizabeth,
Dowager Countess of Stair, who, as the wife of the Viscount Primrose, forms one of the
most interesting characters associated with the romantic traditions of old Edinburgh.
Scott has made the incidents of Lady Primrose’s singular story the groundwork of Aunt
Margaret’s Mirror,” perhaps the most striking of all his briefer tales ; while the scarcely
less interesting materials preserved by the latest survivors of the past generation form
some of the most attractive pages of ‘‘ Chambers’s Traditions.” This story, with nearly
all the marvellous features of Aunt Margaret’s tale, received universal credit from the
contemporaries of the principal actors in its romantic scenes, as well as from many of the
succeeding generation.
The Countess Dowager of Stair was long looked up to as the leader of fashion, and
an admission to her select circle courted as one of the highest objects of ambition among
the smaller gentry of the period. One cannot help smiling now at the idea of the leader
of ton in the Scottish capital condescendingly receiving the dite of fashionable society
in the second flat of a common stair in a narrow close of the Old Town ; yet such were the
habits of Edinburgh society in the eighteenth century, at a period when the distinctions of
rank and fashion were guarded with a degree of jealousy of which we have little conception
now.
A characteristic sample of the manners of the period is furnished in the evidence of
Sir John Stewart of Castlemilk, in the celebrated Douglas Cause, affording a peep into the
interior of Holyrood Palace about the middle of last century. Sir John Stewart states
that, being on a visit to tlie Duke of Hamilton, at his lodgings in the Abbey, the Countess
of Stair entered the room, seemingly in a very great passion, holding in her hand a letter
from Thomas Cochrane, Esq., afterwards Earl of Dundonald, to the Duke of Douglas, in
which he affirmed that the Countess of Stair had declared, that, to her knowledge, the
children said to be those of Lady Jane Douglas were fictitious ; whereupon the Countess
struck the floor three times with a staff which she had in her hand, and each time that she
struck the floor, she called the Earl a damned villain, which her ladyship said was his
own expression in his letter to the Duke. One can fancy the stately old lady in her highheeled
shoes and hoop, flourishing her cane, and crushing the obnoxious letter in her
hand, as she applied to its author the elegant epithet of his own suggestion. ’
In the same close which bears her ladyship’s name also resided the celebrated bibliographer
and antiquary, Mr George Paton, the friend and correspondent of Lord Hailes,
Gough, Bishop Percy, Ritson, George Chalmers, Pennant, Herd, and, indeed, of nearly all
Maitland, p. 285. ’ Proof for Douglas of Douglas, Esq., defender, &c. Douglas Cause.
