I so MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
relics that abounded in the latter fabric, the student of medizval architecture will pronounce,
no less confidently, that here there. once stood a Gothic structure of an ecclesiastical
character, and finished in a highly ornate style, than does the geologist, from the
fossil vertebra or pelvis, construct again the mastodon or plesiosamus of pre-adamite eras.
In the three fragments of carved work we have engraved,’ we have the exterior dripstone
and corbel of a pointed window; a highly decorated portion of a deeply splayed string
course (not improbably from an oriel window), and a corbel, from which we may infer the
ribs of a groined roof to have sprung,-hand specimens, as it were, of both the exterior
and interior of the fabric.
The building was, in all likelihood, the town mansion of the abbot, with a beautiful
chapel attached to it, and may serve to remind us how little idea we can form of the
beauty of the Scottish capital before the Reformation, adorned as it was with so many
churches and conventual buildings, the very sites of which are.now unknown. Over the
doorway of an ancient stone land in Gosford’s Close, which stood immediately to the east
of the Old Bank Close, there existed a curious sculptured lintel, containing a representation
of the Crucifixion, and which may, with every probability, be regarded as another relic of
the abbot’p house that once occupied its site. We furnish a view of this building as it
latterly existed, with numerous additions of various dates and styles that tended to
increase the picturesqueness of the whole. In the underground story of the house there was
a strongly arched cellar, in the centre of the floor of which a concealed trap-door was
discovered, admitting to another still lower down, cut out of the solid rock. Some vague
traditions were reported as to its having been a place of torture ; there is much greater.
probability that it was constructed by smugglers as a convenient receptacle for concealing
their goods, at a period when the North Loch afforded ready facilities for getting wines
and other forbidden articles within the gates, and enabled ‘<an honest man to fetch 8ae
muckle as a bit anker 0’ brandy frae Leith to the Lawnmarket, without being rubbit 0’
the very gudes he ’d bought and paid for by an host of idle English gaugers I ” ’
Directly over the trap-door an iron ring was fastened into the arch of the upper cellar,
apparently for the purpose of letting down weighty articles into the vault below. This
vault, we presume, still remains beneath the centre of the roadway leading to George IV.
Bridge. On the first floor of this mansion, as Chambers informs us, the last Earl of
Loudon, together with his daughter, the present Marchioness of Hastings, used to lodge
during their occasional visits to town. In 1794 the Hall and Museum of the Society of
Antiquaries3 were at the bohtom of this close, where the accommodations were both ample
and elegant, but in an alley so narrow, that it was soon after deserted, owing to the
impossibility of reaching the entrance in a sedan chair,-the usual fashionable conveyance
at that period. This did not, however, prevent their being succeeded by Dr Farquharson,
an eminent physician; indeed, the whole neighbokhood was the favourite resort of the
most fashionable and distinpished among the resident citizens, and a perfect nest of
advocates and lords of session. On the third floor of the front land, Lady Catheriue and
Lady Ann Hay, daughters of the Marquis of Tweeddale, resided; and so late as 1773 it
was possessed, if not occupied, by their brother, George, Marquis of Tweeddale.
.
Vide, pp. 172, 176, 179. 2 Heart of Midlothian, Pltc&mas Eopitur.
Kincaid‘s Traveller’s Companion, 1794.
